This paper considers how ideas from evolutionary theory and the neo-Schumpeterian tradition can be fruitfully combined with ideas from Herbert Simon and the Carnegie tradition on decomposability and cognitive limits. Rather than focusing on any one individual issue, this paper outlines a...

Drawing on the Carnegie tradition, this paper examines how the Greek government and its military apparatus handled an incident involving the islets of Imia, which led to a near-war with Turkey in 1996. This came about not merely as a result of escalating circumstances: there were failures in...

This article examines institutional linkages between corporate governance and labour management in Germany. German corporate governance was characterised by the importance of banks, ownership concentration, long-term investment, and stable corporate networks. This system displayed important...

By providing a theoretical framework that explains how and why vertical dis-integration happens, this inductive longitudinal analysis of the mortgage banking value chain sheds light on one of the least studied aspects of industry evolution. I find that gains from specialization set off a process...

In this Article, we explore a central problem facing creative industries: how to organize collaborative creative production? We identify informal rules as a significant and pervasive — but nonetheless overlooked — tool for solving that problem. While existing literature has focused on the...

In recent decades, a large and increasing number of leading firms in a diverse set of industries have faced allegations of ‘unethical' practices along their international value chains. In many cases this has triggered consumer boycotts and NGO campaigns, introducing a new link between upstream...

In this paper we address the hard problem of search. Search is a pervasive phenomenon of biological and economic life. But search is hard—especially in uncertain and dynamic environments. We develop a generalized form of question-answer probing as a way of simplifying search, with implications...

The paper provides a summary of the existing literature on corporate parenting styles and discovers the missing elements in the theoretical constructs. New theoretical constructs fill the gaps. The paper presents a continuum of corporate parenting styles from pure predator's (Cronos style) to...

This paper proposes a different theory of the firm and demonstrates how it can be employed to yield hypotheses about differences in innovation and human resource strategy according to the shareholder/stakeholder and liberal/coordinated market dichotomies. The theory assumes that feasible...

The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated quot;clustersquot; or quot;networksquot; of firms. In these clusters the activities of Ramp;D, product design, production, logistics and selling may be split up among hundreds or even thousands of firms. Different firms will design...