How To Do Things with Time

Published Research

Sample selection bias is a common problem in the business history literature. This paper proposes methods for researching and writing the history of firms and industries designed to address the problem. The key elements are a forward-looking perspective and close attention to the development over time of selection environments, the resources individual firms can mobilize, and understanding an agency within the firm or firms.Read More

Neighborhood Social Capital and Social Learning for Experience Attributes of Products

Published Research

“Social learning” can occur when information is transferred from existing customers to potential customers. It is especially important in cases where the information that is conveyed pertains to experience attributes, i.e., attributes of products that cannot be fully verified prior to the first purchase.Read More

Collaborating with Complementors: What Do Firms Do?

Published Research

The study considers the interdependencies between complementors in the business ecosystem and explores the nature of collaborative interactions between them. It sheds light on the organizational and the strategic contexts in which such interactions take place, and shows how they may influence the pattern and the benefits of collaboration.Read More

Habit, Deliberation and Action: Strengthening the Microfoundations of Routines and Capabilities

Published Research

The proponents of the “microfoundations project” have advanced a number of criticisms of theories of organizational routines and capabilities. While the criticisms derive in part from philosophical or methodological premises that are open to serious question, and tend to ignore the empirical research on the subject, there remains a valid core concern about the foundational characterization of human nature.Read More

Differentiated Bidders and Bidding Behavior in Procurement Auctions

Published Research

Why do bidders in buyer-determined procurement auctions often bid above the lowest observed bid over the course of the auction? Are such bidding patterns meaningful? In this research, the authors propose that bidders infer their potential quality advantage or disadvantage through their observation of competitive bids and incorporate this information into their responses and price bids.Read More

When Do Firms Divest Foreign Operations?

Published Research

Extant literature on divestment has repeatedly found that firms are likely to divest their poorly performing operations. In this paper, I consider how product market relatedness and geographic market differences in growth, policy stability, and exchange rate volatility can moderate the negative relationship between performance and divestment.Read More

Coordinating and Competing in Ecosystems: How Organizational Forms Shape New Technology Investments

Published Research

We consider firms in the context of their business ecosystems and explore how differences in the ways in which firms are organized with respect to complementary activities affect their decision to invest in new technologies.Read More

Persistence of Integration in the Face of Specialization

Published Research

Although the stylized model of industry evolution suggests that firms transform from vertical integration to specialization over time, many industries still exhibit a continued persistence of integrated firms. In exploring this puzzle, I draw on detailed firm-level data from the semiconductor industry to analyze how integrated incumbents, beyond shifting to the specialized mode, reconfigured in the face of industry’s vertical disintegration.Read More

Innovating Via Emergent Technology and Distributed Organization: A Case of Biofuel Production in India

Published Research

This paper uses complex systems theory to develop a conceptual model that suggests how development can be catalyzed by leveraging innovation in both technology and social organization to solve socioeconomic problems for developing country populations.Read More

Designing B2B Markets

Published Research

This insightful Handbook provides a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of business-to-business marketing. It supplies an overview and pioneers new ideas relating to the activity of building mutually value-generating relationships between organizations – from businesses to government agencies to not-for-profit organizations – and the many individuals within them.Read More

A Hegelian Dialogue on the Micro-Foundations of Organizational Routines and Capabilities

Published Research

This paper aims to further the alignment among different theoretical approaches and future scholarship on the complex themes related to the micro-foundational processes characterizing the emergence and development of organizational routines and capabilities. It has been constructed with a typical Hegelian structure represented by a thesis, an antithesis and an attempt of a synthesis, each presented by different scholars.Read More

Capabilities: Their Origins and Ancestry

Published Research

In a statement that is relatively famous, considering its position at the back of an old book, Alfred Marshall remarked on the ‘the manifold influences of the element of time’. He noted the obstacles those influences pose to mathematical analysis (or, he said, any analysis) of a complex, ‘real life’ problem – and the tendencies to over-simplification that often result.Read More

International R&D service outsourcing by technology-intensive firms: Whether and where?

Published Research

We combine the streams of literature on outsourcing and offshoring to investigate (1) whether choosing an R&D offshore outsourcing strategy by technological firms is advisable, and (2) where these firms are more likely to allocate these R&D services outsourcing agreements offshore, namely, in developed or developing economies.Read More

Capabilities: Structure, Agency and Evolution

Published Research

This paper examines conceptual issues and reviews empirical results bearing on the relationship between research approaches emphasizing organizational capabilities and those based in transaction cost economics (TCE)—or in organizational economics more generally.Read More

Balance Within and Across Domains: The Performance Implications of Exploration and Exploitation in Alliances

Published Research

Organizational research advocates that firms balance exploration and exploitation, yet it acknowledges inherent challenges in reconciling these opposing activities. To overcome these challenges, such research suggests that firms establish organizational separation between exploring and exploiting units or engage in temporal separation whereby they oscillate between exploration and exploitation over time.Read More

The Evolution of Alliance Portfolios: The Case of Unisys

Published Research

How do alliance portfolios evolve? We develop grounded theory based on Unisys’ case, which reveals how exogenous technological changes at the industry level and shifts in a firm’s strategy shape the composition of partners and the nature of alliance relationships.Read More

Evolving Communication Patterns In Response to an Acquisition Event

Published Research

This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods, with particular emphasis on network data of worker behavior, to analyze changes in worker communication patterns during the first three years of a post-acquisition integration. The findings suggest that new communication routines develop slowly and are not entirely enduring even when a transformative event, such as an acquisition, occurs.Read More

Advancing the Conceptualization and Operationalization of Novelty in Organizational Research

Published Research

The construct of novelty is an important primitive for theories of organization learning, strategic change, and innovation. The organizational pursuit of novelty is generally theorized as necessary for long-term organizational adaptation and survival yet variance increasing in the short term.Read More

The Immaterial Text: Digital Technology, the Google Book Settlement, and the Distribution of Print Culture in the United States

Published Research

In 2004 the Internet search firm Google announced an ambitious plan to scan and render searchable the contents of major research libraries. This amounted to a large-scale effort to render the contents of the books into immaterial and easily manipulated and transferred information.Read More