South West-Flanders is a region in Belgium with an almost unique concentration of firms - mainly SMEs - in what could be called the Ahousing and home furnishing@-business cluster. The extreme geographical concentration of these small and medium sized firms does not translate itself into a...

Firms producing application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) have established numerous technology based strategic alliances (SAs) and were involved in merger and acquisition activities (M&As) to enhance their competitive position by improving their learning capabilities and the timely access...

We analyze the determinants of the decision to invest abroad in particular configurations of overseas plants for 120 Japanese firms active in 36 well-defined electronic product markets. We find support for a structured internationalization decision model in which the decision to produce abroad...

Paper presented to the fourth EMOT-workshop, theme 1, Economic performance outco- 1 mes in Europe, Berlin, January 30-February 1, 1997 This paper discusses performance characteristics and differences at three levels: at sector, firm and top management level. First, it explores the extent to...

As transaction costs have become an increasing part of the economy''s overall costs, reducing transaction costs has become increasingly important in economic organisation. An example where this is pertinent is the organisation of standardization processes in, notably, Information and...

In this paper an attempt is made to gain further insight into the environment-strategy-structure- performance linkages. A framework is developed to relate managers’ perceptions of their market environment and competitive strategies to the (advanced) production technologies and human resource...

This research note draws the attention to the harmful consequence of a serious lack of empirical research in the field of International Human Resource Management: myth-building on the basis of one or two publications. The apparent myth of high expatriate failure rates is shortly discussed. To...

Since the early 1990s, electronic organisers or electronic agendas have been evolving towards fully fledged, but miniature, computers. This paper is a case study about this market. Uniquely, and reminiscent of the home computer market in the 1980s, this is a market for personal computers not...

Two antagonistic tendencies in the way work is organized can be observed in Europe and the North-American continent. First, there is the growing tendency toward more efficient and flexible modes of organizing by way of a clear (re)distribution of authority. At the other hand, the importance of...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical and empirical review of the literature on top management composition. This research is theoretically inspired by the old tradition of group dynamics research and later insights into the effects managers have in shaping the course and fates of...