Browsing by Subject "relationship"
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An Alternative IntegrationLi, Xin (Frederiksberg, 2010)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: In a recent article in European Management Review, Pitelis and Teece (2009) argue that extant explanations of the nature and scope of firms, such as transaction costs, property rights, metering team production, and resource-based, can be integrated into a more general (capability-based) theory of the firm. Despite acknowledging their account offers new insights on the issue, I am critical of their claim that the (dynamic) capability-based perspective can integrate the existing theories, which they in fact have failed to substantiate for three reasons. Firstly, they downplay the role of opportunism and simply categorize it as a kind of market failure, which they suspect its explanatory power. Secondly, their account is entrepreneur-centric, ignoring the role of employees in the formation of the firm, a problem they see in the transaction cost theory but nevertheless fail to address themselves. Thirdly, their critique of the market-failure-based explanation is problematic. I briefly introduce my own relationship-based theory as an alternative integration of the existing theories. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8055 Files in this item: 1
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Abstract: In this paper, I argue that all the existing theories of the firm, i.e., the transaction cost, knowledge-based, and entrepreneurial theories, are insightful yet partial since they only deal with one or another possible situation in which the first ever firm came to exist. In addition, all of them have a common problem of buyer/entrepreneur/firm-centrism because they all ignore the role of employees in the formation of the firm. I argue, since they are complementary to each other, a new, comprehensive and integrative theory of the firm must be able to unify them with a consideration of employees. I propose a relationship-based theory of the firm (R’BT) as such a candidate theory. The R’BT places the employer-employee (or broader, firm-stakeholder) relationships at the centre of its whole theoretical framework and argues that the notion of relationship harmony is fundamental in explaining the nature of the firm. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8054 Files in this item: 1
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