<title>Abstract</title> <italic>This paper offers an integrated analysis of outsourcing, offshoring, and foreign direct investment within a systems view of international business. This view takes the supply chain rather than the firm as the basic unit of analysis. It argues that competition in the global economy...</italic>

<italic>Entrepreneurship studies is a booming area of research, but, as previous commentators have noted, the literature has become pluralistic and diffuse. There is a profusion of concepts, many of them ill defined. Theory and empiricism are only weakly linked. There is a distinct lack of historical...</italic>

Information costs play a key role in determining the relative efficiency of alternative organisational structures. The choice of locations at which information is stored in a firm is an important determinant of its information costs. A specific example of information use is modelled in order to...

Firms are hierarchical because hierarchy facilitates both monitoring and control. Monitoring is readily explained in terms of agency costs, but control is not. Control relations between superiors and subordinates emerge naturally only when the superior has decisive information and the...

Dunning's recent discussions of the morality of global capitalism, as developed from his eclectic theory, are critically reviewed. It is argued that, in highlighting the benefits of globalisation, Dunning has underestimated the extent to which globalisation amplifies the costs of capitalism. The...

Much has been written about where the boundaries of the firm are drawn, but little about what occurs at the boundaries themselves. When a firm subcontracts, does it inform its suppliers fully of what it requires, or is it willing to accept what they have available? In practice firms often engage...