New Shop Floor Control Approaches for Virtual Enterprises

The virtual enterprise paradigm seems a fit response to face market instability and the volatile nature of business opportunities increasing enterprise’s interest in similar forms of networked organisations. The dynamic environment of a virtual enterprise requires that partners in the consortium own reconfigurable shop floors. This paper presents new approaches to shop floor control that meet the requirements of the new industrial paradigms and argues on work re-organization at shop floor level.virtual enterprise; networked organisations

The Learning Organisation Meme: Emergence of a Management Replicator (or Parrots, Patterns and Performance)

Organisations and organisms are self-maintaining systems which spontaneously seek to preserve an evolved order. Both are enabled by replicators: memes or genes respectively. Whereas genes are the units of transmission of our biological inheritance memes are the units of transmission of our cultural inheritance. They cause organisations to settle into patterns, routines and habits of behaviour: manifestations of a particular memetic inheritance. These patterns enable the organisation but simultaneously limit its performance. Both systems share the evolutionary dynamic of adaptive radiation followed by stabilisation. Memetic examples include new markets, new technologies and new business ideas. Business theories and their derivative, managerial fads, are a class of memes. This paper illustrates the increasing returns dynamic in the evolution of management recipes by contrasting Business Process Re-engineering and the Learning Organisation. It ends with a plea for the Learning Organisations to retain memetic diversity rather than be trapped in sterile competitions to define an LO. The power of the Learning Organisation movement may, paradoxically, be that we are not stuck with what it is

Cultural economy and the creative field of the city

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra-urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labor market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path-dependent dynamics of the creative field. The paper ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global.cultural economy; creative field; creativity; creative city; urban economy; urban growth

Darwinism, probability and complexity : market-based organizational transformation and change explained through the theories of evolution

The study of transformation and change is one of the most important areas of social science research. This paper synthesizes and critically reviews the emerging traditions in the study of change dynamics. Three mainstream theories of evolution are introduced to explain change: the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest, the Probability model and the Complexity approach. The literature review provides a basis for development of research questions that search for a more comprehensive understanding of organizational change. The paper concludes by arguing for the development of a complementary research tradition, which combines an evolutionary and organizational analysis of transformation and change

Firm technological responses to regulatory changes: A longitudinal study in the Le Mans Prototype racing

Despite the critical role of regulations on competition and innovation, little is known about firm responses and related effects on performance under regulatory contingencies that are permissive or restrictive. By longitudinally investigating hybrid cars competing in the Le Mans Prototype racing (LMP1), we counter-intuitively suggest that permissive regulations increase technological uncertainty and thus decrease the firms’ likelihood of shifting their technological trajectory, while restrictive regulations lead to the opposite outcome. Further, we suggest that permissive regulations favour firms that innovate their products by sequentially upgrading core and peripheral subsystems, while restrictive regulations—in the long term— favour firms upgrading them simultaneously. Implications for theory and practice are discussed

Digital Innovations for the Circular Economy

Doctoral thesis (PhD) - Nord University, 2023publishedVersio