Posts filed under ‘Strategic Management’
Me and Yu
| Peter Klein |
My review of Tony Yu’s Firms, Strategies, and Economic Change (Elgar, 2005) for the QJAE (volume 10, number 1, Spring 2007) is now online.
What Is a Capability and What Does It Matter?
| David Hoopes |
I am often surprised when I present or submit papers because audience members and reviewers find my construct definitions problematic. Often, people find my definitions are too narrow. Also, sometimes others don’t find the scholars whose work I would like to develop merit the attention I give them. This attention sometimes comes in the form of using their definition. Case in point: Sid Winter and capabilities. In a couple of papers I’m working on my co-authors and I have based our definition of capabilities on one Sid Winter has used in an SMJ paper and a book he edited. Tammy Madsen and I have stuck with Sid’s definition. Steve Postrel and I have taken Sid’s definition and made it more specific to our work. Some readers and listeners have had a hard time with this (and given me a hard time). Now, there’s one “school,” that generally does not like definitions or theoretical constructs to be very narrow. Thus, “can’t X, Y, or Z also be a capability?” “Well, it could be. Just not in this paper.” “Aren’t capabilities just resources?” “Sure. So and So big shot thinks so. We just think of resource and capabilities as being two different things.” Another “school” doesn’t understand why we should care about Sid’s opinion. “Shouldn’t you use Other Big Shot’s definition?” “Well, I don’t really understand her definition. Sid has been doing this capability thing for a while.” “Isn’t it the same as Selznick?” “I don’t think so. Sid doesn’t think so” (see Intro to edited volume with Dosi).
I don’t mind that people prefer other definitions. Yet, I am surprised by how agitated people get. I get agitated by definitions when 1) There aren’t any; 2) I don’t understand what the author/presenter is saying; 3) The definition includes everything and the kitchen sink (presumably because that’s the way life is, “complex”).
So, I stumble along with my narrow definitions and hope not to get yelled at too much.
Corporate Venturing
| Peter Klein |
Here are presentation slides from a 2007 Academy of Management Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on corporate venturing. The presenters were Gary Dushnitsky, Thomas Keil, Riitta Katila, Suresh Kotha, Michael Lenox, Markku Maula, Corey Phelps, Shaker Zahra, and Rosemarie Ziedonis.
Don’t forget that slides from our PDW on Austrian economics are available as well.
New Survey Paper on Vertical Integration
| Peter Klein |
Francine Lafontaine and Margaret Slade’s superb review paper on vertical integration, “Vertical Integration and Firm Boundaries: The Evidence,” appears in the current issue of the Journal of Economic Literature. (Non-gated version here.) Unlike previous reviews focusing on particular theoretical frameworks (e.g., my NIE Handbook paper on the transaction-cost approach), Lafontaine and Slade consider a broad range of factors potentially affecting vertical integration such as risk, agent effort, firm size, monitoring costs, and repeated interaction as well as the usual transaction-cost variables (asset specificity and uncertainty). They also look closely, following Whinston (2003), at distinctions between the transaction-cost (Williamson) and property-rights (Grossman-Hart-Moore) approaches. Here’s the abstract:
Since Ronald H. Coase’s (1937) seminal paper, a rich set of theories has been developed that deal with firm boundaries in vertical or input–output structures. In the last twenty-five years, empirical evidence that can shed light on those theories also has been accumulating. We review the findings of empirical studies that have addressed two main interrelated questions: First, what types of transactions are best brought within the firm and, second, what are the consequences of vertical integration decisions for economic outcomes such as prices, quantities, investment, and profits. Throughout, we highlight areas of potential cross-fertilization and promising areas for future work.
Also recommended, from the same issue of the JEL, is Bentley MacLeod’s “Reputations, Relationships, and Contract Enforcement.”
Organization Theory en Français
| Peter Klein |
French-speaking readers may enjoy Nathalie Gardes’s blog Theories des Organisations. There’s a bit too much on pouvoir for my tastes, but the site looks interesting nonetheless.
New Video and Audio
| Peter Klein |
Video and audio files that may intrest our readers:
- The 2006 and 2007 Allen Hamilton Eminent Scholar in International Management awards presentations. See lectures by C. K. Prahalad (with commentary by Yves Doz) and Ikujiro Nonaka (with commentary by David Teece).
- Economic history lectures from Brad LeLong: Marx, Rostow, Kuznets, Gerschenkron; The Slow Spread of Industrialization; Political Economy 101 .
- Original video from the 1962 Milgram experiment (via Max Raskin). As chilling today as 45 years ago. (See also the wiki.)
IT and Creative Destruction
| Peter Klein |
Information technology (IT) intensity is correlated with firm-specific performance heterogeneity, controlling for industry- and time-fixed effects and a host of strategic and financial control variables. Moreover, high rates of firm-specific performance heterogeneity are associated with subsequent increases in industry total factor productivity (TFP). In other words, IT can be interpreted as a general-purpose technology that unleashes a wave of innovation, leading to a shakeout followed by performance improvements — Shumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction.”
So say Hyunbae Chun, Jung-Wook Kim, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung in “Creative Destruction and Firm-Specific Performance Heterogeneity” (NBER Working Paper No. 13011, April 2007). (Non-gated version here.) There’s not much theory but the empirical exercise is interesting and worth a look.
9-11, Strategic Management, and Public Policy
| David Hoopes |
On this sad anniversary I find myself thinking about public policy and the field of strategic management. After six years, how well integrated are our intelligence agencies? A few management and strategic management scholars probably have a lot to say about such issues. Many more might struggle to apply what they work on to this problem or any other policy issue.
A few years back Bill Ouchi was commended by a panel at an Academy of Management meeting. Bill had long since forsaken traditional academic concerns and devoted his considerable intellect to public policy. His main target: public schools. Ouchi’s work has had a profound impact on a number of large and at one time largely dysfunctional school districts. Portions of the session were published in The Academy of Management Executive (recently renamed). I missed the session, but the account in AME had Bill’s talk followed by a number of notable management scholars opining about other applications of management research to public policy. I’ve met a few of the speakers. They are very nice people who are genuinely concerned about the field of management and about how we might be of service to a constituency beyond our students and the business world. Nevertheless, most of what these talented, hardworking, and successful scholars had to say about the field of management and its possible applications to public policy seemed far removed from a direct application to policy questions. (more…)
EBM Reconsidered
| Peter Klein |
Joe Mahoney, whose opinions are highly valued around here, thinks we are unfair to evidence-based management (EBM) (1, 2). Joe encourages readers to study Denise Rousseau’s 2005 Academy of Management Presidential Address and make up their own minds. Writes Joe:
Some of the leading folks in the evidence based-management (EBM) research program include past Academy of Management Presidents such as Jean Bartunek (Boston College), Jone Pearce (University of California, Irvine) and Denise Rousseau (Carnegie Mellon University). In the Strategy field, Ravi Madhavan (University of Pittsburgh), Alfie Marcus (University of Minnesota) and myself have recently become involved. The real leader of the Evidence-Based Management program is Denise Rousseau, who offers much of substance.
Joe reports that he attended a June 2007 workshop at Carnegie Mellon on EBM and came away much impressed. EBM, Joe writes, “means translating principles based on best evidence into organizational practices. Thus, organizational decisions are informed by social science and organizational research, which aid in solving organizational problems.” It’s hard to disagree with that.
Culture, Cognition, and Strategy
| David Hoopes |
Although managers frequently refer to their companies’ culture, culture’s influence on business strategy receives limited attention in the academy. Over the years, organizational culture has gone in and out of fashion. Currently, it remains out of fashion. Yet, strategy researchers often stress the importance of shared beliefs, shared values, administrative history, and other organizational characteristics presumably influenced by or reflecting an organization’s culture. A cogent theory of culture and organizational culture can better integrate organizational beliefs, values, and knowledge with current theories of strategy (and for my interests in competitive heterogeneity). Of particular interest to me is a branch called cognitive anthropology.
Most anthropologists include themselves in one of two traditions. One, generally associated with Ward Goodenough, considers culture to be knowledge necessary to get along in a particular society. The other, generally associated with Clifford Geertz, considers culture as something outside of any particular person. Thus Geertz (1973: 12) decries “…the cognitive fallacy [that] culture consists of mental phenomena.” Building on Goodenough’s work, cognitive anthropologists describe culture in terms of member’s schema or cognitive models (e.g. D’Andrade, Hollins, Quinn, Hutchinson). D’Andrade states that cultural schema are “Socially inherited solutions to life’s problems” (1995: 249). (more…)
The Best Business Book I’ve Read This Year
| Peter Klein |
It’s Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect (mentioned previously here). Rosenzweig systematically, but politely, demolishes the pretensions of best-selling management books and projects such as In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, Good to Great, and the Evergreen Project. These studies, Rosenzweig patiently explains, engage not in serious research — despite their pseudo-scientific pretensions (what Rosenzweig calls “The Delusion of Rigorous Research”) — but in storytelling.
The most common problems are sampling on the dependent variable (i.e., choosing a sample of high-performing companies and explaining what their managers did, ignoring selection bias) and using independent variables based purely on respondents’ ex post subjective assessments of strategy, corporate culture, leadership, and other “soft” characteristics. The latter is the “Halo Effect” of the book’s title. When a company’s financial or operating performance is strong, managers, consultants, journalists, and management professors tend to rate strategy, culture, and leadership highly, while rating the same strategies, cultures, and leadership poorly when a company’s performance is weak. It’s as if the authors of “guru” books have never taken a first-year graduate course on empirical research design. Or, as Rosenzweig puts it (p. 128): “None of these studies is likely to win a blue ribbon at your local high school science fair.” Ouch. (more…)
Economic Darwinism During Recessions
| Peter Klein |
Some version of the survivor principle, or “economic Darwinism,” underlies much economics and strategy research. While the term “survivor principle” was coined by Stigler (1968), the idea is usually attributed to Alchian (1950) and Friedman (1953). Alchian argued that even though theories about rational decision makers making “optimal” choices are clearly unrealistic, the predictions of such theories need not be. The quest for profit, combined with competitive selection forces, ensures that the average firm will tend to behave like those described by theories of rational behavior (Alchian, 1950). Friedman (1953: 22), defending the profit-maximization hypothesis, puts it this way:
[U]nless the behavior of businessmen in some way or other approximated behavior consistent with the maximization of returns, it seems unlikely that they would remain in business for long. Let the apparent immediate determinant of business behavior be anything at all — habitual reaction, random choice, or whatnot. Whenever this determinant happens to lead to behavior consistent with rational and informed maximization of returns, the business will prosper and acquire resources with which to expand; whenever it does not, the business will tend to lose resources and can be kept in existence only by the addition of resources from outside. The process of “natural selection” thus helps to validate the [maximization] hypothesis or, rather, given natural selection, acceptance of the hypothesis can be based largely on the judgment that it summarizes appropriately the conditions for survival.
The problem with Friedman’s strong version of the survivor principle is that we know little about how such competitive selection processes actually work. (more…)
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…)
Corporate Asset Purchases and Sales
| Peter Klein |
There’s a huge literature on mergers and sell-offs (see this excellent, if slightly dated, survey) but less work on the purchase and sale of corporate assets short of full acquisition or divestiture. Studying asset purchases and sales is a good way to learn about firms’ growth and retrenchment strategies because these transactions are not complicated by issues of corporate control.
Missaka Warusawitharana, a recent Wharton PhD now at the Federal Reserve Board, is doing interesting work in this area. In a forthcoming Journal of Finance paper he finds strong evidence that efficiency, not agency, considerations drive most asset purchases and sales. This contrasts with the M&A literature, in which the evidence on investment efficiency is mixed. A companion paper (with Sugata Ray) compares the sensitivity of acquisition returns to transaction value for both asset purchases and full acquisitions, finding evidence for value creation when corporate assets are purchased but not when an entire firm is acquired.
Investor Protection and Firm Governance: Substitutes or Complements?
| Peter Klein |
The new institutional economics often treats the institutional environment and institutional arrangements as substitutes. In countries with stable legal institutions, relatively efficient courts, and reasonable default rules for contract terms, for example, contracts tend to be less complete. If contracting parties can trust the courts to fill in the gaps, why bother to write out every contingency? Likewise, if a country has an efficient external capital market, firms can be small and specialized, relying on the capital markets to allocate resources among business units, but if the external capital market performs poorly, diversified business groups may arise to exploit their internal capital markets.
It is thus surprising to learn, from a new paper by Reena Aggarwal, Isil Erel, René Stulz, and Rohan Williamson, that firms tend to establish better mechanisms for corporate governance in countries that already have strong rules for investor protection. “[O]ur evidence suggests that firm-level governance attributes are complementary to rather than substitutes for country-level investor protection, so that better country-level investor protection makes it optimal for firms to invest more in internal governance.” The better the institutional environment, in this case, the more effort agents put into designing efficient institutional arrangements.
Clearly more work is needed to understand the interactions between “macro” and “micro” institutions. What are some other good papers in this area?
Outsourcing Bleg
| Peter Klein |
A friend asks for good examples of companies outsourcing core functions or selling core technology and brands. Suggestions?
Knightian Financial Markets
| Peter Klein |
Frank Knight knew in 1921 what the world’s most sophisticated mathematical models could not capture today. That is, there is a fine line between risk with mathematical probabilities and uncertainty that cannot be measured. Although investors have no difficulty in pricing all sorts of risks, the “immeasurable” uncertainty and information asymmetries make them shy away from all forms of risk, especially in times of global anxiety. In our view, this is exactly what has happened in the past couple of weeks in financial markets, as credit risks linked to the US subprime-mortgage market spread out (through highly leveraged derivatives and structured instruments) and triggered a volatility wave across the world.
That’s Morgan Stanley’s Serhan Cevik and Katerina Kalcheva, writing in yesterday’s Global Economic Forum. Kudos to Cevik and Kalcheva for reminding investors (or, more likely, economists) that some risks cannot be measured and priced. But keep in mind that Knight treated uncertainty as ubiquitous, not some parameter that rises and falls with market conditions. “Profit arises out of the inherent, absolute unpredictability of things, out of the sheer brute fact that the results of human activity cannot be anticipated and then only in so far as even a probability calculation in regard to them is impossible and meaningless,” as he famously put it. (BTW you can get the full text of Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit online, courtesy of EconLib.)
Economists and the Economy
| Peter Klein |
Chris Dillow, channeling yours truly, writes:
Economists are everywhere. Steve Levitt, Tim Harford and Steven Landsburg use newspaper columns and best-selling books to show how economics can account for why drug dealers live with their mums, why you can’t find space to park, why school teachers cheat, why people share umbrellas and why sexually transmitted diseases are so rife. Simple economics, it seems, can explain everything.
Everything, that is, except the economy. Although orthodox economics can do a good job of explaining why people get a divorce or the clap, it does a much worse job of accounting for what people think it should explain.
Dillow’s essay in the Times goes on to focus on the prediction problem. (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…)
Firm Boundaries in the Japanese Auto Industry
| Peter Klein |
A new NBER paper by Sadao Nagaoka, Yoshihisa Noro, and Akira Takeishi, “Determinants of Firm Boundaries: Empirical Analysis of the Japanese Auto Industry from 1984 to 2002.”
We have assessed the determinants of the choice of integration, relational contracting (keiretsu sourcing) and market sourcing by seven Japanese automobile manufacturers (OEMs) with respect to 54 components in light of contract economics. Our major findings are the following. First, the specificity and interdependency of a component significantly promotes vertical integration over keiretsu and keiretsu over market, consistent with transaction cost economics. Second, interdependency is a more important consideration for the former choice than for the latter choice, and the reverse is the case for specificity. This suggests that the hold-up risk due to specific investment can be
often effectively controlled by a relational contracting based on keiretsu sourcing, while accommodating non-contractible design changes may often require vertical integration. Third, while higher testability of a component makes the effects of specificity significantly smaller, it also promotes the choice of keiretsu sourcing over market sourcing. One interpretation of this last result is that while higher testability improves the contractibility of the component with high specificity, it simultaneously enhances the advantage of keiretsu sourcing since it provides more opportunities for the supplier to explore new information for a collaborative exploitation with an OEM.
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