We seek to bring to the core of the study of comparative corporate governance analysis the idea that within countries and industries, there exist multiple configurations of firm level characteristics and governance practices leading to effective corporate governance. In particular, we propose...

The turning to the XXI century has been marked by reforms in corporate governance practices around the world. Whether due to shocks caused by the economic crisis in East Asia, Russia and Latin America, or by financial scandals in the United States and Europe, the fact is that the way of doing...

In the extant vertical integration literature, the question of how the firm's portfolio of outsourced work is managed across suppliers has been relatively understudied. We seek to advance this area of research by examining factors that influence how concentrated the firm's outsourcing is among...

Much research has examined how and why managers discipline members by removing privileges. However, there has been little research examining the phenomenon of returning privileges to disciplined members, otherwise known as reinstatement. This research introduces reinstatement to the discussion...

Chester Barnard was best known as the author of The Functions of the Executive, perhaps the 20th century's most influential book on management and leadership. Barnard offers a systems approach to the study of organization, which contains a psychological theory of motivation and behavior, a...

This paper suggests that due to the changing nature of the firm, viewing shareholders as the sole residual claimants is an increasingly tenuous description of the actual relationships among a corporation's various stakeholders. Examining the corporation from a (team production) property rights...

This paper addresses modularity as a basis for organizing economic activity. We first define the key concepts of architecture and of modularity as a special form of architecture. We then suggest how modular systems of all types may exhibit several properties of fundamental importance to the...

Debates on "shareholder" and "stakeholder" approaches to corporate governance often get bogged down in competing normative claims about economic rent streams, entitlements of different group members, fairness, and similar distributional issues. These concerns are important, but core economic...

Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, this paper develops a balancing-process approach to explain the motivations and location choices of foreign direct investment (FDI). In this approach, FDI is viewed as a means to balance a firm's portfolio of resources and capabilities through...

This paper studies the practice of integration of influential host country actors to a multinational corporation as a strategy to decrease problems of legitimacy to the foreign firm before the host country's society. By developing the concept of obsolescing legitimacy, we argue that this...