Education and social construction of managerial practice

Educational background and professional categories are the main motivators of managerial actions: what you look at determines what you see and what you see determines what you do - confess the authors of the writing. Among others they seek to answer to account for the fact that one group of companies prefers to employ people with business backgroung and the other those with technological background

Resilience and related variety : the role of family firms in an ocean-related Norwegian region

Recent research in economic geography has introduced two notions that historical studies should explore: regional resilience and related variety. Regional resilience refers to a region’s ability to recover from external shocks. Related variety refers to the existence of related industrial sectors in a region, and the relatedness promotes economic development due to spill-overs between sectors. From an evolutionary perspective, external shocks result in new development paths in regions with related variety. This is a dynamic process well suited to historical studies. This article argues that historical studies can contribute to this literature by studying how related sectors interact in resilient regions. We propose that family firms may act as a micro-coordination mechanism by moving financial and human resources from one sector to another related sector as a response to shock. The paper develops this argument by studying how six major regional business families within ocean industries reacted to external shocks over time.acceptedVersio

The dynamic role of small- and medium-sized multinationals in global production networks: Norwegian maritime firms in the Greater Shanghai Region in China

This article examines the role of small- and medium-sized multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the dynamic development of global production networks (GPNs) in the maritime industry. It studies the dynamism between subsidiaries of Norwegian maritime firms and regional actors and institutions in the Greater Shanghai Region of China from the perspectives of the subsidiaries. It argues that strategic coupling, recoupling and decoupling are partly the results of regional selection mechanisms. However, in the cases where the subsidiaries are embedded within the host region, the strategies and behaviour of MNEs are of decisive importance for the dynamic development of GPNs

Keeping up with the neighbors : The role of cluster identity in internationalization

This paper explores the implications of the collective identity of a regional cluster on firms’ internationalization. Prior research has established the value of cluster “insidership” through access to knowledge and resources. Through a longitudinal study, we find that cluster identity, through distinct identity claims, provides imperatives and shapes the motivation of firms to internationalize. These imperatives, we argue, stem from cluster identity seen as defined features of regional collectives, extending reference theory to encompass the role of social cues from similar firms located geographically close. The imperatives are particularly salient in the early stages of firms’ internationalization, adding the role of cluster identity to explain the differences between inexperienced and experienced firms in internationalization. Keywords: Cluster identity; Internationalization; Multinational enterprise; Longitudinal study.acceptedVersio

Breaking Even : Political Economy and Private Enterprise in the Norwegian Glass Industry, 1739-1803

Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway’s immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway’s iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway’s “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an annual loss for nearly five decades. The article asks why, beyond the anticipation of a royal import ban on foreign glass, private investors might have continued to accept such losses. It focuses on tensions between cameralist and liberal ideologies in the creation of an important national industry, and on older (and perhaps more sustainable) ways of thinking about profitability

The internationalisation process theory and the internationalisation of Norwegian firms, 1945 to 1980

According to the internationalisation process theory firms tend to invest and expand in countries with a short psychic distance to the home country. This paper discusses the usefulness of bringing this theory into business history by analysing the internationalisation of Norwegian firms before the 1980s. The empirical contribution of this paper is that it adds new knowledge to our understanding of the early internationalisation of Norwegians firms. The theoretical contribution is that the paper develops the discussion on the usefulness of bringing networks into the internationalisation process theory. Based on the Norwegian case, there seems to be a need for including personal networks as one dimension of the psychic distance concept, not only in the new economy but also in the old economy.FDI, internationalisation process theory, MNE, internationalisation, Norway,

Creating the new executive: postwar executive education and socialization into the managerial elite

This paper explores the development of executive education in the US from 1945 to around 1970, and its function in developing potential top executives’ cultural, symbolic, and social capital. The paper shows that postwar executive education was an expression of how the academic community acted according to its societal obligations by offering the new leaders norms and values that could replace what was lost during the transformation to managerial capitalism. This function legitimized executive education within the business schools, which was at the time primarily characterized by a very different logic of scientization