This paper combines theories of organizational design with theories of production to provide a novel perspective, which helps explain the technological forces that led to the rise of vertically integrated "modern" corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I describe the...

Annabelle Gawer presents cutting-edge contributions from 24 top international scholars from 19 universities across Europe, the USA and Asia, from the disciplines of strategy, economics, innovation, organization studies and knowledge management. The novel insights assembled in this volume...

Many products are manufactured in networks of firms linked by transactions, but comparatively little is known about how or why such transaction networks differ. This article investigates the transaction networks of two large sectors in Japan at a single point in time. In characterizing these...

This article constructs a theory of the location of transactions and the boundaries of firms in a productive system. It proposes that systems of production can be viewed as networks, in which tasks-cum-agents are the nodes and transfers-of material, energy and information-between tasks and...

This paper argues that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. We define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) modularity and (2) option value. Developers can often make informed judgments about modularity and...

This paper reports data from a study that seeks to characterize the differences in design structure between complex software products. We use design structure matrices (DSMs) to map dependencies between the elements of a design and define metrics that allow us to compare the structures of...