Posts filed under ‘– Foss –’
Single-Country Journals Are Finnished
| Nicolai Foss |
There once was a Swedish Journal of Economics. And, of course, once there were lots of journals in languages other than English. But, as the US national journals increasingly became everyone’s international journals, and as scientific communities became internationalized, single-country, national journals increasingly became a thing of the past and morphed into at least regional journals (thus, the Swedish Journal of Economics. became the Scandinavian Journal of Economics). The latest journal to give is the journal formerly known as the Finnish Journal of Business Economics, now becoming a regional journal as the Nordic Journal of Business. This is a sound initiative.The Euro journal scene is not exactly crowded, and the other regional journal, the Scandinavian Journal of Management may be in need of a bit of competitive pressure. Submit a paper! (I am on the advisory board for the new/old journal ;-)).
HOPE Launch Event
| Nicolai Foss |
This Wednesday, 22 October 2014, is the Launch event for the CBS research program I co-direct with Anders Sørensen, “Human Capital, Organization Design, and Corporate Performance” (HOPE). The program includes Ed Lazear, Kathryn Shaw, Ben Campbell, and David Ross. HOPE is about organizational structure and productivity:
Many of the European economies suffer from sluggish productivity growth. Firms matter strongly to economic growth. However, the understanding of firm performance has many gaps — particularly concerning the role for performance of human resources, organizational design, and their interaction.
The scientific ambition of HOPE is to address these gaps based on an interdisciplinary approach, intensively cooperating with some of the world’s leading researchers in the fields that inform this proposal, and by making use of the state-of-the-art econometric methods, and high-quality register and survey data. HOPE will enter a still sparsely populated but highly important field, and will place CBS centrally in the international discussion of the causes of firm performance, such as firm-level productivity.
HOPE is a joint venture between Department of Strategic Management and Globalization, and Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School
Hope you can join us!
“Why Managers Still Matter”
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is a recent MIT Sloan Management Review piece by Peter and me, “Why Managers Still Matter.” We pick up on a number of themes of our 2012 book Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment. A brief excerpt:
“Wikifying” the modern business has become a call to arms for some management scholars and pundits. As Tim Kastelle, a leading scholar on innovation management at the University of Queensland Business School in Australia, wrote: “It’s time to start reimagining management. Making everyone a chief is a good place to start.”
Companies, some of which operate in very traditional market sectors, have been crowing for years about their systems for “managing without managers” and how market forces and well-designed incentives can help decentralize management and motivate employees to take the initiative. . . .
From our perspective, the view that executive authority is increasingly passé is wrong. Indeed, we have found that it is essential in situations where (1) decisions are time-sensitive; (2) key knowledge is concentrated within the management team; and (3) there is need for internal coordination. . . . Such conditions are hallmarks of our networked, knowledge-intensive and hypercompetitive economy.
Debating Microfoundations, Euro-style
| Nicolai Foss |
As readers of this blog will know, probably to a nauseating extent, microfoundations have been central in much (macro) management theory over the last decade. Several articles, special issues, and conferences have been dedicated to microfoundations, most recently a Strategic Management Society Special Conference at the Copenhagen Business School. Some, uhm, highlyspirited exchanges have taken place (e.g., AoM 2013), with proponents of those foundations being accused of economics imperalism and whatnot, and critics of microfoundations receiving push-back for endorsing defunct Durkheimian collectivism (an obviously justified criticism). Here is recent civilized exchange on the subject between Professor Rodolphe Durand, HEC Paris, and myself. Complete with heavy Euro accents of different origins.
History Lesson: 200 Years of Management, uhm, Thought
| Nicolai Foss |
OK, surely you have come across those timelines featuring the great economists, á la Aristotle-the Spanish Scholastics–William Petty-Cantillon-Smith-Ricardo-Say-Menger-Wicksteed-Marshall-Mises-Hayek-Boettke-Langlois-Klein-etc. Here is a similar timeline with the Greats of management theory, 1800-2000 (Lien seems to be missing, however). Many of the names of those management types are clickable, taking you to e.g. their wikis. Fun brush-up, and may be good for students.
Evaluating New Ideas: Looking Across and Looking Beyond
| Nicolai Foss |
Those of us who have experience with research councils and other funding bodies with expert evaluations of the submitted research are familiar wilth folklore, such as “When evaluating economists routinely smash non-economics projects,” “sociologists are a total incrowd and will not tolerate any application of rational choice method, serious econometrics or common sense,” etc. Of course, this is part of the various conspiracy theories about how, notably, economists seek to establish intellectual hegemony.
However, the folklore may be wrong. In a new paper, “Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance and Resource Allocation in Science,” Kevin Boudreau, Eva Guinan, Karim Lakhani and Christoph Riedl look at the grant proposal process at a major research university and show that evaluators tend to treat proposals more harshly the closer they were to their own areas of expertise. However, evaluators also treat highly novel proposals negatively. Taking issues of ecological and external validity into account, there are obvious implications for the understanding of the nature of the exploitation/exploration tradeoff: There may indeed be a bias against exploring in the domains of highly novel ideas (as predicted by the literature), but the harsh evaluation of new, but well understood ideas may mean that there is a domain of relatively novel and less well understood ideas within which firms will explore.
Foss and Klein Interview on Entrepreneurial Judgment
| Peter Klein |
Nicolai and I are interviewed by Angel Martin for the Spanish-language site sintetia. An English-language version is here. We wax eloquent on entrepreneurship theory, research, teaching, policy, and more. Personally, I think I sound more profound in Spanish, but that’s probably because I can’t read Spanish.
Louise Mors on Ambidexterity
| Nicolai Foss |
Margarethe Wiersema interviews my colleague Louise Mors about her forthcoming article in Organization Science on Ambidexterity.
Chameleon Models and Their Dangers
| Nicolai Foss |
Here is a new paper by major Stanford finance scholar, Paul Pfleiderer on what he calls “chameleon models” and their misuse in finance and economics. Lots of catchy concepts, e.g., “theoretical cherry picking” and “bookshelf models,” and an fine critical discussion of Friedmanite instrumentalism. The essence of the paper is this:
Chameleons arise and are often nurtured by the following dynamic. First a bookshelf model is constructed that involves terms and elements that seem to have some relation to the real world and assumptions that are not so unrealistic that they would be dismissed out of hand. The intention of the author, let’s call him or her “Q,” in developing the model may to say something about the real world or the goal may simply be to explore the implications of making a certain set of assumptions. Once Q’s model and results
become known, references are made to it, with statements such as “Q shows that X.” This should be taken as short-hand way of saying “Q shows that under a certain set of assumptions it follows (deductively) that X,” but some people start taking X as a plausible statement about the real world. If someone skeptical about X challenges the assumptions made by Q, some will say that a model shouldn’t be judged by the realism of its assumptions, since all models have assumptions that are unrealistic. Another rejoinder made by those supporting X as something plausibly applying to the real world might be that the truth or falsity of X is an empirical matter and until the appropriate empirical tests or analyses have been conducted and have rejected X, X must be taken seriously. In other words, X is innocent until proven guilty. Now these statements may not be made in quite the stark manner that I have made them here, but the underlying notion still prevails that because there is a model for X, because questioning the assumptions behind X is not appropriate, and because the testable implications of the model supporting X have not been empirically rejected, we must take X seriously. Q’s model (with X as a result) becomes a chameleon that avoids the real world filters.
Doux Commerce Bleg
| Nicolai Foss |
Andrew Smith, University of Liverpool Management School asks for the help of the readers of O&M:
I’m currently exploring the literature on the theory of the capitalist peace. I’m very familiar with the vast literature by IR scholars and political economists on the theory of the capitalist peace/commercial peace (i.e., the idea that commercial interdependence among nations reduces the likelihood of warfare). This literature is dominated by works using panel data (e.g., Gartzke, 2007).
What I need to find out more about is the literature on the possible microfoundations of the capitalist peace—i.e., work by psychologists and experimental economists on whether repeated participation in inter-ethnic and international trade actually influences the cognitive processes of the individuals involved and makes them less warlike. Does experience with economic exchange with non-members of the group (family, clan, tribe, nation, etc) make people more pacific? Does it make individuals less violent? Montesquieu speculated that this would be the case a long time ago when he advanced his “doux commerce” thesis. Albert Hirschman said that Montesquieu’s theory was the conventional wisdom in the Enlightenment. However, I’m interested in what modern social scientists have said about this theory. Francois and van Ypersele (2009) found that level of trust reported by adults in the US is positively correlated with the competitiveness of the sector in which they work. Their research was not about international economic relations and diplomacy. However, it does tend to support the thesis that a competitive market economy has a civilizing influence. I would be interested in knowing if there is other research by psychologists, experimental economists, and others that is relevant to the doux commerce thesis.
Entrepreneurship and Networks Workshop at CBS
| Nicolai Foss |
My colleagues at the Dept of Strategic Management and Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School, Louise Mors, Mia Reinholdt Fosgaard and Lisa Gärber are arranging an exciting workshop, “Micro Foundations of Social Networks and the Implications for Strategy and Entrepreneurship Research,” on June 12-13. The workshop takes place at CBS and has luminaries like Ron Burt and Martin Kilduff as keynote speakers. (The SMS special conference on “Microfoundations of Strategic Management Research: Embracing Individuals“, begins when the workshop ends, so you may combine the two). This may be of interest to, say, Austrians who seek to add some theoretical and empirical meat to the skeleton of Kirznerian alertness and discovery and who recognize links between these notions and, for example, notions of brokerage in networks.
The Theory of Mind in Agency Theory
| Nicolai Foss |
Agency theory is a highly important foundational theory in management research. It has been of great assistance with respect to conceptualizing and framing key problems in the design and management of reward systems, and it yields sharp and clear predictions. However, it does not provide a realistic treatment of a key psychological aspects of interpersonal relations. Specifically, agency theory does not adequately account for the principal’s ability to develop, hold and adjust a “theory of the agent’s mind”. The theory in fact contains a very lopsided account of the principal’s ability to read the agent’s desires, intentions, knowledge, and beliefs. Thus, in many models in agency theory, the principal’s knowledge of much of what is “inside the head” of the agent (e.g., the agent’s taste for risk, opportunity costs, and disutility of work) is assumed to be perfect, while he is assumed to be entirely ignorant of other aspects of what the agent intends, knows and believes. Such “asymmetrical” assumptions allow for analytical tractability and clean predictions regarding how incentives and monitoring influences the behavior of agents, such as employees, managers, and suppliers. However, extreme and asymmetrical assumptions can also lead more applied research astray and lead to misapplications of theory in managerial practice. Thus, the assumption that a principal is capable of perfectly grasping, for example, an agent’s motivations seems highly, and increasingly, tenuous: High personnel turnover and the increasing use of fleeting project organization in many industries, as well as the increasing prevalence of cross-national and cross-cultural management teams and networks, make an assumption of a perfect ToM unrealistic.
In a new paper, “Putting a Realistic Theory of Mind Into Agency Theory: Implications for Reward Design and Management in Principal Agent Relations,” my CBS colleague Diego Stea and I take some initial and highly exploratory steps towards working with a more realistic theory of mind in the context of agency relationships within firms (in an as yet unpublished modelling paper, we work these ideas into an adverse selection model). We argue that novel insights into the design and management of rewards follow from explicitly incorporating a realistic theory of mind into agency theory. Thus, a principal with a good theory of mind can better learn the type of the agent, read the signals related to the agent’s effort, signal to the agent, and adjust rewards to the agent. A ToM creates value because it results in lower-variance estimates of the agent’s effort and type, and eases the matching of agents with contracts.
Micro-foundations Happening: Strategic Human Capital
| Nicolai Foss |
After about a decade of methodological discussion (involving some preaching on both sides of the debate), the micro-foundations project in macro-management research is now beginning to take off in the “doing” dimension. Specifically, scholars are building micro-foundational theory and they are wrestling with the empirical challenges in the micro-foundations. The theoretical and empirical challenges largely derive from the inherent multi-level nature of the micro-foundations project. Theory-building cannot just be somehow moving, say, individual-level organizational behavior insights to the organizational level, but must be genuinely multi-level which raises tricky issues of aggregation and downward causation. Data sampling will necessarily have to take place at at least two levels. This is complicated and usually expensive. Access to good micro-level data is particularly troublesome (one of the advantages of living in a socialist country like Denmark is that the Big Nanny literally looks after her children: We have register data that is incredibly detailed regarding human capital dimensions (i.e., not just gender, age, education, etc., but also complete job history, school and university grades , criminal record, household income, history of medication, etc. — and this is for each and every employee in the DK economy)).
One of the areasis in which the micro-foundations project is being realized in the theoretical and empirical dimensions is what is increasingly often referred to as “strategic human capital.” This is an emerging field (it has its own interest group at the Strategic Management Society) that is quite overlapping with “strategic human resource management,” and which links strategic management, traditional SHR and HR, and human capital theory. The February special issue of Journal of Management, expertly edited by Patrick Wright, Russ Coff and Thomas Moliterno, three key drivers in the SHRM/SHC field, contains ten fine papers on SHC. The introductory essay by the editors nicely lays out the main challenges and issues. Many of the challenges are quite “low-practical” — e.g., people trained in strategy focus a lot on endogeneity, where HR and OB people focus a lot on construct validity issues that strategy folks care less about. Yet, such differences may be quite decisive–as the editors learned while handling the review process! The editors also deal with key issues, such as what are the important dimensions of human capital for the purposes of the SHM field, how can human capital be characterized at different analytical levels, and what are the antecedents and consequences of human capital. I look forward to sinking my teeth into the research articles in the coming week.
More on Business Model Innovation
| Nicolai Foss |
I am intrigued by notions of “business models” and “business model innovation.” Many academics dismiss these notions, arguing that they are too fluffy or too much overlapping with established thinking in strategic management. I understand both objections, but still think there is something to these notions. Specifically, they capture the need for integration of and coherence among strategic choices related to value proposition, segments, value appropriation models, and value chain organization in a way that I don’t see clearly reflected in mainstream strategy thinking. And yet, it is also clear that the basic unit of analysis, the busines model, remains un-dimensionalized, even though business models and the innovation thereof clearly differ–and therefore pose different leadership, management and organizational design challenges. In other words, extant research does not adequately represent the heterogeneity of business models (innovation), and therefore does not dimensionalize them.
In a new paper, Nils Stieglitz and I argue that a key dimension along which business models (and hence the innovation thereof) differ is the strength of the interdependences, or, complementarities, between their constituent components. Thus, some business model innovations are more modular, while others are more architectural. Also, business model innovations can be dimensionalized in terms how radical they are. We argue that leadership challenges systematically depend on the nature of the relevant business model innovation. To our knowledge this is the first dimensionalization exercise in the literature and the first attempt at building a contingency theory of business model innovation.
Property Rights Economics — Mark I and Mark II
| Nicolai Foss |
In modern standard economics, property rights as an analytical category are mainly associated with the work of Oliver Hart, largely because of his important work, with Sanford Grossman, John Moore and others, on asset ownership in the context of the boundaries of the firm (the pioneering paper is here). Many modern (younger) economists don’t seem to know of the older property rights tradition, associated with Coase, Alchian, Demsetz, Cheung, Barzel, Furubotn, Umbeck, Alston, Libecap, Eggertson et al. Given the prevalent Whig interpretation of the evolution of economic theory, one may be led to the belief that the modern approach superseded or incorporated everything that was sound in the older, verbal approach, while advancing property rights thinking in rigorous game-theoretical terms.
With a frequent co-author, I have penned a paper, “Coasian and Modern Property Rights Economics: A Case of Kuhnian Lost Content,” that argues that such a view is false. In fact, we argue that there has been something akin to a Kuhnian “loss of content” (Kuhn, 1996) in the move from Mark I to Mark II property rights economics. What we call “property rights economics Mark II” is a more narrow approach in terms of the phenomena that are investigated, namely why it matters who owns the asset(s) in a relation that spans at least two stage of production in a value chain. In contrast, “property rights economics Mark I” was taken up with the complex and contingent nature of real ownership arrangements, and pointed to the many margins on which individual can exercise capture of rights, how they seek to protect their rights, the resources consumed in this process, and the role of institutions in facilitating and constraining such processes. This institutional research program is considerably richer than the one implied by Mark II property rights economics.
Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors
| Nicolai Foss |
The shifting fortunes in the international automobile industry over the last four decades have, for obvious reasons, been endlessly commented upon. Usually, the two leading protagonists in the various accounts of the dynamics of the industry are General Motors and Toyota, the former because of its conspicuous decline (GM’s share of the US market dropped from about 60 to about 20% over a 30 years period), the latter because it has been steadily growing and is now the world’s largest automaker.
Discussions of the relative performance of these two industrial giants sometimes focus on vacuous categories like “culture” and “capabilities.” More detailed accounts stress the short-termism of General Motor’s investment decisions, its arms-length supplier relations, and its obsession with narrowly defined, easily-measurable jobs. Toyota’s relative success is often explained in terms of the Toyota Management Model with its emphasis on broadly defined jobs, intensive lateral and vertical information flows, and emphasis on problem-solving on the shop floor. However, it is not immediately clear that GM did something very badly that Toyota did very well. The liabilities that led to the decline of GM were apparently were different from the assets that brought Toyota success.
In a new NBER paper, “Management Practices, Relational Contracts, and the Decline of General Motors“, Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson argue, however, that GM and Toyota are directly comparable in terms of the relational contracts existing inside their corporate hieararchies and across the boundaries of these two companies, and that their differential performance is explainable in terms of the differences between the contracts. Relying on recent contract theory research on relational contracts (rather than the older, but neglected work of Harvey Leibenstein), Helper and Henderson reject a number of conventional explanations (e.g., that GM’s investment policy was oriented towards the short term), and convincingly argue that GM had difficulties understanding the nature and important role of relational contracts behind Toyota’s success and therefores truggled to implement similar relational contracts. They point to a number of reasons why relational contracts may be difficult to build, centering on problems of creating credible commitments and communicating clearly and suggest that these problems were rampant in GM. In all, a very nice read that can be used in a number of different classes (org theory, economics of the firm, strategic management). Highly recommended!
UPDATE: My colleague Henrik Lando draws my attention to Ben-Shahar and White’s 2005 paper on manufacturing contracts in the auto industry which tells a story that is consistent with the Helper and Henderson story. Here.
The Soft Underbelly of Business Model Innovation
| Nicolai Foss |
Business models have become important tools in the top-manager’s toolbox. A business model is the articulation of the logic by which a business creates and delivers value to customers. It also outlines the system of revenues and costs that allows the business to earn a profit. It is both a map—i.e., a mental representation—and the real structure of the company’s internal and external activity systems.
However, in spite of more than a decade’s interest in business models and the innovation, their specific leadership and organization design challenges are only beginning to be understood. What is specific about these challenges is that top-management needs a map of the existing business model and the one it aspires to implement and execute, and a plan of how to get there. Moreover, business models can be very complex systems, with many interlocking elements, requiring coordination. Hence, business model innovations are truly major organizational change projects.
Writers on business models typically outline a number of elements of a company’s business model. These include the value proposition, segments, the value chain, and revenue model. But many writers and practitioners alike tend to stress only or a few of these.
Indeed, very often a single element of the business does stand out. For example, the tipping point business model of Groupon, Moolala and similar seems to be all about the value proposition centered on providing discounts on meals, products and services with local merchants. (more…)
Walter Oi, 1929-2013
| Nicolai Foss |
Walter Oi died December 24. Oi was famous for two things, namely for being a highly active academic in spite of being totally blind (after 1956), and for estimating the social costs of the draft (here). However, he contributed to many areas of applied price theory in a highly original fashion. Of possibly particular interest to strategic management scholars is his 1983 paper on how heterogeneous “entrepreneurial ability” and differential monitoring constrains the size, product offerings and organization of firms in equilibrium. Here is Steve Landsburg’s long, detailed and moving obituary for Oi.
Le Doux Commerce — Cont’d
| Nicolai Foss |
More evidence on the softening nature of commercial society. Here is the abstract:
Levitt and List (2007) conjecture that selection pressures among business people will reduce or eliminate pro-social choices. While recent work comparing students with various adult populations often fails to find that adults are less pro-social, this evidence is not necessarily at odds with the selection hypothesis, which may be most relevant for behavior in cutthroat competitive industries. To examine the selection hypothesis, we compare students with two adult populations deliberately selected from two cutthroat internet industries — domain trading and adult entertainment (pornography). Across a range of indicators, business people in these industries are more pro-social than students: they are more altruistic, trusting, trustworthy, and lying averse. They also respond differently to shame-based incentives. We offer a theory of reverse selection that can rationalize these findings
SMS Special Conference on Microfoundations
| Nicolai Foss |
So, with Torben Pedersen, Bocconi University, I am arranging a Strategic Management Society “Special Conference” (so-called) on “Microfoundations in Strategic Management Research: Embracing Individuals” next year in Copenhagen. Specifically, the conference takes place from the 13. to the 15. of June at the Copenhagen Business School. (The DRUID conference starts on June 16). Pretty good lineup, I dare say, with keynotes by Ron Burt, Richard Rumelt and Ernst Fehr and several luminaries in the panels.
Here is a little presentation video on the conference. Here is the conference site.
The deadline for paper proposals (5 pp + 2 pp refs) is December 5. Submit a proposal!
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