Posts filed under ‘Management Theory’
Open-Source Political Campaigns
| Peter Klein |
Republican Ron Paul’s presidential campaign — a highly decentralized, small-budget, bottom-up effort — is like an open-source software project, writes Jay Roberts. As such, he notes, it has strengths and weaknesses compared to traditional modes of organzation.
Here are some earlier posts on the open-source model.
I’ll Be the Terror Bird and You Can Be the Ostrich
| Steven Postrel |
In the July 2007 AMR, there is an interesting article by Matthew Cronin and Laurie Weingart that looks at “representational gaps” between differentiated specialists working together on problems like product development. They employ a Carnegie School approach and postulate that these gaps will tend to hinder joint problem solving. Different specialties conceptualize goals and constraints differently, they may have trouble communicating, and so on. (more…)
Thoughts on Entrepreneurship Research
| Peter Klein |
The Academy of Management Annual Meeting has been a great success. I’ll blog later about the pre-conference workshop on Austrian economics organized by Nicolai and myself and a few other sessions I participated in. For now I want to share some thoughts on entrepreneurship research drawn from my discussant’s remarks at a session featuring papers by Ciaran Heavey, Zeki Simsek, and Aidan Kelly (“Environmental Scanning and Corporate Entrepreneurship in SME”), Thomas Dalziel, Robert White, and Jonathan Arthurs (“The Influence of Top Management Team Human and Relational Capital on Corporate Entrepreneurship”), Frederic Delmar and Erik Wetter (“The Predictive Strength of Absorptive Capacity on New Firm Performance”), and Brent Ross and Randall Westgren (“The Dynamics of Rent Creation on a Strategic Landscape”). The first three are empirical papers explaining firms’ “entrepreneurial” activity in terms of manager and worker characteristics, while the last one uses an agent-based simulation model to examine the effects of the competitive environment on entrepreneurial behavior.
1. Concepts and definitions of entrepreneurship are all over the map, ranging from abstract notions of alertness, judgment, innovation, and what Ross and Westgren (borrowing from March and Simon, 1958) term “aspiration,” the level of certain returns a firm is willing to forgo for the prospect of uncertain future returns, to concrete measures of R&D expenditures, patent activity, new venture creation, and strategic reorganization. Within the corporate entrepreneurship literature there seems to be a consensus that a composite measure of innovation, venturing, and strategic renewal is appropriate. Of course, one can quibble about these as unique proxies for entrepreneurship because mundane, but equally “entrepreneurial,” activities (production, sales, marketing, and so on) are excluded. (more…)
Defending the Book
| Peter Klein |
Books teach more than videos, PowerPoint presentations, and similar substitutes, writes Alan Wall (via Mark Brady):
[H]owever central the computer might have become in our lives, in a literary education, the book remains our main technological tool, and none of us should be bullied into apologizing about the fact. The book represents one of the greatest technological innovations in history, and its fitness for its task, its versatility, its convenience, mean that it will surely continue well into the future. It is also a remarkably democratic technology, in educational terms. If a teacher is giving a power-point presentation, as we teachers are now being exhorted to do, at every available opportunity, then that teacher dictates what is available in the form of knowledge to everyone in the room. She or he presses the keys on the laptop that change whatever text or image is up there on the screen. She decides what I can see and when. But if I am a student and I have a book in front of me, then I can answer back. I can turn my own pages in my own good time, and remind myself of my own marginalia. “Excuse me, but I don’t agree. What you said about Dorothea in Chapter Five might well be true, but if you’d care to turn to Chapter Nine, I think you might find. . . .”
Many power-point demonstrations are mechanical and halting, because the presenter or lecturer spends much of the time staring at a laptop screen, instead of engaging with the audience. In terms of teaching literature, there is also a limit to the usefulness of any visual material. I can have a picture of Milton, or Charles I heading for the scaffold, or Cromwell displaying his legendary wartiness, but sooner or later we have to buckle down and read Paradise Lost.
Some of you are thinking, “That’s fine for literature, but not economics or sociology or management. Besides, nobody in these fields writes books anyway, just articles.” Still, training students (and colleagues) to grapple with ideas through long, sustained arguments, rather than short bullet points, is a worthy goal for scholars in all disciplines, especially management.
Management R&D Blog
| Peter Klein |
Luke Froeb and Brian McCann, whose book we discussed earlier, have a new blog, Management R&D. It looks good, so check it out.
Strategic Entrepreneurship Review
| Peter Klein |
In case you missed it, Steve Phelan mentioned in one of the comment threads that he has started a new e-journal, the Strategic Management Review. Writes Steve:
Philosophically, the journal is focused on publishing articles that “contribute to the ongoing conversation in strategic management” and intends to be theoretically, methodologically, and geographically neutral. We also aim to have quick reviewer turnaround times and ongoing (instant) publication of accepted articles. There is no reason an article could not be reviewed and published in 30-60 days (if it is deemed to make a contribution). Initially, we anticipate a 35% acceptance rate but the traditional “space considerations” of a paper journal will not be a reason for rejecting articles or lowering the acceptance rate.
The journal is also intended to be a resource for the strategic management community. For example, there is an area for doctoral students to post their dissertation abstracts and there is a “Comments” area for all published articles. Google Scholar will also start indexing the journal and improving the chances that an article will be read. With 269 BPS accepted papers (from 653 submissions) at the upcoming AOM meeting, I think that many articles could benefit from the timely exposure that SMR offers.
To date, the journal has published one issue but has averaged about 250 article downloads per month for the last three months. This is a very positive sign that people want to read online academic content in strategic management.
Consider sending your stuff his way. The journal website contains all the necessary info.
Call for Papers: Generation and Use of Academic Knowledge about Organizations
| Peter Klein |
Organization Studies, one of our favorite journals, is soliciting papers for a special issue edited by Paula Jarzabkowski, Susan Mohrman, and Andreas Georg Scherer, “Organization Studies as Applied Science: The Generation and Use of Academic Knowledge about Organizations.” Submission deadline is 30 November 2007. Here is the call for papers: (more…)
Empirical Research in the RBV
| Peter Klein |
Empirical work in transaction cost economics has been examined in several detailed reviews. Joskow (1988), Shelanski and Klein (1995), Klein (2005), and Macher and Richman (2006) are sympathetic to TCE while David and Han (2004) and Carter and Hodgson (2006) find the evidence less convincing. The critics of TCE raise some good points but do not, in my judgment, show that any rival theory has greater explanatory power. How about the resource-based view?
Surprisingly, while the RBV is central to much recent empirical work in strategy and organization, its empirical track record has not been scrutinized systematically as has TCE’s. Strategic Organization published a paper last year, “Tests of the Resource-Based View: Do the Empirics Have Any Clothes?” by Richard Arend, that begins to fill this gap. (more…)
Michael Cohen on Routines
| Nicolai Foss |
In the field of organization studies, Michael Cohen is a towering figure. What he says is listened to. In a recent Essai in Organization Studies (yes, in case you didn’t know, Org Studies belongs to the same continent as Michel de Montaigne; pretentious, nous?), Cohen talks about the inspiration he has gained from American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. He mentions that, somewhat to his surprise, he has found out that he is far from unique in his Dewey interest. Another Dewey-reader with interests similar to Cohen’s is Sid Winter; in his recent bashing of methodological individualism at the DRUID conference, Winter enlisted Dewey among the enemies of MI. (more…)
Routines or Practices?
| Nicolai Foss |
I am growing increasingly skeptical of the extremely popular and influential notion of routines, a central construct in large parts of management, notably organization and strategic management, and in evolutionary economics. My problems with the construct are these (among others):
1) There are still no clean definitions around of “routine.” Proponents of the routine notion sometimes delight in pointing out that it took transaction cost economics almost 4 decades to arrive at its unit of analysis, dimensionalize it, etc. However, with respect to TCE it was only when the unit was finally decided on, defined and dimensionalized that real progress beyond Coase (1937) began to take place. Those who work with routines have not been so patient, and have not hesitated to introduce all sorts of derived concepts. Thus, capabilities are often defined in terms of routines, so that something undefined is defined in terms of something badly defined.
2) Although no clean definitions seem to exist, different views of routines are proffered in the literature. Indeed, there has a notable drift in the dominant conception of routines, from the standard operating procedures of Cyert and March to the emergent/undesigned, collectively held, largely tacit routines of Nelson and Winter.
3) Routines are (partly because of 1)) too often used as a catch-all category that aims at capturing everything (at any level of analysis) about an organization that has some degree of stability/permanence. For example, the much cited “organizational learning” paper by Levitt and March (it has a whopping 1,655 hits on Google scholar) includes everything from individual-level heuristics (“rules of thumb”) to corporate strategy under the routine heading. (more…)
History of Organizations Bleg from J.C. Spender
| Peter Klein |
Our friend J.C. Spender seeks help from the O&M readership:
I’m desperately searching for a history of organizations — not the history of corporations, nor of corporate law, nor of combinations, nor of Guilds, nor of military organizations, nor of religious ones either.
My problems are (1) to find literature about the history of organizations — are there some good books, papers, etc.? Now that I focus my mind on this I cannot come up with much other than the history of corporations and markets, rather than organizations and markets. My one discovery is the history of the Jesuit movement which, one might argue, was the first modernist “organization.”
(2) Barbara Czarniawska told me that the actual term “organization” only came into general use with the rise in “systems theory” — Henderson, Barnard, and Co. I find this unbelievable but I’m hard pressed to refute or in any other way resist her.
My intuition is that there is something here awaiting discovery about the decline of religion and the emergence of strictly secular and profit-oriented organizations — something beyond the Protestant Ethic therefore and entailing or legitimating a set of objectives which are not in the service of the public — quite to the contrary.
Any suggestions? Please share them below.
Design Puzzles II
| Steven Postrel |
When I last posted on whether apparent inefficiencies in the design of objects and institutions were real opportunities or only mirages, there were many well-informed and thoughtful comments. One of the issues I addressed was the use of multiple queues at checkout counters, despite their theoretical inferiority to a single queue where the next available checker gets the next customer in line. (more…)
More on Terrorism and Incentives
| Peter Klein |
In a recent post on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation I referred to Robert Pape’s analysis of suicide bombings and his conclusion, supported by substantial empirical evidence, that the specific pattern of contemporary suicide attacks cannot be explained by the attackers’ general belief systems (such as religious ideology) but by particular tactical objectives. Suicide bombers, in other words, economize on scarce means to achieve specific ends and adjust their behavior in response to the incentives they face.
For instance: What group is responsible for the most suicide bombings? Al-Qaeda? Hamas? Hezbollah? No, it’s the Tamil Tigers, a secular nationalist group fighting for an independent state in northern and eastern Sri Lanka. Tamil attackers are motivated not by visions of 40 virgins, but by the belief that such attacks are their only effective weapon against a better-armed foe.
For more on these questions check out this NBER working paper by Efraim Benmelech and Claude Berrebi, “Attack Assignments in Terror Organizations and the Productivity of Suicide Bombers.” Benmelech and Berrebi analyze a detailed dataset on the personal characteristics of Palestinian suicide bombers and find that older and more educated suicide bombers are systematically assigned to more important targets. Older and more educated bombers are less likely to fail in their missions and more likely to cause significant damage when they succeed. The authors take this as evidence that terrorist organizations behave “rationally,” in the economist’s usual sense of that term.
Methodological Individualism at the DRUID Conference
| Nicolai Foss |
Today is the second day of the annual conference of the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Economics. In order to stimulate controversy, and entertain conference delegates between less interesting paper sessions, DRUID organizes debates on motions.
I participated along with Sid Winter of the Wharton School, Peter Abell of the London School of Economics, and Thorbjørn Knudsen of Southern Denmark University in today’s “DRUID Debate on Methodological Individualism versus Scientific Progress” (sic!!!!!) which involved the following motion:
Let it be resolved that this conference believes that the lack of methodological individualism applied in strategy research seriously limits scientific progress in the field.
Speaking for the motion were Peter and I, speaking against were Sid and Thorbjorn. A vote was taken before the debate. There were about as many pro as contra votes. After the debate, which had its rather heated moments, another vote was taken. And again there about as many pro as contra votes. Apparently, the debate had — perhaps not surprisingly — not managed to change any beliefs. The debate was streamed, and should be available on the DRUID site within a couple of weeks.
Entrepreneurs are Both Born and Made, in the Interactional Sense
| Chihmao Hsieh |
Well, I’ve coddled this paper long enough, perhaps I should begin to set it free amidst that bit of shameless self-promotion. In a manuscript entitled “Cognition and the interaction between traits and training: the entrepreneur is both born and made,” I argue and provide evidence that an individual’s intelligence and the mode by which they train in multiple domains interact to determine the probability of self-employment. Not yet inclined to throw this up on SSRN just yet, but certainly happy to forward along a copy to interested parties (in hopes of receiving comments!). Just email me at hsiehc at umr dot edu… Below is the long abstract. (more…)
The Methods of Management History
| Peter Klein |
Thomas Hobbes (1660/1994:32) observed that “Out of our conception of the past, we make a future.” It behooves us then, as managers and management scholars, to be satisfied that our conceptions of the past are developed in ways that, as far as possible, avoid the problems that would make them less than useful in creating that future.
Despite the importance of this subject, little attention has been given to the question of method/methodology in management history. A recent Google Scholar search found that, while the term “management history” produced 194,000 hits and “method in history” resulted in 674 hits, the terms “methodology in management history,” “method in management history,” “management history methodology,” and”management history method” produced no hits at all.
To address this deficiency the Journal of Management History is seeking contributions for a special issue on “Scholarship in Management History: The Importance of Methodology.” (I assume they know the difference between method and methodology.) Here is the call for papers.
Can readers suggest good books or papers on the methods of management history?
Do We Need a Project Project?
| Steven Postrel |
A peculiar fact about business schools (at least in the USA) is that project management is not part of the regular MBA curriculum. Why is this peculiar? Only because a huge percentage of the work managers do is organized into projects, the success or failure of strategies often rests on the quality of execution of projects, and many of the principles and techniques of good project management are not immediately obvious. But hey, if anyone needs to know about this trivial stuff they can always go to a two-day workshop and get a certificate (probably from an engineering department). (more…)
Concise Summary of Chandler’s Achievements
| Peter Klein |
Louis Galambos, writing at EH.News:
When Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., entered the subdiscipline of business history, the field was producing very little scholarship of great interest, even to other historians. When Chandler, the world’s leading historian of business, died recently (May 9, 2007) at the age of 88, his legacy included a vibrant, influential body of scholarship and active scholars producing studies that intersected creatively with important developments in economics, sociology, and political science — as well as modern history. Chandler remade business history by publishing a long series of works characterized by meticulous, penetrating research; careful analysis of the data; and, above all, original, imaginative synthesis. Drawing upon the sociology of organizations and Schumpeterian economic analysis of innovation, Chandler reconstructed our understanding of the rise of large enterprise in America and Europe. The business bureaucracies he described were innovative and efficient. Economies of scale and scope, as well as aggressive, successful research and development, enabled them to hold their positions in a capitalist system that was changing rapidly in the second and third industrial revolutions. Their leaders were investors, not Robber Barons; they guided the evolution of the giant, multinational, multidivisional enterprises that have played a central role in capitalist progress since the late nineteenth century. Chandler left the politics of political economy, the labor relations of the firm, and the gender and racial themes of interest to many American scholars of late to other historians of business. His focus throughout his long, amazingly productive career was on the large, successful corporations that have played the central role in global economic development in the modern era.
Core Economics for Managers
| Peter Klein |
Previously I’ve noted the new managerial economics texts by Dwight Lee and Richard McKenzie and Luke Froeb and Brian McCann. Joshua Gans was kind enough to send me a copy of his Core Economics for Managers (Thomson, 2005) and it looks like a good option as well.
The first thing one notices about the book is its brevity and clean, minimalist design: just 206 pages, no fancy graphics, and few sidebars or mini-cases. The book focuses on the “core” areas of pricing, competitive strategy, incentives, and contracts, omitting corporate strategy, human resource management, and peripheral areas like ethics. As its main pricing model, the book features not the increasingly irrelevant perfectly competitive (general or partial) equilibrium model, but a negotiation framework like that in Brandenburger and Nalebuff’s 1996 book Co-opetition. That is, unlike the typical strategy text, cooperative game theory gets as much attention as its more familiar noncooperative counterpart.
Part IV of the book, on contracting, looks particularly good. It favors the property-rights approach to the firm (in my judgment, the correct approach) over the nexus-of-contracts approach, and features a section on relational contracting, a topic usually omitted from introductory managerial texts.
Joshua will be revising the text in the coming months for a new edition and would appreciate suggestions for improvement.
Average versus Marginal: Blowback Edition
| Peter Klein |
Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul caused a stir recently by suggesting, to the horror of the other Republican candidates, that US foreign policy might have something to do with Muslim anger toward the US. The Bush Administration, of course, maintains that “they hate us for our freedom.” No matter what the US government does, in other words, Islamic extremists will target Americans in retaliation for the Declaration of Independence, McDonalds, and Paris Hilton. (Rudy Giuliani, incredibly, claims he has never even heard of blowback.)
Of course, these explanations are not incompatible. US culture and institutions could, in theory, account for the average level of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world. To explain a specific terrorist act, however, we have to think in marginal terms. What we call “terrorism,” as Robert Pape has brilliantly explained, is a tactic, not an ideology. Whatever his general attitude toward the enemy, the terrorist must choose to attack this target or that, to attack now or later, to select one more target or one less. Even if exogenous US characteristics were responsible for overall terrorist attitudes and beliefs, blowback is probably still the best explanation for specific terrorist acts.
Note that this is an application of a more general point about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, an important issue for management theory. (more…)
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