An Architectural Approach to Managing Knowledge Stocks and Flows: Implications for Reinventing the HR Function

Sustainable competitive advantage is increasingly dependent upon a firm’s ability to manage both its knowledge stocks and flows. We examine how different employees’ knowledge stocks are managed within a firm and how—through their recombination and renewal—those stocks can create sustainable competitive advantage. To do this, we first establish an architectural framework for managing human resources and review how the framework provides a foundation for studying alternative employment arrangements used by firms in allocating knowledge stocks. Next, we extend the architecture by examining how knowledge stocks (human capital) can be both recombined and renewed through cooperative and entrepreneurial archetypes. We then position two HR configurations to focus on facilitating these two archetypes. By identifying and managing different forms of social capital across employee groups within the architecture, HR practices can facilitate the flow of knowledge within the firm, which ultimately leads to sustainable competitive advantage

Standardizing and Disseminating Knowledge: The Role of the OECD in Global Governance

If ‘knowledge is power’, it is unsurprising that the production, legitimation, and application of social scientific knowledge, not least that which was designed to harness social organization to economic growth, is a potentially contentious process. Coping with, adapting to, or attempting to shape globalization has emerged as a central concern of policy-makers who are, therefore, interested in knowledge to assist their managerial activities. Thus, an organization that can create, synthesize, legitimate, and dissemination useful knowledge can play a significant role in the emerging global governance system. The OECD operates as one important site for the construction, standardization, and dissemination of transnational policy ideas. OECD staff conducts research and produces a range of background studies and reports, drawing on disciplinary knowledge (typically economics) supplemented by their ‘organizational discourses’. This paper probes the contested nature of knowledge production and attempts to evaluate the impact of the OECD’s efforts to produce globally applicable policy advice. Particular attention is paid to important initiatives in the labour market and social policy fields—the Jobs Study and Babies and Bosses

Employee Compensation and Advanced Manufacturing Technology

[Excerpt] The globalization of product markets has intensified competition in an increasingly wide array of industries, including automobiles, consumer electronics,steel, and computer chips to name just a few. In manufacturing as a whole during the last thirty years, productivity growth in the U.S. has lagged significantly behind that of Japan, Germany, Sweden, and many other industrialized countries. For example, between 1960 and 1985, the annual growth in manufacturing productivity (output per hour) was 2.7 percent in the U.S. compared with 8.0 percent in Japan. Unless this trend can be turned around, U.S. companies will find it increasingly difficult to compete in the world market

Employment Stability Under Different Managerial Compensation Systems

Compensation design may influence the extent to which managerial decision-makers take a long-term perspective in managing important resources like employees. I hypothesize that organizations relying more heavily on long-term compensation incentives exhibit greater stability in employment, perhaps because of a greater concern among management with long-term effectiveness. I also hypothesize that employment stability is more feasible when employees are covered by variable pay plans, which permit labor cost reductions without cuts in employment. Using multiple years of employment, financial performance, and managerial compensation data on 156 organizations, support is found for both hypotheses