Transaction cost concepts have been deployed in information systems to analyze the impact of information technology on the organization of economic activity in markets and hierarchies. It has been widely observed that there is a general trend toward markets. It has also been observed that the...

The notion of best practice is a foundational concept for vendors of Enterprise Resource Planning systems who use it to support a claim to provide tried and tested, ‘best of breed’ process models. This study illustrates how a best practice ERP system was actually created. The product...

This paper discusses the use of multi-criteria decision analysis for supporting strategic decision making in organisations. It begins by exploring the notions of strategic decisions and the strategic decision-making process. We suggest that structuring strategic objectives, dealing with high...

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength...

We examine the extent to which employment horizon concerns affect the relative emphasis on financial versus nonfinancial performance measures in annual bonus plans. We argue that managers of loss-making firms are likely to voluntarily or forcibly depart in the near future and, consequently, have...

Throughout modern business history, contract has been used as an organizational technology that holds counterparties in formal or legally binding agreements. The proliferation of contract prompted the emergence of professional contract managers who played an important but relatively peripheral...

Among various forms of innovation in industry structures and business models an increasing number of companies have shown interest in aligning themselves to an open source software model as a means to capture intellectual energy, productive software processes and relevant technical skills. This...

The geographical sources of innovation of firms have been hotly debated. While the traditional view is that physical proximity within city-regions is key for the innovative capacity of firms, the literature on 'global pipelines' has been stressing the importance of establishing communication...

The sources of value creation are increasingly relying on intangible assets (IAs). IAs are the lifeblood of knowledge-intensive industries where the new value added is disproportionally based on specialized, non-repetitious activities. However, while the role of IAs is recognised as central to...