An increasing number of firms are moving into a new form of competition which can be described as knowledge-based competition. Firms in knowledge-based rivalry are competing mostly on their learning capabilities. The relative importance of capital and labor as a key input factor in the...

In der Modelldiskussion haben sich zwei grundlegende Strömungen herausgebildet, die in diesem Beitrag als Passivistische Abbildungsthese und Aktivistische Konstruktionsthese bezeichnet werden. Der vorliegende Beitrag nimmt die Position der Passivistischen Abbildungsthese als Ausgangspunkt der...

Die Entwicklung betriebs- und volkswirtschaftlicher Forschungsprogramme beruht auf der wissenschaftlichen und technologischen Leistungsfähigkeit der ihnen zugrunde liegenden Metatheorien. Es lassen sich drei allgemeine und kohärente metatheoretische Standpunkte unterscheiden, die als...

Summary The central thesis of this paper is that the production of knowledge in consulting teams can neither be understood as the result of an internal interaction between clients and consultants decoupled from the wider socio-political environment nor as externally determined by socially...

Summary Based on the investigation of seven consultancy projects within an international technical consulting firm, we identify three major practices that characterize client-consultant interaction - shaping impressions, problem-solving, and negotiating expectations - and discuss their...

J.-C. Spender’s award-winning, knowledge-based theory of the firm is based on four premises: (1) The firm can be sufficiently understood as a system of knowledge, (2) explicit and implicit knowing can be clearly dissociated, (3) organizations are conceived as cognizing entities, and (4)...

We classify the strategies by which management consultancies can create and sustain the institutional capital that makes it possible for them to extract competitive resources from their institutional context. Using examples from the German consulting industry, we show how localized competitive...

Building on Hinings and Greenwood’s (1988) concept for the explanation of strategic change processes, this paper examines the organizational transformations in the internationalization process of Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft. We identify three archetypes of the international organization of...