In recent years, applied studies have shown widespread, profound and increasing heterogeneity across firms in terms of their strategy, organization arrangement and performance. This book investigates the diversity of business firms, offering a picture of the different organizational settings they adopt in their endeavour to cope with increasing competitive pressure. The book addresses critical theoretical issues surrounding corporate governance, organizational design and cooperative relations among firms. Moreover, it provides new evidence on the various forms of outsourcing that are playing an increasingly important role as a consequence of globalization. The contributions collected in this book stress the emergence of a trend towards a reorganization of production that can enhance the transmission, development and maintenance of knowledge in order to sustain long-run competitive advantage. Providing original and pertinent empirical evidence, this book will attract interest from scholars and postgraduate students studying the economics and organization of the firm. It will also be of value to managers who wish to understand new developments in the organizational settings of business firms with particular reference to corporate governance, organizational design, cooperative relations, outsourcing and de-localization.

Firms in market economies vary enormously in size, nature and competitiveness. In this important contribution to the literature on the theory of the firm, Mario Morroni provides a fresh analytical framework which improves our understanding of the causes of this diversity in organisational design and performance. The relations between internal and external basic conditions, decision-making mechanisms and organisational co-ordination are addressed, as are the circumstances in which capabilities, transactions and scale-scope considerations interact. With the emergence of the knowledge-based economy and the increasing pressure of global competition, the development of capabilities is acquiring ever greater importance in boosting competitiveness. Morroni shows that long-term relational agreements enhance learning processes and offer powerful tools for improving competitiveness in a context of conflicting interests, incomplete knowledge and uncertainty.

This book, first published in 1992, attempts to unify the economic analysis of the production process in order to understand the effects of technical change. It is both an analytical representation of the production process, taking into account the temporal, organizational, and qualitative dimensions of production, and a fact-finding model for studying the economic effects of technical change. The inclusion of temporal and organizational aspects allows the author to examine the analytical implications of research on the nature of firms and the characteristics of technical change, whilst the model is used to analyse technical changes that involve variations of scale or degrees of flexibility. This book deals with themes much discussed in research in industrial economics and management studies and is an important contribution to bringing these two areas of research closer together, providing a general framework for the study of production processes.

Firms in market economies vary enormously in size, nature and competitiveness. In this important contribution to the literature on the theory of the firm, Mario Morroni provides a fresh analytical framework which improves our understanding of the causes of this diversity in organisational design and performance. The relations between internal and external basic conditions, decision-making mechanisms and organisational co-ordination are addressed, as are the circumstances in which capabilities, transactions and scale-scope considerations interact. With the emergence of the knowledge-based economy and the increasing pressure of global competition, the development of capabilities is acquiring ever greater importance in boosting competitiveness. Morroni shows that long-term relational agreements enhance learning processes and offer powerful tools for improving competitiveness in a context of conflicting interests, incomplete knowledge and uncertainty.

This book, first published in 1992, attempts to unify the economic analysis of the production process in order to understand the effects of technical change. It is both an analytical representation of the production process, taking into account the temporal, organizational, and qualitative dimensions of production, and a fact-finding model for studying the economic effects of technical change. The inclusion of temporal and organizational aspects allows the author to examine the analytical implications of research on the nature of firms and the characteristics of technical change, whilst the model is used to analyse technical changes that involve variations of scale or degrees of flexibility. This book deals with themes much discussed in research in industrial economics and management studies and is an important contribution to bringing these two areas of research closer together, providing a general framework for the study of production processes.

Have you ever puzzled over the causes of the 2007-8 financial crisis and wondered how it will affect all our futures? If so, this book is for you. Using imagined dialogue between three economists with contrasting theoretical perspectives and a student who knows little about economics, different interpretations are compared in straightforward, jargon-free language. The book explores both the consequences of neoliberal economic policies based on the belief in efficient, self-regulating markets and the implications of alternative economic visions formulated in response to the Great Recession. In all, nine dialogues are presented, each of which focuses on a key theme: increasing inequality, the failure of economists to predict the crash, the reasons for fiscal austerity, the rolling back of the welfare state, the roles of the state and the market, the repercussions of the German trade surplus and the Eurozone crisis, policies to confront the crisis, environmental degradation, and the need for an industrial policy appropriate to the present day. The book will be ideal for both general readers and those embarking on the study of economics.