The paper describes the emergence of entrepreneurship in Shanxi province based on fieldwork in the last 6 years. Employing institutional and evolutionary economics shows that both the kind of firms that emerge and the individual behaviour of entrepreneurs reflect a systematic response to the...

The Chinese economy has developed rapidly despite two major constraints: ill-functioning markets and a socialist past, both of which caused an environment of unenforceable contracts. In this situation the need to pool resources and to govern relational risk was paramount to the development of a...

This article introduces a multi-level framework to structure and analyse FDI patterns. It is argued that three internationalisation strategies currently simultaneously shape the globalisation of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI): classical internationalisation, emerging internationalisation and...

This chapter offers a theory and method for the analysis of the dynamics, i.e. the development, of clusters for innovation. It employs an analysis of three types of embedding: institutional embedding, which is often localized, structural embedding (network structure), and relational embedding...

This article provides empirical tests of the hypothesis of ‘optimal cognitive distance’, proposed by Nooteboom (1999, 2000), in two distinct empirical settings. Variety of cognition, needed for learning, has two dimensions: the number of agents with different cognition, and differences in...

Since the early 1990s international - or even global - outsourcing of intermediate products from suppliers has been propagated as a key means to improve the performance of firms. It is argued that becoming more lean and internationally focused is beneficial for the buyer as well as for the...

This paper focuses on governance modes for service development of mobile telephone networks (GSM, WAP, GPRS, UMTS). 'Services' refer to services embodying a specific content. The paper shows that the phase of the life cycle of the network and the service affects the choice of governance mode of...

Terrorism is not a natural hazard outside the range of corporate decision-making. Simple micro-economic analysis shows how globalisation changed the supply of terrorist attacks and the costs for tolerating terrorist hazard. Approaches developed in organizational strategy help to single out three...

Over the last years, it has become increasingly important for companies to create strategic business alignment (SBA), i.e., the degree to which employees understand, support, and are able to execute the companies’ strategic initiatives. This study provides insights into the way companies can...

Increasingly, it has been recognised that in their process of internationalisation multinationals may learn. They may take a strategy not only of exploitation, to leverage existing assets, competencies and products, built up in their home countries, but also, and perhaps even primarily, of...