Browsing Departments by Title
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Gry Knudsen, Line; Bernhard Nielsen, Bo (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Inter-organizational collaboration is an organizational form that is used by an increasing number of firms to meet a wide range of organizational aims (Hagedoorn 1996; 2002; Narula, 2004; Casson and Mol, 2006). Inter-organizational alliances are a preferred way of sourcing a variety of resources (Eisenhardt and Shonhoven, 1996; Gulati, 1999; Van de Ven and Walker, 1998), and a prominent view of the strategic alliance literature suggests that inter-firm collaboration has a special strength in serving as a mechanism by which a firm can leverage its skills, acquire new competencies, and learn (e.g. Kogut, 1989; Hamel, Doz, and Prahalad, 1989; Huber, 1991; Larsson, Bengtsson, Henriksson, and Sparks, 1998; Lyles, 1988; Powell and Brantley, 1992; Inkpen and Tsang, 2008). As firms collaborate at an increasing rate (Khanna et al, 1998) it becomes still more important to understand how these firms can be instrumental in organizing and governing the various collaborative knowledge processes that take place in alliances. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7416 Files in this item: 1
smg wp 2008-17.pdf (312.7Kb) -
Evaluating Clients’ Personality Traits in two Danish Rehabilitation OrganizationsMik-Meyer, Nanna (København, 2005)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This paper explores how two Danish rehabilitation organizations textual guidelines for assessment of clients’ personality traits influence the actual evaluation of clients. The analysis will show how staff members produce institutional identities corresponding to organizational categories, which very often have little or no relevance for the clients evaluated. The goal of the article is to demonstrate how the institutional complex that frames the work of the organizations produces the client types pertaining to that organization. By applying the analytical strategy of institutional ethnography I elucidate how the two rehabilitation organizations local history, legislation, structural features of the present labour market and of social work result in a number of contradictions which make it difficult to deliver client-centred care. This exact goal is according to the staff one of the most important goals for ‘good’ social work. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/6434 Files in this item: 1
wp14-2005.pdf (201.8Kb) -
Møller Larsen, Marcus (Frederiksberg, 2013)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Offshoring can be defined as the relocation of organizational tasks and services to foreign locations. Increasingly, firms experience that unforeseen costs and difficulties of managing offshoring undercut anticipated benefits; that unexpected challenges of offshoring jeopardize and eventually undermine initial objectives. Guided by the research question—what are the organizational consequences of offshoring?—the purpose of this thesis is to investigate why some firms fail when offshoring and other do not. The thesis consists of four research papers using various datasets and methodologies that investigate offshoring in an organizational context. The first paper investigates how the complexity of offshoring leads to ‘hidden costs’ of implementing offshoring activities. The second paper looks at how these hidden reconfiguration costs influence the process performance of the offshored activity and how this relationship is moderated by the modularity of that activity. The third paper investigates the effect of the organizational reconfiguration of offshoring on firms’ strategies. The final paper studies different strategies of adaptation in offshoring. Taken together, this thesis argues that whether firms relocate activities with the purpose of accessing resources or as a response to political pressures, the process of offshoring presents firms with the challenge of coordinating and integrating offshoring activities in a global organization. The complexities and uncertainties of an organization consisting of a number of offshored activities (in contrast to an organization with only co-located activities) require firms to invest additional resources in coordination mechanisms so that an efficient reintegration can be achieved. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8669 Files in this item: 1
Marcus_M _Larsen.pdf (1.714Mb) -
A Research AgendaFoss, Nicolai J.; Argyres, Nicholas; Felin, Teppo; Zenger, Todd (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: For decades, the literatures on firm capabilities and organizational economics have been at odds with each other, specifically relative to explaining organizational boundaries and heterogeneity. We briefly trace the history of the relationship between the capabilities literature and organizational economics and point to the dominance of a “capabilities first” logic in this relationship. We argue that capabilities considerations are inherently intertwined with questions about organizational boundaries and internal organization, and use this point to respond to the prevalent “capabilities first” logic. We offer an integrative research agenda that focuses, first, on the governance of capabilities and, second, on the capability of governance. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8426 Files in this item: 1
Foss_SMGWP2012_1.pdf (780.0Kb) -
Foss, Nicolai J.; Klein, Peter G. (København, 2007)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This chapter reviews and discusses rational-choice approaches to organizational governance. These approaches are found primarily in organizational economics (virtually no rational-choice organizational sociology exists), particularly in transaction cost economics, principal-agent theory, and the incomplete-contracts or property-rights approach. We distill the main unifying characteristics of these streams, survey each stream, and offer some critical commentary and suggestions for moving forward. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7438 Files in this item: 1
smg_wp_11.pdf (832.2Kb) -
Governance and control in research evaluationHansson, Finn (København, 2004)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Organizations perform evaluations in order to demonstrate their trustworthiness to the outside world and to produce knowledge for use by the management of the organization. In the planning and application of specific evaluations in the organization, different participants or stakeholders very often disclose different, hidden or conflicting agendas. In recent years, the use of evaluations in organizations has grown rapidly and we have witnessed the rise of a new bureaucratic instrument in the realm of knowledge production in organizations, viz., internal evaluations. Such evaluations produce a set of data as part of the evaluation process and the long-term impact of this new systematically organised set of data on organizational activities are normally not taken seriously into consideration when the use of evaluations in organizations are discussed. Said differently, evaluations have become a major factor in the management of organizations, but the academic literature on internal evaluation very rarely discusses the impact of this instrument on the long term behaviour and activity of members of the organization. This lacuna in the literature persists despite the well known fact, established by numerous studies of organizational sociology, that people tend to adapt to external behavioural demands especially when related to power relations in the organization. keywords: research evaluation, governance, social control, publication counts. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/6309 Files in this item: 1
wp14-2004.pdf (142.9Kb) -
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an Austrian viewSautes, Frédéric E.; Foss, Nicolai Juul (København, 1999)[More information][Less information]
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The Case of 'Making-or-Buying' ArticlesVang, Jan (København, 2003)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: In this paper the two canonical theories of the firm - transaction costs economics and the knowledge-based view of the firm – predictions on ‘make-or-buy’ are tested on the news industry. The news industry provides an interesting case on which to test the two theories since it is characterized by a high degree of urgency. Urgency refers to the need to catch and process inputs fast. A tendency that is becoming more widespread in other industries where the production cycle tends to be reduced. The test is don on original data on the newspaper industry collected by the author. The conclusions drawn are that that newspapers are organized differently than is predicted from the knowledge-based view of the firm and transaction cost economics. The newspapers do no specialize in core competencies measured in terms of topics covered. On the contrary, a precondition for outsourcing is well-developed competencies in house. The widespread use of integration cannot either be explained as a solution to hold up either, such as transaction cost economics predicts. The reason behind has to be sought in urgency. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7259 Files in this item: 1
03-13.pdf (345.4Kb) -
Foss, Nicilai J.; Klein, Peter G.; Linder, Stefan (Frederiksberg, 2013)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Austrian economics focuses on markets, but has much to say about organizations. In particular, Austrian insights on the structure of production, the heterogeneity and subjectivity of resources, the nature of uncertainty, the role of monetary calculation, and the function of the entrepreneur provide solid foundations for a distinctly Austrian theory of organizations. We review these insights, discuss recent literature on Austrian economics and the theory of the firm, and suggest new directions for developing and extending an Austrian approach to organizations. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8692 Files in this item: 1
Foss_Klein_Linder_SMGWP2013.pdf (544.3Kb) -
(Re)assembling work in the Danish PostMogensen, Mette (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The well-being of employees is currently a central matter of concern both in public and private companies. If employees do not feel well, in the last instance they might experience a burn out or fall ill from stress and thus add to the highly costly yet ever growing number filling up the statistics of this modern epidemic. In short, well-being is key to productivity. For sure this is not a new story, but at the core of organization and management theory: how to best organize the human resources of production balancing off the need for increased productivity and the preservation of physical and mental resources of the worker? In contrast to classic principles such as Taylor’s scientific management, it seems today generally agreed that well-being thrives when work is organized by principles of ‘flexibility’, ‘learning’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘creativity’. However, at the same time workplaces and organizations are under an enormous pressure towards standardization and optimization. This dissertation investigates empirically competing or intersecting ways of organizing well-being and productivity, with an analytic outset in the work task, departing from historically generated, however still prevalent, dichotomies and normativities of standardization and flexibility respectively. The empirical case of the dissertation is the organization of postal work in a big and formerly publicly run distribution company in Denmark. Based on an ethnographic field work and the employment of an auto-photographic method, the dissertation investigates how the current and simultaneous efforts of standardization and flexibility configure the well-being(s) and productivities of postal work. The theoretical framework is primarily informed by Actor Network Theory and the dissertation attend to a detailed investigation of how well-being and productivity are enacted in the daily work practices and the constant shifting/delegation going on between the inscribed postal worker of work tools, standard procedures and management programs on the one side and the routinized bodies of the postal workers on the other. Most of the time this results in ‘working compatibilities’ silently enacting bodies-with-standards that are both productive and well. At other times, however, controversy and conflicts arise, pointing to the fact that the presence of multiple modes of organizing are not always productive. The empirical chapters departs from selected auto-photographs that prompt different unfoldings of the way postal work is organized – or sought organized – and the way well-being and productivity arise as effects of these organizations. In this unfolding the analysis proceed on a tension between phenomenological and actor-network theoretical readings of empirical material creating a patchwork-like assemblage of postal work. This involves a stitching together of highly mundane, corporeal practices and material such as bicycles and kickstands, personal experiences, the researcher’s interpretations, the technical scripts of electric bikes, the norms of postal workers, the discourse of management and the political-economic developments of European postal markets. Through the empirical chapters, the dissertation depicts postal work not as a story of standardization versus flexibility, but as a constant ‘juggling’ and balancing act between them. This is not a story of humanization or the opposite, it is both at once. It is not a story of stabilization or perpetual change, it is both at once. It is a story of the hanging-togetherness of an organization that displays multiple versions of well-being and productivity as well as multiple controversies as a result of this. Depending on the stakes one has in this complex organizational set-up, whether one is the postal worker, the local manager, the HR consultant or perhaps the customer, preferences will differ, and indeed this is an important discussion. What is the better way to organize postal work? The analysis presented in the dissertation will not deliver the answer to this, but hopefully make the discussion a more qualified one, by displacing old truths. Having as point of departure and final emphasis a heuristics of the work task, the thesis aims to contribute to a specification of organization theory, HRM and work environment theorizing, which otherwise tend to have lost its primary object: work. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8589 Files in this item: 1
Mette_Mogensen.pdf (9.923Mb) -
past and future directionsFüssel, Lanni (København, 2003)[More information][Less information]
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Competency and Change in Public Sector Work PracticesHull Kristensen, Peer; Bojesen, Anders (København, 2005)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This paper invites to discuss the processes of individualization and organizing being carried out under what we might see as an emerging regime of change. The underlying argumentation is that in certain processes of change, competence becomes questionable at all times. The hazy characteristics of this regime of change are pursued through a discussion of competencies as opposed to qualifications illustrated by distinct cases from the Danish public sector in the search for repetitive mechanisms. The cases are put into a general perspective by drawing upon experiences from similar change processes in MNCs. The paper concludes by asking whether we can escape from a regime of competence in a world defined by a rhetoric of change and create a more promising world in which doubt and search serve as a strategy for gaining knowledge and professionalism that improve on our capability for mutualism. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7376 Files in this item: 1
organizing process.pdf (581.6Kb) -
An Entrepreneurial Theory of Economic OrganizationKlein, Peter G.; Foss, Nicolai J.; Foss, Kirsten (København, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Recent work links entrepreneurship to the economic theory of firm using the Knightian concept of entrepreneurship as judgment. When judgment is complementary to other as-sets, and these assets or their services are traded in well-functioning markets, it makes sense for entrepreneurs to hire labor and own assets. The entrepreneur’s role, then, is to arrange or organize the human and capital assets under his control. We extend this Knightian concept of the firm by developing a theory of delegation under Knightian uncertainty. What we call original judgment belongs exclusively to owners, but owners may delegate a wide range of decision rights to subordinates, who exercise derived judgment. We call these employees "proxy-entrepreneurs," and ask how the firm’s or-ganizational structure — its formal and informal systems of rewards and punishments, rules for settling disputes and renegotiating agreements, means of evaluating perform-ance, and so on — can be designed to encourage forms of proxy-entrepreneurship that increase firm value while discouraging actions that destroy value. Building on key ideas from the entrepreneurship literature, Austrian economics, and the economic theory of the firm we develop a framework for analyzing the tradeoff between productive and de-structive proxy-entrepreneurship. We link this analysis to the employment relation and ownership structure, providing new insights into these and related issues in the eco-nomic theory of the firm. Keywords: Judgment, entrepreneur, delegation, employment relation, ownership. JEL Codes: B53, D23, L2 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7452 Files in this item: 1
smg 2006-48.pdf (368.6Kb) -
Mikkelsen, Line; Hardt, Daniel; Ørsnes, Bjarne (Frederiksberg, 2011)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Overt VP anaphors like do so, do it and do the same can host a following PP (Culicover & Jackendoff (2005:285–6), Huddleston & Pullum (2002:1533), Miller (2011:5–6), Sobin (2008:150, 155–157)): (1) The House is set to take up the final version of the funding bill tomorrow. The Senate will do the same on Thursday. [COCA] (2) You have jilted two previous fiances and I expect you would do the same to me. [COCA] Using (1) to fix terminology, the ANAPHOR is do the same, the ANTECEDENT is take up the final version of the funding bill, the ORPHAN is on Tuesday, and the CORRELATE is tomorrow. Examples like (2) are of particular interest because the correlate (two previous fiances) is inside the antecedent and, consequently, the orphan and the antecedent must interact to produce the interpretation of the clause containing the anaphor. In order to arrive at the interpretation ‘you would jilt me’, the me of the orphan must take the place of two previous fiances inside the antecedent VP. A superficially similar situation arises with remnants of ellipsis, including pseudogapping (3), sluicing (4), and fragment answers (5). In each case, the interpretation of the ellipsis clause combines part of the antecedent with all or part of the remnant. (3) I wouldn’t say that to my mother, but I would to you. (4) I know he gave the dresser away, but I don’t know to who. (5) Q: Who did he give the dresser to? A: To me. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8469 Files in this item: 1
mikkelsen_hardt_oersnes_2011.pdf (136.1Kb) -
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Lessons from EstoniaKhoury, Sarkis Joseph; Wihlborg, Clas (København, 2005)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The literature on Currency Boards (CB) stops at the water edge in terms of dealing with the totality of the functions of a central bank. Monetary policy, and banking supervision can be "outsourced" in an open economy with substantial foreign direct investment (FDI) in the banking sector if political nationalism does not trump economic rationality. An orthodox CB renders the central banking function redundant in terms of interest rate and exchange rate determination. FDI in banking could perform the same role for the supervisory function of central banks. We use the case of Estonia to illustrate the feasibility of, and constraints on, outsourcing of central bank functions. A brief discussion of the Argentinian experience is used for contrast. Key words: Currency Board, Foreign Banks, Supervision, Regional Integration,outsourcing. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7168 Files in this item: 1
wplefic032005.pdf (270.1Kb) -
Bennedsen, Morten; Schultz, Christian (København, 2003)[More information][Less information]
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reducing employee computer crime through Situational Crime PreventionWillison, Robert; Siponen, Mikko (København, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Employee computer crime represents a substantial threat for organisations. Yet information security researchers and practitioners currently lack a clear understanding of how these crimes are perpetrated, which, as a consequence, hinders security efforts. We argue that recent developments in criminology can assist in addressing the insider threat. More specifically, we demonstrate how an approach, entitled Situational Crime Prevention, can not only enhance an understanding of employee computer crime, but also strengthen security practices which are designed to address this problem. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/6456 Files in this item: 1
11_2006.pdf (167.9Kb) -
Industry Involvment in the Development of Energy RegulationsGeorg, Susse; Garza de Linde, Gabriela; Schweber, Libby; Sexton, Martin (Frederiksberg, 2011)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The 2002 European Union (EU) directive on the energy performance of buildings (Directive 2002/91/EC) set minimum standards on the energy performance of new buildings and existing buildings. It also indicated that these would be subject to periodic renovation. In some countries the directive supported policymakers in their bid for national commitments to carbon reduction. In others, it affirmed existing commitments. In most countries, it informed the ongoing reformulation of building regulations. This paper explores energy related developments in building regulations for new housing in Denmark (DK) and the United Kingdom (UK). The interest of the comparison lies in similarities in the type of changes introduced into the regulations and differences in industry responses. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8406 Files in this item: 1
Susse_Georg_2.pdf (97.79Kb)