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 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

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)

Transaction cost economics (TCE) is one of the leading perspectives in management and organizational studies, yet debate continues regarding its empirical support. In this paper, we take stock of the large body of extant research and provide a systematic assessment of empirical evidence. In all, 308 statistical tests from 63 articles, selected according to a set of clear criteria, were examined across various dimensions. We assess not only the level of empirical support for the theory, but also the degree of paradigm consensus present in the empirical literature. Our analysis shows that results are mixed: while we found support in some areas (e.g., with regard to asset specificity), we also found considerable disagreement on how to operationalize some of TCE's central constructs and propositions, and relatively low levels of empirical support in other core areas (e.g., surrounding uncertainty and performance). We conclude that a more thorough empirical grounding of the theory's foundation is crucial to its future development, and offer several strategies for doing this. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A systematic assessment of the empirical support for transaction cost economics

Partnerships between companies receive a great deal of attention from top managers and researchers at the time of their formation. This attention results largely from the common perception that the initial structuring of partnerships and establishment of common goals determines partnership outcomes and success. In Alliance Advantage, Doz and Hamel shift the focus away from deal making to the internal processes within the partnership and the unfolding interactions among partners that play an important and relatively unexplored role in shaping outcomes. Focusing on the underlying reasons why companies enter alliances and the processes by which they continually learn from their interactions and re-evaluate common--and individual--goals, the authors paint a sophisticated picture of alliance dynamics over time. The authors challenge organizations to define their objectives for alliance formulation and consider whether their own corporate culture provides an "alliance ready" atmosphere.

Alliance advantage : the art of creating value through partnering

Intersecting the boundaries of public and private economic activity, public-private ties carry important organizational strategy, managerial, and policy implications. We identify the value-creation and capture mechanisms embedded in these ties through a theoretical framework of two conceptual public-private structural alternatives, each associated with different value-creating capacities, rationales, and outcomes. Two important restraints on private value capture — public partner opportunism and external stakeholder activism — arise asymmetrically under each form, carrying a critical effect on partnership outcomes.

Creating and Capturing Value in Public-Private Ties: A Private Actor's Perspective

Les analyses de la filière : bilan et perspectives

This study investigates contracting mechanisms in situations of opportunistic disputes between organizations. We specifically explore the relationships between the formal versus informal nature of opportunism and the formal versus informal nature of contractual governance. We use a unique data set of 102 buyer-supplier disputes to explore in depth different types of opportunism - that is, strong form versus weak form opportunism - and different types of contracting mechanisms - that is, the controlling and coordinating functions of formal contracts and the cooperative and competitive sides of relational contracts. Our detailed empirical analysis suggests distinct relationships between the different contracting mechanisms, the different types of opportunism, and the level of legal fees necessary to deal with the dispute. These findings enable us to derive implications for research on the role of contractual mechanisms in dealing with interorganizational opportunism.

An Empirical Investigation of Interorganizational Opportunism and Contracting Mechanisms

National Regulation of Telecommunications : a Neo-Institutional Economic 
Interpretation 
Institutional economic analysis allows us to study the nature and limits of the network 
industries regulations set up in Europe on the national level. It brings to light the 
inadequate coordination between this level of regulation and the institutional environment, and the problems that result. In order to remedy the situation, it seems necessary 
to set up Community regulation authorities on a supra-national level in a better position 
to harmonise regulation frameworks and the fluidity of markets. The creation of such 
authorities would considerably reduce transaction costs and limit the assymetries of 
information which the main historical operators have always taken advantage of.

La régulation nationale des télécommunications : une lecture économique néo-institutionnelle

Comment les firmes accedent-elles a de nouvelles competences suite a l'introduction d'une innovation? Cet article developpe un modele integrant quatre formes organisationnelles (developpement interne, alliance, acquisition et transaction de marche) qui est teste dans le contexte de l'industrie americaine du courtage en ligne. Les resultats empiriques de cette recherche confirment l'interet d'un modele integrateur pour expliquer les choix d'acces aux competences sous condition d'innovation

Bertrand Quelin

Papers

Creating and Capturing Value in Public-Private Ties: A Private Actor's Perspective

Les analyses de la filière : bilan et perspectives

An Empirical Investigation of Interorganizational Opportunism and Contracting Mechanisms

La régulation nationale des télécommunications : une lecture économique néo-institutionnelle

Nouvelles compétences et modes d'accès