Is Globalization Making Us All the Same?

When I first began teaching organizational sociology to undergraduates in the late 1980s, the students could not get enough of Japan. It was obvious to them and (to come clean) to their teachers that Japan was the way of the future and that the American corporation would need to remake itself radi-cally to compete in the global economy. Japan had, for reasons of culture or history or politics, happened on a model of corporate organization that was more stable, more innovative and more productive than the warmed-over Fordism found in American firms. Change or rust, that was the lesson for America. Fast-forward a decade or so and the period of Japan worship is regarded as folly, as misplaced American self-doubt. Japan was the model for us; now we are surely the model for Japan. The new generation of undergraduates cannot get too little of Japan. It is now the poster child for crony capitalism and all that went wrong in Asia. It is obvious to the students, and (again) to their teachers, that the United States is now the way of the future. We are i

KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION: PROMOTING A SYSTEM APPROACH OF INNOVATION PROCESSES

This contribution intends to clarify for the current discussion about knowledge and its importance within economic systems. It relies on the complementary character of the economics of knowledge of Marshall and Hayek. One of them is useful to discuss opportunities and limits of the so-called resource-based theory of the firm in order to deal with the relationship between the governance of knowledge and firms' innovative behaviours; the other is useful to insist on the importance of knowledge channelled by and within market dynamics. As a consequence, their combination allows one to pave better grounds to current knowledge economic importance by exploring in-depth characteristics of knowledge, expressing the need to deal with the governance of technological knowledge, and promoting the localized and distributed characters of firms' innovative behaviours. This finally leads to promote an innovation-system approach based on that localized character of innovative behaviours of firms in order to depict proper use made by firms in matters of knowledge generation, use, dissemination, and trade.Knowledge governance, Innovation systems, Industry dynamics,