Some Austriaen Insights

I critically discuss recent claims about economic organization in the emerging “knowledge economy,” specifically that authority relations will tend to disappear (or at least become radically transformed), the boundaries of the firm will blur, and coordination mechanisms will be much more malleable than assumed in organizational economics, resulting in various “new organizational forms.” In particular, the price mechanism will be used inside hierarchies to a much greater extent. In order to obtain an analytical focus on the knowledge economy, I assume that it may be approximated by “Hayekian settings” (after Hayek 1945), that is, settings in which knowledge is distributed and where knowledge inputs are relatively more important in production than physical capital inputs. I then argue, drawing on organizational economics as well as Mises’ insights in property rights and comparative systems, that the presence of Hayekian settings does not mean that authority will disappear, etc., although economic organization will in fact be affected by the emergence of the knowledge economy. This suggests that Austrian economics has an important contribution to make to the study of economic organization

An Organizational Economics Interpretation of the Rise and Decline of the Spaghetti Organization

At the beginning of the 1990s, Danish hearing aid producer, Oticon became world famous for its radical empowerment and delegation experiment, popularly called the "spaghetti organization." Recent work has interpreted the spaghetti experiment as a radical attempt to foster dynamic capabilities by imposing structural ambiguity on the organization (Lovas and Ghoshal 2000; Verona and Ravasi 1999; Ravasi and Verona 2000). However, this work has neglected that about a decade later, many of the more radical elements of the spaghetti organization have been left. This paper presents an organizational economics interpretation of the spaghetti organization and its subsequent transformation. In such an interpretation, the spaghetti organization imposed significant organizational costs that could be tolerated as long as the benefits produced by the spaghetti organization dominated the costs. One source of organizational costs that the paper focuses on turn on the potential contradiction involved in combining a strong manager who possesses ultimate decision rights with widespread delegation. Apparently, Oticon management failed to solve, or didn’t even realize the nature of, the resulting commitment problem. A number of implications are developed, particularly with respect to the firm-market dichotomy

Strategi som effektiv ledelsesproces

Strategi bliver ofte betragtet som topledelsens plan for virksomhedens fremtidige udvikling. Omvendt har en øget fokusering på viden som konkurrencefaktor medført, at strategisk udvikling også kan betragtes som en følge af initiativer taget blandt mellemledere længere nede i virksomhedens hierarki. Artiklen argumenterer for, at optimale strategiske udviklingsprocesser integrerer disse to perspektiver. Effektiv strategiudvikling er en dynamisk proces, hvor topledelsen er i stand til at kombinere rationelle planlægningsaktiviteter med nye initiativer blandt organisationens græsrødder