The paper shows how traditional organizational structures within the productionsector, such as quality circles, learning groups (“Lernstatt”) and projectteams reflect the constructivist and postmodern concepts of strategic managementwith their wide ignorance of purely plan deterministic...

Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt, dass die Festlegung der Fertigungstiefein der Gegenstromplanung von Strategien kein stringentes Instrumentder Unternehmensführung ist. Die Top-Down und Bottom-Up Analyseüber die hierarchischen Ebenen der Unternehmens-, Wettbewerbs- undFunktionalstrategie liefert...

Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of a housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. In...

Although there has been an intensive debate on the relative merits of different systems of corporate governance, empirical evidence on the link between corporate governance and firm performance almost exclusively refers to the market-oriented Anglo-Saxon system. This paper therefore investigates...

We model deferred compensation as a share of an uncertain futureprofit granted by a financially constrained employer to her employeein mutual agreement. Deferred compensation serves as a retentionmechanism, helping the employer to avoid bankruptcy. The optimalcombination of cash and deferred...

This paper reviews the literature on two-sided atomeless assignment models of workers to tasks. Using simple parametric examples, the fundamental differences between the comparative advantage and the scale of operations models are illustrated. Holding the distributions of abilities and tasks and...

The paper presents a linear model of product quality in scientific competition.The only outputs of research are published papers; the onlyinputs are labor and papers by other researchers, which are cited whenused. Researchers compete for status, measured as their rank in a citationscount. If...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) constitute a disruption to the workingenvironment of the inventive labor force of the acquired company. If inventors wouldrespond with a decline of their patent productivity or departure from the firm thiscan be detrimental to the innovative process within the...

Determining the research and development (R&D) boundaries of the firm as the choicebetween internal, collaborative and external technology acquisition has since long been amajor challenge for firms to secure a continuous stream of innovative products or processes.While research on R&D...

In this paper we analyse the decision of firms in the Canadian manufacturing sectorto co-operate on innovation projects. Our focus is on the motives behind this decisionand the firm characteristics, both general and with respect to innovation activities,which influence the motives for innovation...