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

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 25 Nov 2014)

Ernst Abbe's Scientific Management: Theoretical Insights from a 19th Century Dynamic Capabilities Approach

"Scientific management" is the label Frederick Taylor attached to the system of management devised by him. In this article we present our discovery of very different "scientific" management principles that were developed roughly concurrently with Taylorism by German physicist Ernst Abbe, then owner and managing director of the Carl Zeiss optical instruments company. Abbe's management principles as well as the social philosophy underlying them are accessible to present-day theorists because he laid them down both in the statutes of a foundation he founded and in an extensive commentary on the statutes. These original accounts offer a remarkable opportunity to enrich our current understanding of how managers can create and recreate firm capabilities that allow firms to enjoy a long-term leadership position. Abbe develops an early account for managing a science-based firm and securing its long-term competitiveness, giving detailed prescriptions with regard to the kind and scope of firm activities, its organizational setup, and its labor relations. Abbe's management principles exhibit striking parallels to important contemporary theories of organization such as the Resource-Based Theory of the Firm and the related Dynamic Capabilities Theory of the Firm, and are even today able to indicate issues that warrant further theoretical elaboration. In this article, we give an outline of Abbe's thought, highlight some of its most characteristic features, and set them into relation to present-day management theory

What does the success of Tesla mean for the future dynamics in the global automobile sector?

After reading Jacobides, MacDuffie, and Tae (2016), the success of Tesla in launching a new automobile company in a crowded sector puzzled us. Jacobides, MacDuffie, and Tae (2016) had convinced us that developing the capabilities to become the manufacturer of a complete, safe automobile system would be quite difficult. Since the establishment of the dominant design for the auto in the 1920s, the industry has operated on the premise of massive economies of scale. Original equipment manufacturers' (OEMs) role in taking responsibility for the legal liability of the whole automobile, combined with their extensive supply and marketing chains, has ensured they remained dominant in the sector despite some missteps with modularisation and outsourcing efforts (Jacobides, MacDuffie, & Tae, 2016; Schulze, MacDuffie, & Taube, 2015). No major component supplier has succeeded in forward integrating into becoming an OEM and no new entrants have challenged the dominance of the incumbent OEMs since the earliest days of the auto industry (Jacobides & MacDuffie, 2013)

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ORGANIZATION: LOCATING KNOWLEDGE CAPABILITIES IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS

ABSTRACT We investigate what types of human capital are most valuable to professional service firms. Using the data from the New York City advertising industry from 1924-1996, we find that the departure of unheralded back office executives is more damaging than the departure of many prominent client-facing executives