The resource-based approach to strategy, which reaches back to the contributions of Penrose, Selznick and Chandler, has gradually become the dominant perspective in strategy (content) research, arguably because it combines realism with relative rigour. The present paper presents the main themes...

We discuss and empirically examine a firm-level equivalent of the ancient problem of "tying the King<92>s hands", namely how to maximize managerial intervention for "good cause", while avoiding intervention for "bad cause". Managers may opportunistically intervene when such intervention produces...</92>

I critically discuss recent claims about economic organization in the emerging “knowledge economy,” specifically that authority relations will tend to disappear (or at least become radically transformed), the boundaries of the firm will blur, and coordination mechanisms will be much more...

Many economists, including Austrian economists, have argued that the market process is essentially an experimental process. We briefly try to clarify this conceptualization, and then argue that we may understand the firm in much the same light. A basic view of the firm as an experimental entity...

Recent theoretical and empirical analysis in the field of economic organisation has focussed almost exclusively on identifying organisational practices and complementarities between such practices, invariant to the type of activity in question. However, this paper takes its point of departure in...

We discuss the relations between alternative conceptualizations of the market process - neoclassical, Austrian and radical subjectivist/evolutionary - and alternative approaches to economic organization, for example, nexus of contract theory, Williamsonian transaction cost economics and the...

This paper examines the nature of genuine uncertainty and rule-following behaviour and suggests some implications for the theory of the firm. The firm is seen here as emerging as a means to manage some of the experienced uncertainty. The nature of the firm is perceived as an evolving institution...

We model a two-stage R&D project with an abandonment option. Two types of uncertainty influence the decision to start R&D. Demand uncertainty is modelled as a lottery between a proportional increase and decrease in demand. Technical uncertainty is modelled as a lottery between a decrease and...

This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of...

Ever since its emergence in the 1970s the modern economic or Coasian theory of the firm has been discussed and challenged by sociologists, heterodox economists, management scholars, and other critics. This chapter reviews and assesses these critiques, focusing on behavioral issues (bounded...