The past quarter century has witnessed many developments in the research and practice of managing human resources in the United States. In this article, we briefly describe two major areas in which these developments have been unfolding: strategic human resource management and international...

A political economy approach to explaining the existence of different human resource strategies is developed in this article - in short: a political personnel economy. The starting point is a critical analysis of the abstinence of politics and power and the resulting explanation deficiencies of...

Much progress has been made with regard to theory building and application in the field of Strategic Human Resource Management (HRM) since Wright and McMahan's (1992) critical review. While researchers have increasingly investigated the impact of HR on economic success within the Resource Based...

The paper takes the viewpoint of the neoinstitutional theory of the firm to analyse Germany's voluntary Dual Management System for Packaging Waste Collection and Recycling (DSD); namely, its governance structure and its contractual relations with upstream and downstream firms. Two aspects...

Recent thinking has emphasized the importance of consistency in a firm?s compensation policy. By starting from Williamson?s ideas about idiosyncratic exchange, this view can be supplied with some theoretical foundation. At the same time, the consistency view can be applied to a number of...

In the economic literature on market competition, firms are often modeled as single decision makers and the internal organization of the firm is neglected (unitary player assumption). However, as the literature on strategic delegation suggests, one can not generally expect that the behavior of...

Entrepreneurship is an important process in regional economic development. Especially the continued growth of a minority of new firms is of major significance to the commercialization of new ideas and employment growth. These growing new firms are transforming on a structural basis, like...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that impose externalities on other members of the organization. When only decision rights can be contractually assigned to one of the organization's stakeholders, the optimal assignment minimizes the resulting inefficiencies by...

This paper builds upon a view of economic system and individual economic organization as problem-solving arrangements and presents a simple model of adaptive problem-solving driven by trial-and-error and collective selection. The institutional structure, and in particular its degree of...