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Business Firms (business + firm)
Selected AbstractsINEQUALITY, INCOMPLETE CONTRACTS, AND THE SIZE DISTRIBUTION OF BUSINESS FIRMS,INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 2 2010Thomas Gall This article analyzes the effects of intrafirm bargaining on the formation of firms in an economy with imperfect capital markets and contracting constraints. In equilibrium, wealth inequality induces a heterogeneous distribution of firm sizes, allowing for firms both too small and too large in terms of technical efficiency. The findings connect well to empirical facts such as the missing middle of firm-size distributions in developing countries. The model can encompass a nonmonotonic relationship between aggregate output and inequality. It turns out that an inflow of capital may indeed decrease output in absolute terms. [source] The E-economy and the Rise of Technocapitalism: Networks, Firms, and TransportationGROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2003Luis Suarez-Villa ABSTRACT The e-economy is part of a larger phenomenon, technocapitalism, that is transforming business organizations and the ways in which they transact, produce, and ship their goods. Technocapitalism is an evolution of market capitalism that is rooted in technological innovation and supported by such intangibles as creativity and knowledge. This paper considers first the main characteristics of networks that support the e-economy and its source phenomenon, the emergence of technocapitalism. Networks are thought to be the main vehicle through which the e-economy spreads, and they have major effects on the organization of business firms. The culture of technocapitalism, with its emphasis on continuous innovation and rapid adjustment, is largely behind the rising importance of networks. A second section then considers the deconstruction of business firms and its relation to networks, the e-economy, and the rise of technocapitalism. A historical perspective is provided to show the contrast with previous eras. The deconstruction of business organizations involves a major transformation of the norms and ways in which firms are run and structured. Finally, the likely implications for transportation and shipping of the rise of the e-economy, its networks, and the deconstruction of firms are discussed. The logistics, pricing, and infrastructure of shipping are likely to be substantially affected by the spread of the e-economy, its networks, and the deconstruction of firms. [source] Strategic HRM in China: Configurations and competitive advantageHUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2008Irene H. Chow The strategic HR literature suggests that a firm will perform better through internal appropriate fit among HRM practices (the configuration fit) and through external appropriate fit between a firm's HRM practices and business strategy. The present study adopts a configuration approach to identify unique patterns of HR practices and business strategy that are posited to be maximally effective. The proposed relationships were empirically tested by surveying with a sample of 241 business firms in Guangzhou, South China, to find out the extent that four HR configurations could be successfully adopted in the Chinese context. The results revealed that HR configurations are significantly related to effect in predicting overall outcome performance and turnover, but not significantly related to effect on sales growth and profit growth rates. Research findings showed not only competitive strategies are significantly related to effect on HR configurations. The results also showed significant interaction effects between HR configurations and business strategy in their effect on profit and sales growth. These results further extended support for a contingency perspective in strategic HRM to the Chinese context, with significant practical implications for managing HRM in China. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Focusing on the software of managing health workers: what can we learn from high commitment management practices?INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2008Bruno Marchal Abstract Knowledge of what constitutes best practice in human resource management (HRM) in public-oriented services is limited and the operational aspects of managing health workers at provision level have been poorly studied. The magnet hospital concept offers some insights into HRM practices that are leading to high commitment. These have been shown to lead to superior performance in not only industrial business firms, but also service industries and the public service. The mechanisms that drive these practices include positive psychological links between managers and staff, organizational commitment and trust. Conditions for successful high commitment management (HiCoM) include health service managers with a strong vision and able to transmit this vision to their staff, appropriate decision spaces for healthcare managers and a pool of reasonable well-trained health workers. For this, adequate remuneration is the first condition. Equally important are the issues of cultural fit and of ,commitment'. What would staff expect from management in return for their commitment to the organization? Salary buys indeed time of employees, but other practices ensure their commitment. Only if these drivers are understood will managers be able to make their HRM practices more responsive to the needs and expectations of the health workers. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] The Determinants of Organizational Change and Structural Inertia: Technological and Organizational FactorsJOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, Issue 4 2002Massimo G. Colombo There are a growing body of theoretical work, wide anecdotal evidence, and a few large-scale empirical studies supporting the view that business firms quite rarely change their organizational structure, a phenomenon usually referred to in the literature as structural inertia. The present paper aims to analyze empirically the determinants of structural inertia and organizational change. As far as we know, this work constitutes the first attempt to directly address such issues through econometric estimates based on a large, longitudinal dataset at plant level. For this purpose, we consider changes of the organizational structure within a sample composed of 438 Italian manufacturing plants observed from 1975 to 1996. More precisely, we specify and test a duration model of the likelihood of an individual plant changing the number of hierarchical tiers after a spell r, provided that no change has occurred up to T. We also analyze the direction of change, distinguishing increases from decreases of the number of managerial layers. We consider a set of plant- and industry-specific explanatory variables that are expected to induce or oppose organizational change. The findings show that the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies and new human-resources management practices favors organizational change. On the contrary, the presence of sunk costs and the extent of influence activities figure prominently in explaining structural inertia of business organizations. [source] Scaling phenomena in the growth dynamics of scientific outputJOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 9 2005Kaushik Matia We analyze a set of three databases at different levels of aggregation: (a) a database of approximately 106 publications from 247 countries published from 1980,2001, (b) a database of 508 academic institutions from the European Union (EU) and 408 institutes from the United States for the 11-year period of 1991,2001, and (c) a database of 2,330 Flemish authors published in the period from 1980,2000. At all levels of aggregation we find that the mean annual growth rates of publications is independent of the number of publications of the various units involved. We also find that the standard deviation of the distribution of annual growth rates decays with the number of publications as a power law with exponent , 0.3. These findings are consistent with those of recent studies of systems such as the size of research and development funding budgets of countries, the research publication volumes of U.S. universities, and the size of business firms. [source] Firm-like behavior of journals?JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 1 2005Scaling properties of their output, impact growth dynamics In the study of growth dynamics of artificial and natural systems, the scaling properties of fluctuations can exhibit information on the underlying processes responsible for the observed macroscopic behavior according to H.E. Stanley and colleagues (Lee, Amaral, Canning, Meyer, & Stanley, 1998; Plerou, Amaral, Gopikrishnan, Meyer, & Stanley, 1999; Stanley et al., 1996). With such an approach, they examined the growth dynamics of firms, of national economies, and of university research fundings and paper output. We investigated the scaling properties of journal output and impact according to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR; ISI, Philadelphia, PA) and find distributions of paper output and of citations near to lognormality. Growth rate distributions are near to Laplace "tents," however with a better fit to Subbotin distributions. The width of fluctuations decays with size according to a power law. The form of growth rate distributions seems not to depend on journal size, and conditional probability densities of the growth rates can thus be scaled onto one graph. To some extent even quantitatively, all our results are in agreement with the observations of Stanley and others. Further on, a Matthew effect of journal citations is confirmed. If journals "behave" like business firms, a better understanding of Bradford's Law as a result of competition among publishing houses, journals, and topics suggests itself. [source] Real estate and corporate valuation: an asset pricing perspectiveMANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS, Issue 7 2001Liow Kim Hiang Property is a significant asset in the balance sheets of some Singapore industrial/commerce firms and hotel corporations. In this research, we take on the task of examining the relationship between real estate and stock market valuation of these business firms from an asset pricing perspective. Specifically, the real estate sensitivity of ,property-intensive', non-real estate stocks is investigated in both a three-index (market, sector and property) of stock returns and in an arbitrage pricing theory (APT) framework. The APT model is further recast as a multivariate non-linear regression model with across-equation restrictions. Using weekly returns on ,property-intensive' stocks in the period 1989,1998 and three shorter-sample periods, iterated non-linear seemingly regression techniques (ITNSUR) are employed to obtain joint estimates of stock sensitivities and their associated APT risk ,prices'. The ,real estate' sensitivity is found to be systematic and priced in the APT sense of corporations being paid an ex ante premium for bearing property market risk in investing and owning properties in two of the three sample periods (1989,1991, 1992,1994). The empirical results provide some support that property is a factor in corporate valuation, and is broadly consistent with the efficient markets hypothesis. The implications for portfolio and corporate management are examined. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Regulation of Government: Has it Increased, is it Increasing, Should it be Diminished?PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2000Christopher Hood This article examines arms-length ,regulation' of UK government , the public-sector analogy to regulation of business firms , and assesses the precepts for public-sector regulation embodied in the Blair Labour government's official vision of public-man-agement reform, its Modernising Government White Paper of 1999. As a background to assessing the recipes for public-sector regulation in Modernising Government, the article shows that such regulation grew markedly both in the two decades up to 1997 and in the plans and activities of the Blair government from 1997 to 1999. Against that background, the design principles for public-sector regulation contained in Modernising Government are assessed. The White Paper was notable for embracing a doctrine of ,enforced self-regulation' for the public sector that involved aspirations to both more and less public-sector regulation in the future. It put its faith in a mixture of oversight and mutuality for ,regulating regulation'. But in spite of the radical-sounding tone of Modernising Government, the measures proposed appeared limited and half-hearted, and two well-known institutional design principles for regulation seemed to be missing altogether from the Blair government's view of administrative ,modernity'. [source] Economic Liberalization and the Antecedents of Top Management Teams: Evidence From Turkish ,Big' BusinessBRITISH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2006Sibel Yamak There has been an increased interest in the last two decades in top management teams (TMTs) of business firms. Much of the research, however, has been US-based and concerned primarily with TMT effects on organizational outcomes. The present study aims to expand this literature by examining the antecedents of top team composition in the context of macro-level economic change in a late-industrializing country. The post-1980 trade and market reforms in Turkey provided the empirical setting. Drawing upon the literatures on TMT and chief executive characteristics together with punctuated equilibrium models of change and institutional theory, the article develops the argument that which firm-level factors affect which attributes of TMT formations varies across the early and late stages of economic liberalization. Results of the empirical investigation of 71 of the largest industrial firms in Turkey broadly supported the hypotheses derived from this premise. In the early stages of economic liberalization the average age and average organizational tenure of TMTs were related to the export orientation of firms, whereas in later stages, firm performance became a major predictor of these team attributes. Educational background characteristics of teams appeared to be under stronger institutional pressures, altering in different ways in the face of macro-level change. [source] | ||||||||||