Entrepreneurs cannot develop a business single handedly. One of the most important tasks the entrepreneur faces is to recruit, allocate work to, motivate and retain employees who will help the business to grow. Based on survey data, this paper examines the HRM orientations of UK and Japanese...

Using the cases of Wal-Mart and IKEA, this paper takes a productive systems approach to examine Ôvarieties of capitalismÕ from the perspective of the ways by which production and market relations are structured and prioritised. It considers the nature of these relations and their interaction...

After a brief recent empirical sketch of Islamic finance, the paper turns to its main theoretical and conceptual purpose. It seeks to relate the concepts of Islamic and conventional finance, and to examine certain important questions which arise from the interaction between these systems. The...

Local clusters of high technology small businesses are of increasing interest to politician and academics. This papers draws on a study of 237 high tech small businesses located throughout the UK. Combining information on activity and location, firms were grouped according to their potential...

The institutions of productive systems are structured by mutual interests and relative power. Securing mutually beneficial cooperation in production requires resolving distributional differences. These objectives are secured in liberal economic theory by the working of markets which mediate the...

In this paper we examine the sourcing strategies of clothing firms in the developed economies of the UK and Germany in the context of their national institutional framework. We argue that, as a result of their embeddedness in divergent national structures, these firms pursue different sourcing...

This paper reviews the recent development and growth of small and medium-sized high-technology firms in the Cambridge region of the United Kingdom, as an example of an innovative and R&D-focused business cluster associated with a major international university and successful local science and...

This paper presents the findings of a survey of 237 high tech small and medium sized businesses based in the UK. The survey is part of an ongoing comparative study of high tech small businesses in the UK and Japan. The paper describes the growth, innovative activity and market structure of...

In this paper, I briefly review the motivations for inventive behavior and describe two common incentive systems that harness and encourage such behavior. This review of well-trodden ground is performed only so that the implications of the rise of the networked knowledge economy for the...