Throughout modern business history, contract has been used as an organizational technology that holds counterparties in formal or legally binding agreements. The proliferation of contract prompted the emergence of professional contract managers who played an important but relatively peripheral...

Among various forms of innovation in industry structures and business models an increasing number of companies have shown interest in aligning themselves to an open source software model as a means to capture intellectual energy, productive software processes and relevant technical skills. This...

The geographical sources of innovation of firms have been hotly debated. While the traditional view is that physical proximity within city-regions is key for the innovative capacity of firms, the literature on 'global pipelines' has been stressing the importance of establishing communication...

The sources of value creation are increasingly relying on intangible assets (IAs). IAs are the lifeblood of knowledge-intensive industries where the new value added is disproportionally based on specialized, non-repetitious activities. However, while the role of IAs is recognised as central to...

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. In this paper, we present evidence on a possible explanation for persistent differences in productivity at the firm and the national level -- namely, that such differences largely reflect...

Increasing product-market competition is believed to be a driving force behind higher productivity. However, even those critics of globalization who accept this argument claim that there is a hard trade-off because tougher competition comes at the price of reducing work—life balance (WLB)....

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from over 4,000 medium sized manufacturing firms across Asia, Europe and the US. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level performance (e.g. productivity, profitability and stock market...

We explore work identity amongst managers, a key group in the 'new' capitalism. Some existing accounts of such workplace identities emphasize new 'cultures of control', others focus on new requirements and possibilities of individual autonomy through reflective identity formation, while others...

Planning under Pressure offers managers, planners, consultants and students a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the Strategic Choice Approach, which has gradually been attracting worldwide recognition as a fresh, versatile and practical approach to collaborative decision-making under...