Changes in technology and demand require firms to learn how to continuously reshape unique and non-imitable resources and competences. A firm‘s capacity to achieve this is captured by the concept of dynamic capabilities. This book offers an analysis of how firms manage to reconfigure their pool of idiosyncratic resources, skills and competencies to
During the 1980s the Marshallian concept of industrial district (ID) became widely popular due to the resurgence of interest in the reasons that make the agglomeration of specialised industries a territorial phenomenon worth being analysed. The analysis of clusters and IDs has often been limited, considering only the local dimension of the created business networks. The external links of these systems have been systematically under-evaluated. This book offers a deep insight into the evolution of these systems and the internal-external mechanism of knowledge circulation and learning. This means that the access to external knowledge (information or R&D cooperative research) or to productive networks (global supply chains) is studied in order to describe how external knowledge is absorbed and how local clusters or districts become global systems. It provides a unified approach; showing that existing capabilities expand when locally embedded knowledge is combined with accessible external knowledge. In this view, external knowledge linkages reduce the danger of cognitive ‘lock-in’ and ‘over-embeddedness’, which may become important obstacles to local learning and innovation when technological trajectories and global economic conditions change. A selection of international experts
The receipt of knowledge is a key ingredient by which the tourism sector can adjust and adapt to its dynamic environment. However although its importance has long been recognised the fragmentation within the sector, largely as a result of it being comprised of small and medium sized businesses, makes understanding knowledge management challenging. This book applies knowledge management and social network theories to the business of tourism to shed light on successful operations of tourism knowledge networks. It contributes specifically to understanding a network perspective of the tourism sector, the information needs of tourism businesses, social network dynamics of tourism business operation, knowledge flows within the tourism sector and the transformation of the tourism sector through knowledge networks. Social Network Analysis is applied to fully explore the growth and maintenance of tourism knowledge networks and the relationships between tourism sector stakeholders in relation to their knowledge requirements. Knowledge Networks and Tourism will be valuable reading for all those interested in successful operations of tourism knowledge networks.
This book focuses on three main areas, each of which is central to economic theorising: firms’ organisation and behaviour, technological change and the process of globalisation. What this collection provides is a broad view of the three topics by concentrating on different aspects of each of them, and utilising different methods of investigation.
To fill in the gap in theoretical and empirical aspects in the existing international management literature, the book covers a broad variety of issues relating to the challenges facing companies after the recent worldwide crises of financial, sanitary, and geopolitical nature. The book offers an overview of these challenges along three axes: the challenges related to the processes of adapting to the international environment, the challenges affecting the actors of internationalization, and finally the challenges related to the specifics of the international context. The book aims to offer a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical and practical attributes related to the adaptation processes in international business, the cultural evolutions of actors, and the changes in the international environment. It also seeks to help managers and scholars alike to better understand the new challenges in diverse aspects pertaining to international management. To cover these issues, the book addresses topics, which up till now have not been investigated in depth or have not been researched at all. It includes both theoretical and managerial viewpoints and various international examples.
This book provides an explanation for the differences observed in the impact of globalization which is based on the influence of the territory and of the production specialization of the firms.
This book proposes a new approach to economics, management and organization that should help in making economic organization ‘wise’, ‘innovative’ and ‘robust’ in an uncertain and risky world. Although the modern economy and society is ‘knowledge intensive’, Anna Grandori argues that the dominant economic, organizational and behavioural models neglect to a large extent the problem of valid knowledge construction and effective knowledge governance. The book integrates inputs from economics and behavioural science with insights from the philosophy of knowledge to define new micro-foundations: neither a calculative, deductive and omniscient ‘rational actor’; nor an experiential, adaptive and biased ‘behavioural actor’; but a knowledgeable and imaginative ‘epistemic actor’. The implications for contracts and organizations, sustained also by insights from law, are shown to be far reaching, including a new view of the nature of the firm as an entity-establishing agreement under which to discover uses of resources under uncertainty, and as a democratic institution.
The recent financial and economic crisis has spurred a lot of interest among scholars and public audience. Strangely enough, the impact of the crisis on innovation has been largely underestimated. This books can be regarded as a complementary reading for those interested in the effect of the crisis with a particular focus on Europe.
A volume that concentrates on the substantive gaps in the IB/IM field and addresses whether these gaps are resolvable with the theoretical and methodological toolkit.
