It has been claimed that the market fosters selfishness and thereby undermines the moral basis of society. This thesis has been developed with an emphasis on market exchange. Everyday life is, however, predominantly shaped by interactions in the workplace rather than by shopping behaviour. This...

Berkshire Hathaway, among history's largest and most successful corporations, shuns middlemen; its chairman, the legendary investor Warren Buffett, excoriates financial intermediaries. The acquisitive conglomerate rarely borrows money, retains brokers, or hires consultants. Its governance is...

We have got in the habit of thinking of corporate governance as a collection of rules and it is very easy to become seduced by this rule oriented approach. However, this mechanical approach should not distract us from the reality that a corporate governance regime should seek to address and...

What role do community norms play in the diffusion and persistence of new organizational practices? We explore this question through an examination of the widespread practice of wage arrears, the late and non-payment of wages, in Russia during the 1990s. Existing research on wage arrears most...

The paper deals with development of a general theory of the firm. It discusses the demand for such a theory, reviews existing approaches to its generalization, and offers a new variant of general theory of the firm based on the contract theory. The theory is based on minimization of...

The paper studies through the lens of the economic theory of the firm the development of two managerial disciplines: supply chain management and relationship marketing. The author demonstrates which ideas have been borrowed by these disciplines from the economic theory of the firm, and in what...

The paper considers the approaches to the theory of the firm developed by strategic management scholars: positioning theory, resource-based view, dynamic capabilities approach, knowledge-based view, strategic theory of the firm, as well as open innovations theory. The author shows how the ideas...