How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

The article is intended as a contribution to the ongoing conceptual development of corporate sustainability. At the business level sustainability is often equated with eco-efficiency. However, such a reduction misses several important criteria that firms have to satisfy if they want to become truly sustainable.

This article discusses how the concept of sustainable development has evolved over the past three decades and particularly how it can be applied to the business level. It then goes on to describe the three types of capital relevant within the concept of corporate sustainability: economic, natural and social capital.

From this basis we shall then develop the six criteria managers aiming for corporate sustainability will have to satisfy: eco-efficiency, socio-efficiency, eco-effectiveness, socio-effectiveness, sufficiency and ecological equity. The article ends with a brief outlook towards future research. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

Beyond the business case for corporate sustainability

Individualism and collectivism

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the three elements of intellectual capital, i.e. human capital, structural capital, and customer capital, and their inter‐relationships within two industry sectors in Malaysia. The study was conducted using a psychometrically validated questionnaire which was originally administered in Canada. The main conclusions from this particular study are that: human capital is important regardless of industry type; human capital has a greater influence on how a business should be structured in non‐service industries compared to service industries; customer capital has a significant influence over structural capital irrespective of industry; and finally, the development of structural capital has a positive relationship with business performance regardless of industry. The final specified models in this study show a robust explanation of business performance variance within the Malaysian context which bodes well for future research in alternative contexts.

Intellectual capital and business performance in Malaysian industries

Intellectual Capital ‐ Navigating in the New Business Landscape

Little research on knowledge-intensive firms has focused specifically on management control issues. This paper aims to consider such issues. Starting from the limitations of the definition of uncertainty, especially when applied to contexts characterised by knowledge intensity, this study investigates the relationship between knowledge complexity and management control systems. This relationship is analysed in the realm of knowledge-intensive firms' teams where it is particularly critical due to the double coordination and knowledge integration role played by management control systems. A field research conducted in three project teams of a software firm supports the relevance of knowledge complexity in explaining the variation of management control systems. The paper concludes with some avenues for future research.

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Dealing with uncertainty in knowledge-intensive firms: the role of management control systems as knowledge integration mechanisms

Several years have passed since Hopwood (Hopwood, A. G. (1996). Looking across rather than up and down: on the need to explore the lateral processing of information. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 21 , 589–590) proclaimed the need to explore the lateral processing of information, transcending legal organizational boundaries. Since then, many contributions in the management accounting literature have been published in an effort to overcoming this shortage. The aim of this work is to investigate whether these contributions have brought the possibilities of that powerful intuition to its full potential development. To this end, the paper provides a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on management control in inter-firm contexts by organizing contributions according to the breadth of the control solutions they investigated, i.e., control archetypes, management control mechanisms, and cost and accounting controls. Our objective is not only to present the state of the art in this field, but also to evaluate critically the corresponding achievements and to assist in developing new research questions. To address the limitations of the extant literature, we propose the prominence of control problems (cooperation, coordination, appropriation concerns) as a way to integrate the different streams of research, and we highlight some important variables (structure of interests, component and cognitional complexity of tasks) that have been neglected so far by management accounting contributors but, as has been suggested in the organizational literature, may influence control choices. We also identify several areas ripe for future research.

A review and discussion of management control in inter-firm relationships: Achievements and future directions

Opening the black box of management accounting information exchanges in buyer-supplier relationships

How audit teams are structured and function plays a crucial role in determining the level of audit service quality. Despite this claim, little empirical research has been conducted on this effect. ...

Angelo Ditillo

Papers

Intellectual Capital ‐ Navigating in the New Business Landscape

Dealing with uncertainty in knowledge-intensive firms: the role of management control systems as knowledge integration mechanisms

A review and discussion of management control in inter-firm relationships: Achievements and future directions

Opening the black box of management accounting information exchanges in buyer-supplier relationships

Audit team attributes matter: how diversity affects audit quality