Posts filed under ‘Ephemera’
CCSM 2006
| Nicolai Foss |
The Copenhagen Conference on Strategic Management 2006 ended late Wednesday with a wine reception and entertainment by a local (very local) jazz group, “Professors’ All-Stars.” Jay Barney observed that I should be up playing with the band, “playing the trombone. You are a trombone kind of person.” I still have to deconstruct that one!
Apropos Jay his opening talk was a hilarious performance and the great fun event of the conference, but in general, there were many good laughs, fine discussions, and many excellent papers.
I realize that quite a number of the conference participants are regular O&M readers, so this is probably an excellent place to thank once again all who participated. This year’s conference was quite significantly better than last year’s conference, and the average paper quality was above that of other conferences that could be mentioned, the likely exception being Rich Makadok’s Atlanta Competitive Advantage Conference.
Academic Insults: CCSM Edition
| Peter Klein |
Time to begin a new thread on academic insults (1, 2, 3). Overhead at the CCSM:
Session chair to audience: “Thank you, [Presenter], for your excellent time management.” [But not your paper.]
Discussant to presenter: “Your paper is beautifully written. When I got to the end I realized that I totally disagree with it, but I couldn’t remember where in the paper you started to go wrong.”
Audience member to presenter: “Your paper reminds me of my lecture on fallacies of strategic management research. You committed every one of them.”
Who Are (Really) the Cheese-Eating Surrender-Monkeys?
| Nicolai Foss |
My co-blogger is very fond of France, the French, etc. (And me? Well, I have actually lived there ;-)). In a recent post, Peter cited the familiar neo-con characterization of the French as “cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.” Here is Mark Steyn reflecting on who the real CESM are:
I’ve never subscribed to that whole “cheese-eating surrender-monkeys” sneer … As a neo-con warmonger, I yield to no one in my contempt for the French, but that said, cheese-wise I feel they have the edge. … In America, unpasteurized un-aged raw cheese that would be standard in any Continental fromagerie is banned. Americans, so zealous in defense of their liberties when it comes to guns, are happy to roll over for the nanny state when it comes to the cheese board. … The French may be surrender-monkeys on the battlefield, but they don’t throw their hands up and flee in terror just because the Brie’s a bit ripe (pp. 181-182 in America Alone, Regnery Publishing, 2006).
France may be the most commie nation in the World, but CESM they ain’t!
CCSM 2006
| Nicolai Foss |
In case you have been wondering why O&M star blogger, Peter Klein, has only blogged once over the last couple of days — unheard of in the history of O&M — here is part of the reason: Peter is on his way to the Copenhagen Conference on Strategic Management which will begin tomorrow (Tuesday), organized by the Center that I direct here at CBS.
The CCSM will feature several great speakers, such as Jay Barney, Rich Makadok, Yves Doz, Peter Lorange, Alan Rugman, and my co-blogger. It is the second time we are doing the CCSM. The format is to have about 70-80 participants with high-quality papers.
Not only is my co-blogger joining me for the CCSM, guest blogger Lasse Lien will also be in Copenhagen for the event. Lasse has promised to deliver some real-time blogging from the conference.
Price as a Signal of Quality
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is the evidence.
Update I: I have a few copies left of this book. I am offering it at the competitive price of 195 Pounds. First come, first served.
Update II: Here is another ridiculously under-priced offer.
Update III: In a more serious vein, what is the economics behind these prices? Not even a hardcore Foss sycophant would pay almost 200 quid for my 1994 collection of essays. Are they phishing for that Japanese university library that just must have a complete collection of books on Austrian economics (cf. Joe Mahoney’s comment)?
Friendship is Cheap
| Peter Klein |
File under “pet peeves.” I recently received an invitation to attend a reception for a particular journal at the upcoming ASSA meeting. It began “Dear Friend of [Journal].” I’m not a subscriber, am not on the editorial board, and have never reviewed for this journal. Our only relationship is that I’ve twice had papers rejected there. Some friendship!
Another Irritating Practice
| Nicolai Foss |
OK — here I go again: Another jeremiad related to the institutions of publishing in the learned journals (for other O&M jeremiads on this subject, see here, here, here, here, and here).
Recently, I received a paper from two very bright assistant professors at one of the top Euro BSchools. They happily informed me that their paper had now been accepted for a top journal, and that, knowing that I took an interest in the issues that the paper dealt with, they were happy to forward the accepted paper to me. (more…)
How To Screw Up an Email Negotiation
| Peter Klein |
From WebWorkerDaily, tips on how to screw up an email negotiation. Highly recommended. Generalizes easily to other kinds of email exchanges.
We’ve previously shared some ideas on ruining a PowerPoint presentation (use tiny fonts, a busy background, garish colors, lots of graphics and animation, inconsistent grammar, and read the slides word for word).
Coming soon: How to screw up a blog entry.
Best Business Movies
| Peter Klein |
The American Enterprise Institute gives us a list of the ten best business movies (via Craig Newmark). “[W]e looked for three qualities: (1) a great movie, (2) a relatively realistic picture of business, and (3) an attitude not openly hostile to capitalism as we know and love it.”
Here are some movies about entrepreneurs. And here is an entire blog about the treatment of capitalism in film.
Travails of Patricia Russo
| Peter Klein |
As a certified Francophile I can make fun of the French without getting in trouble. So I enjoyed a segment on NPR this morning (can’t find it online, unfortunately) about Alcatel CEO Patricia Russo, the only American to head a major French company. Russo, as you may have heard, has caused a stir by refusing to learn French. The NPR segment featured a Russo impersonator being tutored in French culture. Sample:
Tutor: Let us try some word association. When I say “Jerry Lewis,” you say. . . .
Russo: Idiot.
Tutor: Mais non! In France, we say, “genius.” Now, when I say “McDonald’s,” you say. . . .
Russo: French fries.
Tutor: Non! You say, “Hellhole”! Now, “Iraq.”
Russo: Quagmire.
Tutor: Bon! We agree on something!
We Always Suspected It — Part II
| Nicolai Foss |
As we recently noted O&M has had the dubious honour of being included in the set of “heterodox newslettes and weblogs” along with blogs such as “Actuel Marx.” But it gets worse!! O&M has just received mention in Accounts: ASA Economic Sociology Section Newsletter vol. 6, issue 1, Fall 2006 (on p.15). We tremble when we consider what may come next. Honorable mention on webdeleuze? Endorsements from Bob Sutton?
HT to Teppo.
Even Danes Respond to Incentives
| Peter Klein |
A critical news item for this Danophilic blog. The Telegraph reports, with some alarm, that fewer Danish Christmas trees are being exported to the UK this year.
Increasingly, [British] garden centres have been buying them in wholesale deals with Danish farmers. But last year Danish farmers saw subsidies for growing Christmas trees cut, and the result is that fewer have been exported.
Looks like even Danes respond to economic incentives. I’m sure that Pfeffer, Mintzberg, et al. will have an alternate explanation having nothing to do with the subdidies, however.
Co-Authors From Hell
| Nicolai Foss |
Casual empiricism seems to indicate that co-authorship is constantly gaining ground vis-a-vis sole authorship (anyone who knows of any solid studies of social science authoring practice?). There are numerous forces that positively influence the choice of teaming up with other scholars for the purpose of writing books and articles, such as career concerns (writing with a Big Guy), hierarchical concerns (writing with a Local Big Guy may help your chances of promotion), political calls for co-authorship between academia and industry, and, of course, team-based benefits, such as exposure to new perspectives, effort sharing, the social experience, etc.
It is well known that there is a significant latent moral hazard problem in connection with teams (cf. this paper). But of course there is also a potentially heavy adverse selection problem. It does matter which type you pick to co-author a paper with. I have been involved in numerous co-authored paper projects, and usually I have been lucky with my co-authors. Indeed, Kirsten, Peter, Keld, Torben, Teppo, Joe, and Yasemin are exemplary and excellent co-authors.
But I certainly haven’t always been lucky. (more…)
We Always Suspected It …
| Nicolai Foss |
… but we are not sure we like it — “it” being the fact that O&M has now received certification that we belong to the distinct group of “heterodox newsletters and weblogs” along with “Actuel Marx” and “Lettre de la Regulation.” Hmmmm …
Milton Friedman Has Died
| Nicolai Foss |
Under the heading Requiescat in Pace, Economist.Com briefly and concisely notes:
MILTON FRIEDMAN has died. An economics giant, he not only revolutionised monetary theory, but singlehandedly did more than almost any economist in history to advance the cause of free markets. He was not merely an accomplished economist, but an accomplished popular writer; his Newsweek columns remain gems of clarity and brilliance decades later. We will not soon see his like again.
Peter and I both expect to blog on Friedman and his contributions in the near future.
Italian Academia Goes International
| Nicolai Foss |
The universities of quite a number of European countries have reputations — well-deserved in a number of cases — of being hostile to foreign influences as well as foreigners (particularly those yanks!), nepotistic, insular, and introverted, particularly in the social sciences and the humanities. Large European countries, such as France, Italy, and Germany still run a major infrastructure of learned journals in the native tongue, and it is often understood that publishing in one of these (e.g., the Sardinian Journal of the Economics of Olive Production) may be better for one’s career than publishing in irrelevant (and, oh horror, American) journals such as Journal of Political Economy or the Strategic Management Journal.
Luckily, things are changing all over Europe concerning the internationalization of the Academy. Here is an example: The Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies, opened last year to support “PhD programs and research activities in the fields of political and social sciences, market regulations, economics, management, biorobotics, industrial and computer technologies.” On its frontpage it stresses that among its “distinctive features” (!) are “open and competitive selection processes” and “international faculty.” Telling!
Note also the job openings for assistant professors and post-doctoral fellows. Lucca isn’t a bad place at all to spend a part of your life!
Political Correctness and Public Sector Management
| Nicolai Foss |
The following is ephemera, but we have noted from the blog stats that our readership appreciates this category of posts. And we believe in giving the market what the market wants.
I was recently accused by an (admittedly weird) external lecturer here at CBS for having fascist sympathies. I thought my political leanings were classical-liberal, which I would tend to associate with rather the opposite of fascism. Oh well; the reasoning of this person was that I ran a blog that linked to the Ludwig von Mises Institute; that institute was known for being associated with people who had an unconventional view of the American Civil War; a view, this person added, that any sane human being would recognize as fascist! QED
I was reminded of this incident when I read this story in the UK newspaper, The Daily Mail. (more…)
Strategic Management Society Meetings
| Nicolai Foss |
I am currently in beautiful Wien for the Strategic Management Society Meetings. Beforehand I had decided that this would be the test case: Should I continue paying those exorbitant conference fees and expensive hotels for a mediocre conference, or should I just forget about it?
While the pre-conference sessions yesterday were a bit of a disappointment (too many presentations apparently improvised on the trans-Atlantic flight), I must say that I have only attended excellent paper sessions today (Monday). So far the conference is far superior to last year’s conference in Orlando (and the food is better).
Europeans constitute the majority of the participants, but that hasn’t harmed paper quality at all (on the contrary?). The days where the quality gap in strategic management between the US and Europe was huge and pronounced may be over. The Euro research community in strategic management is really shaping up (largely as a result of interaction with US research and import of US research methodology). Bottom line: I will probably give the SMS meetings a shot next year as well!
I Love France
| Peter Klein |
Here is a confession. I love France. Not just the food or the countryside or the language, but also the culture, the history, the way of life. Perhaps that makes me a cheese-eating surrender monkey. I don’t know. But I do know that I like France. And I don’t even mind the French all that much.
Seriously, I’m fortunate to count such diverse thinkers as Pierre Garrouste, Jean-Michel Glachant, Guido Hülsmann, Nathalie Janson, Armelle Mazé, Claude Ménard, Philippe Nataf, Pascal Salin, Stéphane Saussier, and Anne Yvrande-Billon as friends, colleagues, and research collaborators.
Despite my Francophilia — or perhaps because of it — I have enjoyed reading Stephen Clarke’s A Year in the Merde, a send-up of French society and culture written by a young British expat. It’s funny (though a bit raunchy), and resonates well with those of us who admire, but fail to comprehend, so much of what it means to be French. A good read.
Economics and Literature
| Peter Klein |
Lest the “Pomo Periscope” series below make you think we at O&M are anti-literary or anti-narrative, let me tell you about one of my favorite literary scholars, University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor. A specialist in Shakespeare and English Romanticism, Cantor has recently begun writing about the relationship between literature and economic theory (and, in his Gilligan Unbound, the relationship between economics and pop culture).
Cantor burst on the (economics) scene with a 1994 article in the Review of Austrian Economics, “Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics.” Focusing on Mann’s 1925 short story “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” set in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Cantor explores the parallels between hyperinflation and “hyperreality,” the condition of being unable to distinguish fact from fiction. “If modernity is characterized by a loss of the sense of the real,” writes Cantor, “this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century.” Mann’s story, as interpreted by Cantor, illustrates how closely the commercial and cultural worlds are linked. (Cantor has also written about the economic views of such diverse literary and cultural figures as Percy Bysshe Shelley and W. C. Fields.)
Here is a series of Cantor lectures from a July 2006 seminar on “Commerce and Culture.” Topics include “The Economic Basis of Culture”; “The Economics of Painting: Patronage vs. the Market”; “The Economics of Classical Music: Patronage vs. the Market”; “The Economics of Modernism”; and “Totalitarianism and the Arts in the 20th Century.” All are well worth watching.
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