In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that...

We analyze how a product's design hierarchy shapes the evolution of the underlying body of technological knowledge, building on the literature on technological evolution in complex products. This literature suggests that the design hierarchy of a product can have an ordering effect on the...

The appendices for this paper are available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2239843 Comparative lawyers and economists have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites and, therefore, were unusually...

This paper studies the impact of task complexity and decomposability on the degree of organizational divisionalization and hierarchy within firms. Drawing upon the team theory and modularity literature, it argues that the degree of divisionalization is not only predicated on the extent of...

This paper assesses the extent to which the organization of the innovation effort in firms, as well as the geographical scale at which this effort is pursued, affects the capacity to benefit from product innovations. Three alternative modes of organization are studied: hierarchy, market and...

It is clear that in process architecture definition, process hierarchy and granularity definition is a crucial step. But this varies from enterprise to enterprise and can also vary from function to function in the enterprise. It is important to have a definition of process architecture terms...

Leadership implies power. We argue, from a social embodiment perspective, that thinking about power involves mental simulations of vertical location. Three studies tested whether judgments of leaders’ power and information on a vertical location are interrelated. In Studies 1a-c, participants...

I study the internal organization of firms using occupation data on workers in Swedish manufacturing firms. Firms with more layers are larger in size, in value added, and they pay higher wages. Firms are hierarchal in that lower layers have more workers and lower mean wage than higher layers....