This issue of JIBS offers reviews of two books that analyse the dynamic interaction between the business environments and business strategies in very different ways. The institutional underpinnings for business strategies are a major research topic for comparative management, aiming to explain why in different contexts firms pursue different strategies, and with different implications for performance. J Peter Murman in ‘Knowledge and Competitive Advantage’ takes a historical perspective focusing on the co-evolutionary processes between national innovation systems, business strategies, and performance. This books thus adds to the industry-level longitudinal research reviewed in JIBS no. 4/2003, Tom Murtha et al.'s ‘Managing New Industry Creation’ and David McKendrick et al.'s ‘From Silicon Valley to Singapore’.

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The Fable of the Bees. Part I: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits

Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions

Past literature tends towards dichotomous representations of computer hackers as either unhealthy young men engaged in bold tournaments of sinister hacking or visionaries whose utopian technologica...

Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism

People have various ways of interacting, and in particular of transferring goods and services among themselves. They ‘truck and barter’. They also rob, force, enslave, and otherwise harm others or kill them. And they often also give: they support their families and other groups; they commonly respect their neighbours; they occasionally give to charity, save others’ lives or die for their country; and they often pay for the large public transfers for which they vote. More interestingly, people tend to provide return gifts when gifts have been given to them, and also to take revenge — and this is not only in order to induce further gifts or to deter others from causing future harm. Someone giving as a gift because she received a gift is reciprocity.2 Very generally, a notable part of life in society consists of interrelated other-oriented behaviour, motivations and sentiments which are neither exclusively self-interested ‘exchange’ nor pure unilateral gift-giving — both of which appear as borderline cases. This is the general field of reciprocity, of which the gift/return-gift relationship constitutes the simplest form and component, but which includes many steadier and more complex relations.

Introduction: The Economics of Reciprocity, Giving and Altruism

Adam Smith wrote two books, one about economics and the other about morality. His Wealth of Nations argues for a largely free-market economy, while his Theory of Moral Sentiments argues that human morality develops out of a mutual sympathy that people seek with one another. How do these books go together? How do markets and morality mix? James Otteson's 2002 book provides a comprehensive examination and interpretation of Smith's moral theory and shows how his conception of the nature of morality applies to his understanding of markets, language and other social institutions. Considering Smith's notions of natural sympathy, the impartial spectator, human nature, and human conscience the author also addresses the issue of whether Smith thinks that moral judgments enjoy a transcendent sanction. James Otteson sees Smith's theory of morality as an institution that develops unintentionally but nevertheless in an orderly way according to a market model.

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The Fable of the Bees. Part I: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits

Citations

Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions

Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism

Introduction: The Economics of Reciprocity, Giving and Altruism

Adam Smith's marketplace of life

Republicanism : a shared European heritage

Related Papers (5)

The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith: I: The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment

Essays on Philosophical Subjects

The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith