We discuss and empirically examine a firm-level equivalent of the ancient problem of "tying the King<92>s hands", namely how to maximize managerial intervention for "good cause", while avoiding intervention for "bad cause". Managers may opportunistically intervene when such intervention produces...</92>

The “knowledge governance approach” is characterized as a distinctive, emerging approach that cuts across the fields of knowledge management, organisation studies, strategy, and human resource management. Knowledge governance is taken up with how the deployment of governance mechanisms...

The recent decade has witnessed a strong expansion of work on the firm, both from a capabilities perspective and from a contractual perspective. These two bodies of theories are often thought to be fundamentally different, because their domains of applications are different...

Important aspects of leadership behavior can be rendered intelligible through a focus on coordination games. The concept of common knowledge is shown to be particularly important to understanding leadership. Thus, leaders may establish common knowledge conditions and assist the coordination of...

The paper begins by providing a brief overview and discussion of the modern economics of organization, concentrating in particular on the work of incomplete contract theorists. I then turn to a discussion of Loasby’s view of the firm and incomplete contracts. The point here is that while...

The notion of distributed knowledge is increasingly often invoked in discussions of economic organization. In particular, the claim that authority is inefficient as a means of coordination in the context of distributed knowledge has become widespread. However, very little analysis has been...

This paper makes the point that Thorstein Veblen should be considered one of the important precursors of the emerging competence-based approach to the firm. Thus, the emphasis in this literature on firms as path-dependent entities characterised by their heterogeneous knowledgebases, operating...

We address the notion of 'corporate coherence', recently made prominent by Teece, Rumelt, Dosi and Winter (1994). We argue that the literature is confused on the meaning of the notion (and similar notions) in a number of dimensions. Drawing on insights from market-process theories, we put...

We argue that strategizing fundamentally concerns disequilibrium phenomena, such as discovery, innovation, resource-combination, imagination - in short, entrepreneurship. Therefore, the understanding of strategizing is likely to be led astray by drawing too heavily on equilibrium theories....

We discuss the relations between alternative conceptualizations of the market process - neoclassical, Austrian and radical subjectivist/evolutionary - and alternative approaches to economic organization, for example, nexus of contract theory, Williamsonian transaction cost economics and the...