Work Papers Archive
- From Manufacturing to Design: An Essay on the Work of Kim B. Clark
The interdisciplinary research of economist Kim Clark, former dean of Harvard Business School and now President of Brigham Young University-Idaho, occupies a unique place in management scholarship. This paper reviews his research contributions over almost thirty years. Throughout his career, Clark has brought fresh insights to old questions and…
- The Evolution of Evolution: A Bibliometric Study on Evolutionary Research
In this study, we map the structure and evolution of evolutionary research related to the fields of management, economics, and sociology. Our bibliometric study investigates documents evolutionary researchers have cited in the past 20 years. The results indicate how Nelson & Winter (1982) has remained as the most important…
- Toward a Systematic Framework for Research on Dominant Designs…
The concept of a dominant design has taken on a quasi-paradigmatic status in the analysis of the link between technological and industrial dynamics. A review of the empirical literature reveals that a variety of interpretations exist about some aspects of the phenomenon such as its underlying causal mechanisms and…
- Evolutionary Theory Revisited: Cognition, Hierarchy, and Capabilities.
Building on a field study of Polaroid’s transition from analog to digital imaging, this article identifies important lacunae in evolutionary research on capabilities. It argues that this research has focused excessively on the emergent, quasi-automatic nature of capability development, thus neglecting the role of cognition and deliberation. Furthermore, because…
- The Coevolution of Industries and Academic Disciplines.
Based on a five-country historical case study of the synthetic dye industry and the discipline of chemistry, the paper argues that academic disciplines, like industries, change through variation, selection, and retention processes. Using a comparative historical method and drawing on inductive evidence spanning a 60-year period, the study clarifies…
- The Vanishing Hand: the Changing Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism.
In a series of classic works, Alfred Chandler challenged the prediction (implicit perhaps in Adam Smith’s account of the division of labor and the Invisible Hand) that economic growth would always lead to finer market decentralization. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chandler showed, the visible hand…
- Introductory Chapter to “Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology,
This study argues that the creation of productive capabilities underlying successful firms and the institutional context surrounding firms are related through interactive, coevolutionary processes. To induce a dynamic framework for analyzing the sources of competitive advantage, I examine the processes through which German firms became dramatically more successful than…
- From Organizational Routines to Dynamic Capabilities.
This paper investigates the mechanisms through which organizations develop capabilities in a dynamic sense (Teece, Pisano & Shuen, 1997) and reflects upon the role of (1) experience accumulation, (2) knowledge articulation and (3) knowledge codification processes in creating and constantly reshaping organizational routines. The argument is made that dynamic…
- Science, Executive Leadership, and Business: The Multinational Gives Way to the Global Firm in Pharm
The authors conclude that in pharmaceuticals the MNE, which operates through susidiaries in a number of nations but is controlled by nationals from the headquarters country, is starting to give way to a new form of global enterprise which draws its executives as well as its employees from a…
- Knowledge, Technology, and Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution.
This paper is an application of evolutionary theory to a concrete historical problem, namely explaining the timing of the Industrial Revolution in the last third of the eighteenth century. The argument is that useful knowledge (that is, knowledge and understanding of natural phenomena and regularities) constrains the form that…
- Comparing Evolutionary Dynamics Across Different National Settings: The Case of the Synthetic Dye In
Empirical investigations of industry evolution have flourished over the last two decades, but with the exception of Carroll and Hannan’s automobile study (1995) no one has examined in systematic fashion whether evolutionary patterns are the same in different social contexts. We present in this paper some striking dissimilarities in…
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