Markus Pohlmann

Bio: Markus Pohlmann is an academic researcher from Heidelberg University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Globalization & Innovation management. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 52 publications receiving 363 citations.

The development of innovation systems and the art of innovation management—strategy, control and the culture of innovation

Abstract: The success of strategies of changing or establishing innovation systems is indicated by scientific and technological innovations, the number of new products and patents, the prosperity of regions and firms and the creation of new jobs. However, there is also a less visible outcome of the innovation process in regard to knowledge creation, redesign of cultural software of what is understood as innovation and in new management concepts to maintain and generate organizational innovativeness. The papers in this issue contribute to the identification of blockages to innovation and means of overcoming them related to the latter issue. The first blockage to innovation is the human capital dilemma of insufficient trained persons in innovation management; a second is the paucity of effective organizational mechanisms to realize the full potential of innovations that have been achieved in one environment to transfer them to where they are needed in another. The capacity to integrate innovation mechanisms and carry...

The evolution of innovation: Cultural backgrounds and the use of innovation models

Abstract: Innovation is said to be one of the most important factors in economic competition. Regions and firms are striving for the establishment of innovative structures. However, the question of how to organize permanent or sustainable innovativeness is not easily answered. Suggesting six rules of innovation, the first rule is, that there is no general rule of how to organize sustainable innovativeness. Anyway, we do know much about innovation killers and about how organizations deal with innovations and we do know that innovations do not happen merely by chance. There are regional paths of innovations, innovation paradigms and long waves of innovation models. For Europe, especially for Germany, the adaptation of ‘innovation models’ has been very important for the evolution of new institutional and organizational forms, but we can identify striking cultural differences. In Asia, the adaption of the same innovation models did lead to different forms of innovation management with considerably different outcomes. T...

Globale ökonomische Eliten? Eine Globalisierungsthese auf dem Prüfstand der Empirie

Abstract: Ziel des Beitrages ist die Uberprufung der in der Globalisierungsliteratur haufig formulierten Annahme, dass die Internationalisierung des Managements jener der Unternehmen folge und globale Markte zu einem verscharften Wettbewerb um die besten Kopfe fuhrten. Anhand empirischer Daten und Analysen zur Internationalisierung des Managements u. a. bei den Top-100-Industrieunternehmen in den USA, Ostasien und Deutschland zeigt der Beitrag auf, dass weder das mittlere Management noch die Spitzenmanager ihre Karrieren im Ausland machen. Vielmehr hat sich eine Entsendedynamik mit eher kurzfristigen Auslandsaufenthalten etabliert, die mit der Bevorzugung von Insidern fur Spitzenpositionen kompatibel ist. Je weniger revidierbar eine Rekrutierungsentscheidung erscheint, je starker Clans oder dominante Koalitionen die Karrieremechanismen zur Statusreproduktion nutzen und je starker kulturelle „Dunkelfaktoren“ die Karrieresysteme beeinflussen, desto hoher ist die Praferenz fur Hauskarrieren. Der „brain drain“ zwischen den entwickelten OECD-Landern halt sich daher in engen Grenzen.

Personal Gain or Organizational Benefits? How to Explain Active Corruption

Abstract: Corrupt practices in organizations are commonly explained via the rational choice of individual employees, with the benefits of deviant actors at the heart of the theoretical approach. This Article challenges the rational choice perspective with reference to cases of corruption in which the organizational benefits are crucial and personal gains negligible. The authors propose to embed the concept of “useful illegality” (Luhmann) into an institutional theory framework and develop a set of indicators for the systematic comparison of individual case studies. Exemplary analyses of two landmark cases of corporate bribery on behalf of German corporations' subsidiaries abroad (Siemens Argentina and Magyar Telekom) show that active corruption was neither simply a function of individual deviance, nor of personal gain. In contrast, institutional theory allows the modeling of organizational deviance as a function of unwritten rules that lend legitimacy to the deviant behavior of bribe payers. Despite plentiful opportunities in the periphery of these two multinational corporations, the few instances of personal gain were either in line with the organizational incentive structures (as in Telekom) or attributable to the loss of membership (as in Siemens). Mostly high-ranking employees, loyal to their organization, committed those crimes at high personal risks. The discussion of factors that explain why these “company men” nonetheless complied with the unwritten rules, in support of organizational benefits, leads the authors to conclude with likely consequences for effective regulation. They argue that it is the usefulness of the illegal behavior for the organization, its entrenchment in organizational cultures, and amplified adaptation problems with regard to changing institutional environments that explain what makes corrupt practices so hard to control and to regulate in a formal legal organization.

The analysis of collective mindsets: Introducing a New Method of Institutional Analysis in Comparative Research

Abstract: This article presents a specific qualitative method – the Collective Mindset Analysis (CMA) – that is applicable within the frame of institutional analysis to map the cognitive and normative institutions at work The purpose of this paper is to introduce and discuss the method and its methodology as well The paper will elaborate on how the method is applied to international research and will provide concrete examples drawn from a bigger research project on economic elites in eleven countries It will demonstrate the steps of interpretation of interview material from this project with the help of CMA, using concrete text sequences The sequences have been extracted from interviews with Brazilian top managers that were conducted in the context of an international research project The paper will show, how an institutional approach, that is relying on the sociology of knowledge, can be supported by a method, that helps to reconstruct the cognitive and normative rules in a given culture and to analyze, how these rules are translated in action orientations to solve culturally significant problems Thus, the method can be a remedy for the shortcomings of institutional analysis in mapping and comparing the knowledge stocks in different cultures and a new tool in international comparative research

Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.

Abstract: Preface Introduction: Traditions of Nationhood in France and Germany I. The Institution of Citizenship 1. Citizenship as Social Closure 2. The French Revolution and the Invention of National Citizenship 3. State, State-System, and Citizenship in Germany II. Defining The Citizenry: The Bounds of Belonging 4. Citizenship and Naturalization in France and Germany 5. Migrants into Citizens: The Crystallization of Jus Soli in Late-Nineteenth-Century France 6. The Citizenry as Community of Descent: The Nationalization of Citizenship in Wilhelmine Germany 7. \"Etre Francais, Cela se Merite\": Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in France in the 1980s 8. Continuities in the German Politics of Citizenship Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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

Abstract: 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 World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

On the european union

Abstract: The extent to which member states transpose EU directives in a timely fashion is often argued to be strongly associated with the general effectiveness of national bureaucracies. But what kind of institutional solutions ensure better performance? This paper examines the patterns and effects of departmental oversight across 28 ministries in Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. In mapping the strength of oversight, it relies on around 90 structured interviews regarding the rules-in-use on transposition planning, legal review and monitoring of deadlines. The analysis of the impact of departmental oversight is based on an original dataset of over 300 directives with transposition deadlines between January 2005 and December 2008.