The Firm

This 'goldmine of concepts for understanding business and industrial organization' was originally published in 1959 but has been an influence in business schools ever since. The author combines rigorous theory with close observation of the real business world, and writes simply but with anoriginal approach. Her focus on teams and organizational knowledge underlines contemporary discussion of 'organizational competences' and she has written a new introduction which assesses the book's impact and describes the subsequent development of her own ideas.

He thought it was his dream job. It turned into his worst nightmare. When Mitch McDeere qualified third in his class at Harvard, offers poured in from every law firm in America. Bendini, Lambert and Locke were a small, well-respected firm, but their offer exceeded Mitch's wildest expectations- a fantastic salary, a new home, and the keys to a brand new BMW. Except for the mysterious deaths of previous lawyers with the firm. And the FBI investigations. And the secret files. Mitch soon realises that he's working for the Mafia's law firm, and there's no way out - because you don't want this company's severance package. To survive, he'll have to play both sides against each other - and navigate a vast criminal conspiracy that goes higher than he ever imagined...

Includes over 60 classic papers, these volumes collect together contributions on the theory of the firm, beginning with Ronald Coase's classic work of 1937 and ending with important papers published as late as 1998.

The essays in this volume discuss the theory of the business firm and its applications in economics.

This volume features a series of essays which arose from a conference on economics, addressing the question: what is the nature of the firm in economic analysis? This paperback edition includes the Nobel Lecture of R.N. Case.

This book brings together selections from the most influential writings on the internal economic organisation of business firms.

This book provides case studies of worker-controlled firms and surveys available evidence on their behavior.

This book explores a new theory of the firm produced through an exchange between management theory and economics. In the process economics is seen to provide a foundational element for strategy research whilst developing a more realistic theory of the firm with a greater emphasis on its internal features. The success of competence theories of the firm also reflects their ability to explain significant trends in the business world, notably the declining importance of conglomerates and critical features in the success of Asian and Japanese business.

In this book, a well known theorist of the multinational firm extends his major contributions to encompass the scope of the firm in general. Casson presents a model showing how the different activities of the firm - R & D, production, marketing, and distribution, for example - are linked in a way that is just as important in determining the scope of the firm as are the traditional factors of market share or product type. Casson infers from an extensive consideration of the history, development, and organization of the multinational that the scope of any firm is determined by the way it resolves the problem of coordinating these production activities; the possibility of its becoming a multinational, in fact, depends on the strategic problems encountered in these operations. After chapters in which he critically reviews the literature and sets forth his own theoretical insights, the author looks at case studies of topical concern in the shipping, construction, and motor vehicle industries in order to explain contemporary rationalization and restructuring in manufacturing. Mark Casson is Professor of Economics at the University of Reading and author of Economics of Unemployment: An Historical Perspective (MIT Press 1984).

The Internationalization of the Firm is a collection of seminal articles on international business with particular reference to the experience of large European and American multinationals in Europe, Japan and the developing countries.

Edith Penrose's contribution to the theory of the firm reinvented the classical tradition in economics. This volume builds on an issue of "Contributions to Political Economy" that celebrated 40 years since Penrose's publication, "The Theory of the Growth of the Firm".

The pace of change in the business world is becoming faster. This book provides a detailed account of the network-like organization forms that some firms are adopting to make themselves more flexible and responsive to changing technologies and customer demands. As these organizations become more pervasive, the winners will be those firms that develop the specific capabilities that are needed to thrive in a networked world. Paradoxically, such capabilities are developed not only at the firm level, but also in the relationships the firm has with its external network and in the operating units within the firm. This perspective has implications for the 'resource-based view of the firm' in the field of strategic management, suggesting that the development of capabilities is a more complex and multi-level process than was traditionally thought. This book brings together eleven chapters, each focusing on a particular aspect of capability development in the networked firm. It is based on research in five big Swedish firms (Ericsson, Volvo, Skandia, Pharmacia & Upjohn, SE Banken) as well as a number of other well-known firms such as HP and ABB. The book will be essential reading for advanced students in strategy and international business wanting to keep abreast of current thinking and company practices.

These papers by Teece cover the theory of the firm and its implications for economic performance, as they concern managers and policy-makers. Key topics addressed include: the nature of the firm and dynamic capabilities; diversification and vertical integration; and joint ventures.

A look at the field of strategic management, exploring the theories of the running of the firm.

This book offers a distinctive analysis of the relations and interplay between the internal activities of firms, their changing boundaries, and increasing reliance on networks and alliances with other firms. The contributors offer a blend of theoretical and empirical studies; they are based on a set of related perspectives in modern economics, including transaction cost economics, competence and resource-based theories of the firm, evolutionary economics and the theories of foreign direct investments and the multinational enterprise. The unifying concern shared by the different studies is the need to model firm behaviour and inter firm cooperative activities in terms of knowledge growth and competence building rather than merely in terms of cost-reduction; they emphasize learning processes and dynamic efficiency rather than efficient allocation of given resources.

This collection examines the forces, both external and internal, that lead corporations to behave efficiently and to create wealth. Corporations vest control rights in shareholders, the author argues, because they are the constituency that bear business risk and therefore have the appropriate incentives to maximize corporate value. Assigning control to any other group would be tantamount to allowing that group to play poker with someone else's money, and would create inefficiencies. The implicit denial of this proposition is the fallacy of the so-called stakeholder theory of the corporation, which argues that corporations should be run in the interests of all stakeholders. This theory offers no account of how conflicts between different stakeholders are to be resolved, and gives managers no principle on which to base decisions, except to follow their own preferences. In practice, shareholders delegate their control rights to a board of directors, who hire, fire, and set the compensation of the chief officers of the firm. However, because agents have different incentives than the principals they represent, they can destroy corporate value unless closely monitored. This happened in the 1960s and led to hostile takeovers in the market for corporate control in the 1970s and 1980s. The author argues that the takeover movement generated increases in corporate efficiency that exceeded $1.5 trillion and helped to lay the foundation for the great economic boom of the 1990s.

Do people with high testosterone levels make decisions the same way as people with lower testosterone? Do men change their behavior when a pretty woman enters the office? Do women change their behavior when a handsome man enters the office? Do men and women affect each other within the firm to the detriment or the benefit of the firm? In some ways, the questions this edited volume addresses are questions that we are all familiar with and have asked for many years. It suggests looking for answers in places that that we have never thought of before. Some of the chapters will surprise you with their ingenious, simple answers and propositions; some will perhaps make you feel awkward with their straight-forward way of presenting what we all suspected but felt uncomfortable to talk about. From the foreword by David B. Audretsch This volume brings together leading researchers from a variety of fields to investigate the concept of the firm from new perspectives arising from neuroeconomics. The traditional theory of the firm has focused on the strategic, operational and resource management objectives of the firm as an organization. This timely and informative book explores new horizons in the biology of human decision-making and behavior, including uncertainty, entrepreneurship and ethics as it affects the functioning of the organization. The fascinating chapters cover a wide range of research fields, drawing on both the conscious and the unconscious mind, and how common hormonal cycles in the female and testosterone variations in the male affect each other in the workplace and its affect on the firm as an organization. The topics of entrepreneurship and the recent global financial crisis are discussed from the perspective of hormonal forces and the implications of those forces in the future. It is an enlightening selection of articles that scholars, students, business leaders, and managers will find a valuable read. Vernon L. Smith, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics The ideal firm has been studied over several centuries, yet little is known about what makes one successful and another fail. This pioneering book brings together leading researchers investigating the concept of the firm from a neuroscientific perspective. From the viewpoint of economics, the firm's purpose is to maximize shareholders' wealth; resources are commodities, each with its particular supply and demand curve that can be manipulated by the firm to its own benefit. Traditionally, the firm is focused on the strategic, operational and resource management objectives. The editors instead suggest that the objective of the firm is equal to the objectives of its workers. The definition and function of risk in decision-making, ethics, trust and the global financial crisis are all discussed. They are analyzed from the perspective of human bio-physiology, using scanning and hormonal analysis tools, with a focus on the implications for the bottom line of the firm. With experimental as well as theoretical and applied contributions, this book will benefit scholars and students of economics, business management, finance, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, psychology, neuroscience and law. Practitioners of management, entrepreneurship and law firms will also find this book to be a captivating read.

This volume of Progress in International Business Research includes a selection of 13 papers from the 35th European International Business Academy Annual Conference, which was held in Valencia (Spain) from the 13th to the 15th of December 2009.

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