General Motors was once regarded as the best-managed and most successful firm in the world. However, between 1980 and 2009, GM's US market share fell from 46 to 20 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. We argue that the conventional explanation for this decline?namely high legacy labor...

General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the US market fell from 62.6 to 19.8 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional explanation for this decline -...

Resource dependency and institutional theories of organizational structure and economic geography are employed to explain the spread of information technology applications in manufacturing processes. We consider a number of avenues through which institutions affect the spread of three different...

The literature on agglomeration economies suggests that, in addition to firmspecific attributes, the local geographic context conditions the expected profitability of technology adoption. All theories of technology diffusion assume that inter-firm learning is the outcome of contact with prior...

Alfred Chandler attributed the rise of the vertically integrated corporation in the twentieth century to improvements in transportation and communication. In contrast, many have argued that further advances in transportation and communication have made vertical integration obsolete in recent...

Using an original data source, this paper investigates the circumstances under which fmns adopt computer numerical control (cNC), an important type of flexible automation which can significantly increase productionproduct variety and quality. The paper shows that arms'-length supplier/customer...

Over the last 20 years, the success of Japanese manufacturing firms has broughtrenewed attention to the importance of cost reduction on existing products as a source ofproductivity growth. This paper uses survey data and field interviews from the auto supplyindustry to explore the determinants...

Honda of America has developed a comprehensive approach to teaching the principles of leanproduction to its suppliers. The centerpiece of these efforts is a program called BP (for "Best process","Best Performance", "Bs Practice"), in which a crossfunctional team of personel born Honda and...