Overview

Bruce Kogut's writing has sketched a theory of human motivation that sees managers as social, often altruistic, sometimes as selfish, who care about their colleagues and their status among them. For the first time this book collects together key pieces that show how this view works in application to practical managerial issues, such as technology transfer and licensing, joint ventures as options, and the diffusion of ideas and best practices in the world economy.In an extensive introduction to these chapters, Kogut grounds this view in recent work in neurosciences and behavioural experiments in human sociality. On this basis, he provides a critique of leading schools of thought in management, including the resource based view of the firm cognition, and experimental economics. He proposes that people are hardwired to learn social norms and to develop identities that conform to social categories. This foundation supports a concept of coordination among people that is inscribed in social communities. It is this concept that leads to a theory of the firm as derived from social knowledge and shared identities. Kogut argues that the resource based view of the firm is only a view and it fails as a theory because it lacks a behavioural foundation. If it were to choose one, the choice would be between knowledge and organizational economics. Similarly, he argues that recent statements regarding cognition do not confront the age-old question of shared templates. If it did, it too would have to confront a theory of social knowledge. The author then proposes that this foundation is essential to an understanding of norms and institutions as well. Thus, we are moving into a period in which rapid advances in neuroscience increasingly lead to an integrated foundation for the social sciences. This opening chapter is the gateway to the collected essays, which assemble the author's published articles on knowledge, options, and institutions. The book ends on the most recent work on open source software and generating rules. The chapter on open source discusses how new technology is changing the face of innovation. The final article on generating rules is the segue to the author's current work that looks at how simple rules of social exchange leads to complex patterns of local and global knowledge.

Full Product Details

Author:   Bruce Kogut (, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Professor of Leadership and Ethics, Columbia Business School)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 23.20cm
Weight:   0.583kg
ISBN:  

9780199282531

ISBN 10:   0199282536
Pages:   388
Publication Date:   03 January 2008
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

1: Introduction: Knowledge, Options, and Institutions Part I: Knowledge, Coordination, Categories, Identity 2: with Udo Zander: Knowledge of the Firm, Combinative Capabilities, and the Replication of Knowledge 3: with Udo Zander: Knowledge and the Speed of the Transfer and Imitation of Organizational Capabilities: An Empirical Test 4: with Udo Zander: What Firms Do: Coordination, Identity, and Learning Part II: Practices, Institutions, and Diffusion 5: Country Capabilities and the Permeability of Borders 6: National Systems, Organizational Practices, and Institutions 7: with John Paul MacDuffie and Charles Ragin: Prototypes and Fuzzy Work Practices: Assigning Causal Credit for Performance Part III: Markets , Value, and Options 8: Joint Ventures: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives 9: Joint Ventures and the Option to Expand and Acquire 10: with Nalin Kulatilaka: Operating Flexibility, Global Manufacturing, and the Option Values of a Multinational Network 11: with Nalin Kulatilaka: Strategy, Heuristics, and Real Options Part IV: Institutions and Geography 12: with Paul Almeida: Localization of Knowledge and the Mobility of Engineers in Regional Networks 13: with Anca Metiu: Open-Source Software Development and Distributed Intelligence Part V: Looking Forward 14: Network as Knowledge: Generative Rules and the Emergence of Structure

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Author Information

Bruce Kogut received his Ph.D. from MIT, has been a chaired professor at Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) and at INSEAD (Fontainebleau), and as of September 2007 the Bernstein Chaired Professor at Columbia University. Awarded an honorary doctorate at the Stockholm School of Economics where he has often been a visiting professor, he has also been a visitor at the Ecole Polytechnique, the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin, and the Santa Fe Institute. He is on the principal orginators of the theory of the firm as a reservoir of knowledge and capabilities embedded in social networks. In addition, he introduced the use of real options into strategy in reference to joint ventures and multinational production, and the study of institutions as critical to the study of the diffusion of best practices.

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