Posts filed under ‘Recommended Reading’
Mental Illness in the Academy: Elyn Saks’ Brave New World
| David Hoopes |
Monday’s LA Times had an amazing story about a USC law professor who has managed to attend Oxford, Yale Law School, and become Dean of Research at the USC law school while battling schizophrenia. Many O&M readers have probably read the book or seen the movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” the incredible story of mathematician John Nash. Like Nash, Elyn Saks suffered hallucinations, delusions, and a litany of other terrible effects of her disease. I probably should not use the past tense because I don’t believe medicine can remove these things. However, they can be tempered. Saks recently published a memior, “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.” Thus, in addition to the direct suffering of the disease, Saks is now willing to take on the problems of social stigma, no small thing.
I wish I could think of some profound comment or lesson. There are many among us who suffer from a variety of mental illnesses. For better or worse, more jokes about academics come to mind than profundities. Here’s to the day when the social stigma associated with mental illness is much smaller. I’ve always thought I’d wait until I got tenure to open up any of my (much more minor) nightmares.
Thoughts on Capabilities From the Interesting Sutton
| Nicolai Foss |
We have spent too much time on this blog discussing Bob Sutton. A much more interesting Sutton is John Sutton, the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics as the London School of Economics. Sutton is the author of numerous papers and books (e.g., the highly influential Sunk Costs and Market Structure). He has had some influence on strategic management thinking, mainly (obviously) among those who base strategic management on industrial economics. (more…)
Does Management Research Need to Become More Empirical?
| Nicolai Foss |
Or, to put it more precisely, does management research (i.e., the journals) need to become more empirical in the specific sense of allowing for research that is pre-theoretic, but addresses an issue of relevance or detects a pattern to organizational stakeholders, that is, identifies a potentially important stylized fact? (more…)
Bryan Caplan’s New Book
| Nicolai Foss |
During my libertarian awakening in the mid-1980s, I remember being particularly impressed by public choice theory. While I read the works of the major Austrians and felt strongly inspired by their vision, PC theory seemed richer in predictive implications and concrete policy proposals. It was also much closer to the mainstream economics I was being taught at the University of Copenhagen. (more…)
In the Journals
| Nicolai Foss |
What can possibly be better than to return after a long holiday (Euro-style — 2 weeks!!) and a long conference (the AoM; at 6 days definitely too long) to a stack of lovely journals that arrived in your pigeonhole while you were away? After clearing the administrative, department-head-specific tasks that had accumulated in my absence, I spent this afternoon browsing the journals. Here are some of those papers, special issues, etc. I found particularly interesting, and which may interest the O&M readership: (more…)
Managing Through Incentives
| Nicolai Foss |
In my recent mention of various textbooks on organizational economics I somehow forgot to mention two excellent books on the subject. One is by former O&M guest blogger Joe Mahoney (which makes the omission the more embarrassing), Economic Foundations of Strategy (most of which turns out to be organizational economics). The other is the more managerially oriented Managing Through Incentives by Dwight Lee (my co-blogger’s former University of Georgia colleague) and Donald McKenzie. In addition to watching 300, I read through most of Managing Through Incentives on my flight back from the AoM in Philadelphia.
The book is light and engaging, but not exactly your average management book. Although clearly intended for a management audience it is probably too long and complicated to successfully serve that role. But it is excellent as an inspiration for teachers of organizational economics and organizational strategy. It abounds in nice examples and applications of, mainly, agency theory that can be very usefully applied in teaching. Or you may simply read it for fun. There is a humorous tone to much of the writing, it has appealing libertarian leanings (David Friedman and Robert Hessen are approvingly cited), and it features a nice chapter that takes issue with Alfie Kohn’s views on incentives. Highly recommended!
Sociology Blogs
| Peter Klein |
A nice list from Tina Guenther. I’m afraid to start reading them because I won’t understand them.
Garrett on Ford
| Peter Klein |
Garet Garrett’s 1953 book on Ford Motor Co., The Wild Wheel, is now available as a free e-book at Mises.org. Garrett, the iconoclastic American journalist who wrote for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Saturday Evening Post and is best known as a critic of Franklin Roosevelt, was trained as a financial reporter and covered Ford for many years. Worth a read.
Brilliant But Neglected II
| Peter Klein |
Some suggestions for Nicolai’s list:
John G .Matsusaka, “Corporate Diversification, Value Maximization, and Organizational Capabilities,” Journal of Business 74 (July 2001): 409-31. Offers a novel and provocative “match-seeking” theory of diversification in which firms do not know their own capabilities but must discover them by experimenting with various combinations of business units. A diversified firm may be valued at a discount relative to more specialized firms because its current lines of business include some not consistent with its capabilities, but such conglomeration is necessary, and value-creating in the long run, if the firm is to discover where it should eventually refocus. 85 hits on Google Scholar. Possibly neglected because it appeared in the Journal of Business near the end of its run.
Robert C. Ellickson, “A Hypothesis of Wealth-Maximizing Norms: Evidence from the Whaling Industry,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 5, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 83-97. A nice example of the emergence of private law, focusing on the rules governing property rights in whales prior to the twentieth century. Without a central authority the whaling community — a small, close-knit group with shared characteristics and frequent interaction — developed a complex set of norms enforced by community sanction and the threat of ostracism. Just 25 Google Scholar hits. (more…)
John Hagel’s Blog
| Nicolai Foss |
John Hagel III is one of the most thoughtful consultant-thinkers out there. His work (with John Seely Brown) on productive friction and dynamic specialization is very inspiring, and I have benefited from it when recently starting up an empirical project on how major Danish firms are changing corporate strategies towards dynamic specialization. Hagel runs a nice blog, EdgePerspectives that is worth taking a look at. I particularly liked his discussion of Bill McKelvey’s work on the differences between Gaussian and Paretian worlds.
Brilliant But Neglected Articles
| Nicolai Foss |
Because markets for science hardly work perfectly, a certain number of papers that are truly excellent will tend to be overlooked. The scientific community may collectively commit Type 1 errors, or may simply overlook certain papers because they were published at a time when the interests of the community were elsewhere, or were published in obscure journals, or in non-English languages, etc. etc. (more…)
Efficient Organizational Design by Marco Weiss
| Nicolai Foss |
Good textbooks in organizational economics are badly missing from the market. In particular, good textbooks that are more advanced than Brickley, Smith, and Zimmerman’s Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture (great book, BTW), but still more accessible than the average organizational economics research papers, basically do not exist. Milgrom and Roberts’s Economics, Organization, and Management has much interesting material in it, but there is simply too much material (students drown) and the book is extremely uneven in terms of readability (some chapters, e.g., chpt. 4 are hard to read even for advanced readers and even more for students). George Hendrikse’s Economics and Management of Organizations is organized much like the Milgrom and Roberts book but is more readable. However, parts of it are too difficult for the average 3rd or 4th year business student. (more…)
Two Essays on Douglass North
| Peter Klein |
By Arnold Kling, here and here.
I usually recommend to my students North’s 1991 Journal of Economic Perspectives paper, “Institutions,” for an overview of his general approach to institutions and economic change.
Pioneers of Industrial Organization
| Nicolai Foss |
Pioneers of Industrial Organization: How the Economics of Competition and Monopoly Took Shape is the title of a new volume edited by Henk de Jong to be published next month by Edward Elgar. My CBS colleague Peter Møllgaard and I have contributed a chapter on early (meaning pre-1980) IO research in the Scandinavian countries. (more…)
Colin Camerer on Strategic Management
| Nicolai Foss |
Strategic management researchers are, as a rule, practically oriented folks who typically do not have much patience with lofty debates in the theory of science. Say the word “ontology” and you will have eyes rolling in the audience (yes, I have tried it!).
I am currently working on a chapter on methodological/philosophy-of-science discussions in strategic management for Giovanni Battista Dagnino’s forthcoming Handbook of Research on Competitive Strategy and, given the above characterization, I have actually been surprised by the number of published papers on meta-theoretical issues in strategic management. (more…)
The Diffusion of IT in the Workplace
| Peter Klein |
Much research on information technology focuses on the IT sector itself (software, computer hardware, telecom, biotech). Less attention has been paid to the effects of IT on the rest of the economy, particularly “old economy” manufacturing and service industries. (Erik Brynjolfsson’s work constitutes perhaps the most prominent exception.) And yet we know that IT has had a significant impact on a range of industries including steel, machine tools, trucking, and banking.
One of the first book-length, single-industry, long-range studies of the effects of IT on workplace practices is JoAnne Yates’s 2005 book Structuring the Information Age, an analysis of the life-insurance industry over the last hundred years. As noted by Thomas Haigh, reviewing the book for EH.Net, life insurance is a conservative, heavily regulated industry concerned primarily with stability, not growth. But because its main activity is processing paperwork, improvements in record-keeping and information processing have always been critical to the industry’s performance. Life-insurance firms have been not only early adopters, but also creators and developers of IT. During the 1920s and 1930s they were the first to add printing capabilities to the tabulating machines that had been around since the 1890s and to develop the ability to process letters as well as numbers. From the 1940s to the 1970s they were among the earliest adopters of digital computing.
Writes Haigh: “I hope Yates succeeds in her stated aim of convincing historians that businesses can be creative users of technologies. We would all benefit if it can also serve what must have been an implicit aim: to remind business school faculty that history explains a great deal about how technology does and doesn’t work when applied within an industry.”
New Paper by Hart and Moore
| Peter Klein |
I blogged previously about Oliver Hart’s work (with John Moore) on “partial contracts.” The paper has been revised and retitled “Contracts as Reference Points” and is available for NBER subscribers here. Abstract:
We argue that a contract provides a reference point for a trading relationship: more precisely, for parties’ feelings of entitlement. A party’s ex post performance depends on whether he gets what he is entitled to relative to outcomes permitted by the contract. A party who is shortchanged shades on performance. A flexible contract allows parties to adjust their outcome to uncertainty, but causes inefficient shading. Our analysis provides a basis for long-term contracts in the absence of noncontractible investments, and elucidates why “employment” contracts, which fix wage in advance and allow the employer to choose the task, can be optimal.
Classic Books in Business and Economic History
| Peter Klein |
EH.Net’s Project 2000/2001 features new reviews of classic works in business and economic history. Here are some that may be of particular interest to O&M readers:
- David Landes on Chandler’s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
- Thomas McCraw on Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
- Stanley Engerman on Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Cynthia Taft Morris on Davis and North’s Institutional Change and American Economic Growth
- Paul Hohenberg on Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
- Winifred Rothenberg on Horwitz’s The Transformation of American Law
- Albert Fishlow on Gerschenkron’s Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
- Philip Coelho on North and Thomas’s The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History
My Redesigned Site
| Nicolai Foss |
Check it out. I have dropped the quasi-blog feature of the old version (I hadn’t maintained it for almost a year anyway), so now I can concentrate on O&M and this one. I will soon upload talks and work in progress.
Reader’s Reports on The Road to Serfdom
| Peter Klein |
A new edition of The Road to Serfdom is coming out this year, positioned as volume 2 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. Like all the volumes in the Collected Works, it includes a new foreword (here by series editor Bruce Caldwell), standardized and corrected notes and references, and previously unpublished supplementary material. This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features some excerpts from the new material. Here, for example, are the reader’s reports on the manuscript, solicited by the University of Chicago Press in 1943 from Frank Knight and Jacob Marschak: (more…)
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