The paper aims at investigating how far transaction costs economics (TCE) concurs in the explanation of outsourcing decisions in firms characterized by “thick’ industrial relations, that is where unions and employees are involved in, and are sometimes able to affect, the relative managerial...

The paper aims at ‘embedding’ the outsourcing firm by considering it as a four-fold unit of analysis: i.e. as an organizational, production, industrial and innovation unit. Theoretical correlations between outsourcing decisions and outsourcing variables are formulated and then tested with...

Inspired by the resource- and knowledge-based views, much attention has been focused on knowledge transfer as a process of strategic importance. Still, many open questions regarding knowledge transfer processes need to be addressed to complete our understanding. For instance, what are the...

The benefits of an international division of labour is never illustrated more clearly than in small developed nations like Denmark. Without many natural resources such countries can never be self sufficient and they need access to foreign markets in order for their firms to specialise and...

The article departs from an understanding of organizational learning as processes that code historical events into routines that guide behavior in organizations, and which is based on shared knowledge, insight, and mental models from the organizational memory. Focus is on knowledge-intensive...

The aim of this paper is to explore the heterogeneity in R&D collaborations and of their determinants and motives. Using a recent French survey on research and innovation relations, we first show the heterogeneity of such relations thanks to a typology of their characteristics: their nature...

Twenty years have passed since Nelson and Winter (1982) proposed routines as the unit of analysis of an evolutionary theory of economic change. Since then, the concept of routines has been taken up widely in the economics and business literature. Many ambiguities and open questions still...

Foucaults studies of the relations between power and knowledge provide an alternative methodology for the studies of knowledges and their organizing. A methodology, which is referred to as genealogy. Process and pluralism is at the heart of genealogy. It thereby challenges unitary sciences and...

This paper investigates whether firms innovate persistently or discontinuously over time using an innovation panel data set on German manufacturing and service firms for the period 1994–2002. It turns out that innovation behaviour is permanent at the firm–level to a very large extent. Using...

This paper reviews the first results from a large Danish survey on organisational innovation within the private business sector. The 1,900 surveyed firms are divided in two groups of an almost equal size according to whether or not they have undertaken organisational innovation during the period...