While characteristically 'Austrian' themes such as entrepreneurship, economic calculation, tacit knowledge and the temporal structure of capital are clearly relevant to the business firm, Austrian economists have said relatively little about management, organization, and strategy. This innovative book features 12 chapters that all seek to advance the understanding of these issues by drawing on Austrian ideas. Building on existing research in transaction cost economics, agency theory, evolutionary economics and the resource-based theory of the firm, the authors cover a wide range of theoretical and applied topics. These include knowledge management, authority and hierarchy, modularity, corporate restructuring, telecommunications regulation and competitive advantage. They clearly show how Austrian ideas can usefully engage, challenge and extend more mainstream perspectives on economic organization. There are many books on Austrian economics and many more on the theory of the firm, but virtually none that integrate these two bodies of literature. Scholars of Austrian economics and academics interested in strategy, organization and the theory of the firm will draw great value from this insightful book.

Series Information:
Routledge Advances in Management and Business Studies

As business struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing world, managers are bombarded with a bewildering array of schemes for how to be a boss and make an organization tick. It's tempting to be seduced by futurist fantasies where every company has the culture of a startup, and where employees in wacky, whimsical office settings, liberated from hierarchies and bosses that oppress them, are the foundation for breakthrough performance. "Get real," warn Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein. These fads ironically lead to micromanaging and, often, to disaster. Companies and societies, they show, need authority and hierarchy to coordinate work, including creative work. And, counterintuitively, Foss and Klein illustrate how the creative use of authority and hierarchy helps companies to be more agile and flexible, enabling educated, motivated people and teams to thrive. And not a moment too soon: Foss and Klein provide evidence that global challenges such as the proliferation of artificial intelligence, economic disruption, empowered knowledge workers, and black swan events such as the pandemic actually make hierarchy and the job of the manager more important than ever.

Resources, Technology and Strategy brings together contributors from Europe, North America and Asia to consider the strategic relationship between technology and other resources, such as production capabilities, marketing prowess, finance and organisational culture. Throughout the book, these experts take a critical approach to RBP (Resource-Based Perspective) in order to assess both its strengths and weaknesses. Case studies also highlight the importance of both having and not having strong technological capabilities in settings as diverse as the US semiconductor industry, small family manufacturing firms in Hong Kong and state-owned enterprises in China.

This book explores a new theory of the firm produced through an exchange between management theory and economics. In the process economics is seen to provide a foundational element for strategy research whilst developing a more realistic theory of the firm with a greater emphasis on its internal features. The success of competence theories of the firm also reflects their ability to explain significant trends in the business world, notably the declining importance of conglomerates and critical features in the success of Asian and Japanese business.

This book explores a new theory of the firm produced through an exchange between management theory and economics. In the process economics is seen to provide a foundational element for strategy research whilst developing a more realistic theory of the firm with a greater emphasis on its internal features. The success of competence theories of the firm also reflects their ability to explain significant trends in the business world, notably the declining importance of conglomerates and critical features in the success of Asian and Japanese business.

Nicolai Foss, the influential European management scholar presents, in this essential book, sixteen of his most prominent papers. Written from a new institutional and Austrian economics perspective, this book focuses on the knowledge-based view of the firm, economic organization and property rights economics. The author critically examines notions of routines and capabilities and calls for the use of micro-foundations in management research. He illustrates the need for more emphasis to be placed upon managerial opportunism and other organizational costs, and highlights how concepts of property rights can inform strategic management. Accompanied by a lively and accessible introduction, this informative volume will invigorate strategic management, organization and international business students and scholars, as well as economists concerned with organization.

'Microfoundations' has become prominent in the discourse of management scholars. But what is it and how does it matter? This Element provides a characterization of microfoundations based on classical work on the methodology of social science and documents and discusses its manifestations in management research over the last one and a half decades. It also covers the relation of microfoundations to multilevel research, criticisms of microfoundations, and empirical research strategies for microfoundations.

Entrepreneurship, long neglected by economists and management scholars, has made a dramatic comeback in the last two decades, not only among academic economists and management scholars, but also among policymakers, educators and practitioners. Likewise, the economic theory of the firm, building on Ronald Coase's (1937) seminal analysis, has become an increasingly important field in economics and management. Despite this resurgence, there is still little connection between the entrepreneurship literature and the literature on the firm, both in academia and in management practice. This book fills this gap by proposing and developing an entrepreneurial theory of the firm that focuses on the connections between entrepreneurship and management. Drawing on insights from Austrian economics, it describes entrepreneurship as judgmental decision made under uncertainty, showing how judgment is the driving force of the market economy and the key to understanding firm performance and organization.

The search for competitive advantage serves as the basis for organizational strategy. This book argues that there are four key sources of competitive advantage and financial success that have not been given the attention they deserve. Firstly, that organizational design and management processes may be strategic resources in their own right. Secondly, that organizational design and management processes can be deployed to create new strategic resources. Thirdly, that managers have begun to think of organizational design and management processes in a proactive way rather than seeing them more passively as necessary facilitators of success. Fourthly, that this new way of looking at organization and management requires a search for new ways of structuring organizational design and managerial processes. These points are driven home through case studies of the Danish firms LEGO Group, Vestas Wind Systems, Coloplast, Chr. Hansen, IC Companys and NKT Flexibles.

Entrepreneurship, long neglected by economists and management scholars, has made a dramatic comeback in the last two decades, not only among academic economists and management scholars, but also among policymakers, educators and practitioners. Likewise, the economic theory of the firm, building on Ronald Coase's (1937) seminal analysis, has become an increasingly important field in economics and management. Despite this resurgence, there is still little connection between the entrepreneurship literature and the literature on the firm, both in academia and in management practice. This book fills this gap by proposing and developing an entrepreneurial theory of the firm that focuses on the connections between entrepreneurship and management. Drawing on insights from Austrian economics, it describes entrepreneurship as judgmental decision made under uncertainty, showing how judgment is the driving force of the market economy and the key to understanding firm performance and organization.

This book develops a property rights approach to firm strategy and demonstrates how it helps address key challenges in strategic management research. It shows that the property rights approach holds important implications both for entrepreneurship and organizational learning theory. Property rights have direct implications for strategic management, as control over assets has an immediate link to the creation and appropriation of economic value. For a firm to execute a competitive strategy, it must hold rights to appropriate resources. This book will appeal to scholars working in the fields of strategic management, organizational theory and resource allocation. It is an invaluable summary of two decades of groundbreaking research.

The 'Austrian' tradition is well-known for its definitive contributions to economics in the twentieth century. However, Austrian economics also offers an exciting research agenda outside the traditional boundaries of economics, especially in the management disciplines. This Element examines how Austrian ideas play a key role in expanding the understanding of fields like entrepreneurship, strategy, and organization. It focuses especially on the vital role that entrepreneurs play in guiding economic progress by shaping firms and their strategic behavior. In doing so, it explains a wide range of contributions that Austrian economics makes to the understanding of key problems in management, while also highlighting many directions for future work in this inspiring tradition.

The search for competitive advantage serves as the basis for organizational strategy. This book argues that there are four key sources of competitive advantage and financial success that have not been given the attention they deserve. Firstly, that organizational design and management processes may be strategic resources in their own right. Secondly, that organizational design and management processes can be deployed to create new strategic resources. Thirdly, that managers have begun to think of organizational design and management processes in a proactive way rather than seeing them more passively as necessary facilitators of success. Fourthly, that this new way of looking at organization and management requires a search for new ways of structuring organizational design and managerial processes. These points are driven home through case studies of the Danish firms LEGO Group, Vestas Wind Systems, Coloplast, Chr. Hansen, IC Companys and NKT Flexibles.

While there are many books on knowledge management, knowledge governance is a concept that has not been so well explored, and is much less understood. Knowledge governance refers to choosing structures and mechanisms that can influence the processes of sharing and creating knowledge.
The book argues that knowledge governance is a distinct issue in management and organization because knowledge processes differ on several dimensions from routine and more traditional processes. The relationship between governance issues and knowledge processes is under-researched, theoretically as well as empirically. Thematically, knowledge governance cuts across fields such as general management, human resource management, the management of intellectual capital, innovation theory, strategic management, technology strategy, and international business. Not surprisingly, existing ideas are developed from the perspectives of different fields and from different underlying disciplinary foundations; however, it often remains unclear how these ideas relate together and how they differ in terms of unit of analysis, mode of analysis, underlying logic and assumptions, etc.
This book is an important step towards overcoming the existing fragmentation in the field by providing a multi-disciplinary collection of chapters on knowledge governance. While the single chapters accentuate the pluralism in the field, they all examine issues that constitute the essence of knowledge governance.

The rise of the knowledge economy has far-reaching implications for the nature of economic organization as well as firm strategy. Not surprisingly, thinking in management studies as well as in economics has been profoundly affected by these changes. Thus, management thinking in particular has been increasingly characterized by a schism between those who advocate 'knowledge' or 'capabilities-based' approaches in the strategy and organization fields and those who adopt more economics-influenced approaches, notably the economics of organization. This book is a sustained attempt to overcome this schism. Its basic argument is that knowledge-based and organizational economics approaches are not substitutes but complements. In particular, organizational economics has much to contribute with respect to furthering the understanding of efficient organization and strategy in the emerging knowledge economy. This theme is taken through several theoretical as well as empirical variations. Themes such as the incentive liabilities of flat, 'knowledge-based' organizations, the role of complementary HRM practices for fostering knowledge sharing and creation, and the role of organizational instruments in the knowledge management activities of the multinational corporate are extensively treated. The book thus contains important implications for knowledge management, organizational design, and international management. The book encompasses nine chapters which critically examine current thinking on strategy, and organization. The reasoning is non-technical. While primarily aimed at a management studies audience, economists and other social scientists will also benefit from it, including Advanced Students, Academics, and Researchers.

The rise of the knowledge economy has far-reaching implications for the nature of economic organization as well as firm strategy. Not surprisingly, thinking in management studies as well as in economies has been profoundly affected by these changes. Thus, management thinking in particular has been increasingly characterized by a schism between those who advocate 'knowledge' or 'capabilities-based' approaches in the strategy and organization fields and those who adopt more economies-influenced approaches, notably the economics of organization. This book is a sustained attempt to overcome this schism. Its basic argument is that knowledge-based and organizational economics approaches are not substitutes but complements. In particular, organizational economics has much to contribute with respect to furthering the understanding of efficient organization and strategy in the emerging knowledge economy. This theme is taken through several theroretical as well as empirical variations. Themes such as the incentive liabilities of flat, 'knowledge-based' organizations, the role of complementary HRM practices for fostering knowledge sharing and creation, and the role of organizational instruments in the knowledge management activities of the multinational corporate are extensively treated. The book thus contains important implications for knowledge management, organizational design and international management. The book encompasses nine chapters which critically examine current thinking on strategy, and organization. The reasoning is non-technical. While primarily aimed at a management studies audience, economists and other social scientists will also benefit from it, including Advanced Students, Academics and Researchers.