This paper presents a lexical definition of firms' flexibility and its operationalization as used in the DISKO survey of 1900 Danish private firms. This operationalization is highlighted by data from a highly flexible firm which was visited in 1997 as part of a follow-up upon the questionnaire...

This paper draws upon a questionnaire survey, conducted 1996 in 1900 Danish Firms, on technical and organisational change. The topics in the survey were among others if firms been through significant organizational change, how the firm had developed its human resources, and what were the motives...

This paper is an empirical test of the hypothesis that the appropriateness of different business strategies is conditional on the firm’s distance to the industry frontier. We use data on four 2-digit high-tech manufacturing industries in the US over the period 1972-1999, and apply...

Among some scholars of management, organisation and also economists as well as policy makers it is argued that certain new forms of firm organisation such as flexible and learning organisations increasingly are becoming “best practice”, in an increasingly learning and global economy. On a...

I critically discuss recent claims about economic organization in the emerging “knowledge economy,” specifically that authority relations will tend to disappear (or at least become radically transformed), the boundaries of the firm will blur, and coordination mechanisms will be much more...

The focus of this paper is on the evolution of international production by Japanese electronics firms. In the first two parts, I trace the development of Japanese production networks in Asia through three different periods. Each of these periods reflects fundamentally different strategic...

Over the last two decades the resource-based view (“RBV”) has become dominant in the strategic management field. It has often been observed that the RBV is lacking in the dynamic dimension. For example, processes of building competitive advantages by means of combining existing complementary...

Many economists, including Austrian economists, have argued that the market process is essentially an experimental process. We briefly try to clarify this conceptualization, and then argue that we may understand the firm in much the same light. A basic view of the firm as an experimental entity...

This paper addresses two puzzles related to industrial dynamics and competition. The first of these puzzles is that a high degree of globalization may well go hand in hand with increasing concentration. I show that one of the most globalized sectors of the electronics industry, hard disk drives...

The resource-based approach to strategy, which reaches back to the contributions of Penrose, Selznick and Chandler, has gradually become the dominant perspective in strategy (content) research, arguably because it combines realism with relative rigour. The present paper presents the main themes...