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A roundtable on “Resources, Routines and Industrial Dynamics in the Experimentally Organized Economy” will be held on the October 24 and 25 in Hirtshals, Denmark. Click here for details. The first English translation of the seventh chapter of Schumpeter’s 1912 classic “Theory of Economic Evolution” will appear in a special issue on Industry and Innovation. Click here for a table of contents.
Evolutionary Theory in Management and Organization Theory at the Beginning of a New Millennium: A Symposium on the State of the Art and Opportunities for Future Research in Evolutionary Theory. You can now read a transcript of the symposium that took place on Aug 7 2000, in Toronto, Canada. The symposium was organized by Johann Peter Murmann, and the speakers were Howard Aldrich, Dan Levinthal and Sid Winter. Click here for conference details.
A conference took place in honor of the Richard R. Nelson at Columbia University in New York. Click here for details on the conference and the papers presented. You can read here Sidney Winter’s speech The Evolution of Dick Nelson and go on a photo tour.
Design Rules, Vol.1: The Power of Modularity by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark
From the Publisher: We live in a dynamic economic and commercial world, surrounded by objects of remarkable complexity and power. In many industries, changes in products and technologies have brought with them new kinds of firms and forms of organization. We are discovering news ways of structuring work, of bringing buyers and sellers together, and of creating and using market information. Although our fast-moving economy often seems to be outside of our influence or control, human beings create the things that create the market forces. Devices, software programs, production processes, contracts, firms, and markets are all the fruit of purposeful action: they are designed. Using the computer industry as an example, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark develop a powerful theory of design and industrial evolution. They argue that the industry has experienced previously unimaginable levels of innovation and growth because it embraced the concept of modularity, building complex products from smaller subsystems that can be designed independently yet function together as a whole. Modularity freed designers to experiment with different approaches, as long as they obeyed the established design rules. Drawing upon the literatures of industrial organization, real options, and computer architecture, the authors provide insight into the forces of change that drive today’s economy.
Abstracts of important new working papers by Joel Mokyr are now posted.
The Demography of Corporations and Industries
by Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan
The publisher’s preview: The Demography of Corporations and Industries is the first book to present the demographic approach to organizational studies in its entirety. It examines the theory, models, methods, and data used in corporate demographic research. Carroll and Hannan explore the processes by which corporate populations change over time, including organizational founding, growth, decline, structural transformation, and mortality. They review and synthesize the major theoretical mechanisms of corporate demography, ranging from aging and size dependence to population segregation and density dependence. The book also explores some selected implications of corporate demography for public policy, including employment and regulation. Click on the title for a table of contents. Read Boyan Jovanovic’s Review in the JEL.
Sources of Industrial Leadership: Studies of Seven Industries.
David Mowery and Richard R. Nelson
This book describes and analyzes how seven major high-tech industries evolved in the USA, Japan, and Western Europe. The industries covered are machine tools, organic chemical products, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, computers, semiconductors, and software. In each of these industries, firms located in one or a very few countries became the clear technological and commercial leaders. In number of cases, the locus of leadership changed, sometimes more than once, over the course of the histories studied. The locus of the book is on the key factors that supported the emergence of national leadership in each industry, and the reasons behind the shifts when they occurred. Special attention is given to the national policies which helped to create, or sustain, industrial leadership. Click on the title for a table of contents. Read Paul L. Robertson’s Review on eh.net.
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This book examines the initial commercial uses of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is one of the most modern, controversial and dynamic of the science based technologies. It is not an object but a set of techniques or way of doing things. The development of these techniques from the 1970s onwards illustrates the changing relationships between universities and firms and between basic science and research oriented towards commercial uses. The main focus of the book is on two firms - Genentech in the United States and Kabi in Sweden and their activities and ‘knowledge-seeking’ behavior in the development of human growth hormone and how those ran in parallel with university science. As well as providing a remarkably clear account of these developments (the book includes a chapter on the basics of biotechnology for the lay person), McKelvey also provides a fresh contribution to our understanding of innovation processes by using the evolutionary metaphor to interpret patterns of change where novelty, transmission, and selection are important elements, and where the knowledge-seeking behavior of firms and other agents are critical for survival and development. The book will be of considerable interest to a wide audience concerned to understand the complexities of innovation processes in the ‘knowledge society’ - management and organization researchers, economists, policy advisers, managers and strategies responsible for turning knowledge into product and profit.
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