It is by now an established fact, that the so-called high technology industries have experienced growth rates way above average through most years. High technology industries share of the world manufacturers export has risen from 12 per cent in 1970 to 25 per cent in 1995. More than one-third of...

Knowledge management has emerged as a very successful organization practice and has been extensively treated in a large body of academic work. Surprisingly, however, organizational economics (i.e., transaction cost economics, agency theory, team theory and property rights theory) has played no...

Important aspects of leadership behavior can be rendered intelligible through a focus on coordination games. The concept of common knowledge is shown to be particularly important to understanding leadership. Thus, leaders may establish common knowledge conditions and assist the coordination of...

The notion of distributed knowledge is increasingly often invoked in discussions of economic organization. In particular, the claim that authority is inefficient as a means of coordination in the context of distributed knowledge has become widespread. However, very little analysis has been...

We analyze a key problem in organization theory and design, namely the potential tension between authority (i.e., the power to make decisions which guide the decisions of another person) and the discretion of employees (i.e., the ability of an agent to control resources including his own human...

The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly to highlight how the current “hybridisation” of the academic and industrial rationales exerts its influence over the new production of young scientists; secondly to compare, between five OECD countries (USA, France, Great Britain, Japan and Germany),...

We discuss and empirically examine a firm-level equivalent of the ancient problem of "tying the King<92>s hands", namely how to maximize managerial intervention for "good cause", while avoiding intervention for "bad cause". Managers may opportunistically intervene when such intervention produces...</92>

This paper is a slightly revised version of Bengt-Åke Lundvall's Inaugural Lecture, the 10th of November at Department for Business Studies, Aalborg University. The general message is that the growing frequency of so-called paradoxes in economic theory and of unsolved socioeconomic problems...

The purpose of the present paper is to explore the possibility to compound in a unique formalization two different but complementary theories of technical change and macroeconomic growth, that is the Kaldorian idea of cumulative causation and the technology-gap approach to economic growth. . The...

In this paper I argue that quality standards, products standards, and quality classes influence the priority that firms give to different product developments. These standards may be viewed as institutions in the sense of shared rules of behavior or codes. They have become shared because there...