Entrepreneurship, technology, and the university

In recent years, the small technology-based enterprise ('spin-off') has had a significant impact on regional economic development. As a source of new technology and entrepreneurs, the university has made an important contribution to the formation of new enterprises. This article focuses on the role of the university as an incubator organization and the special problems of academic entrepreneurs and their firms. Guidelines are given to improve the academic entrepreneur's corporate performance and suggestions are offered to enable the university to facilitate the entrepreneurship process. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the future prospects for academic entrepreneurship.     

以人为本 规范运行 构建安全管理新机制

安全在于管理。邯郸矿业集冈有限公司陶一煤矿积极推行以人为本理念，强化安全管理，建立了新的安全管理机制，以实际行动落实了“三个代表”重要思想，使矿井安全生产逐步走上了健康发展的轨道。     

温家宝副总理走近矿工

2003年的除夕之夜,温家宝副总理在阜新矿业集团艾友矿720米深的井下,与矿工一起吃年夜饺子,一起过春节。温副总理一句朴实而真情的话语,感动和鼓舞了全国的煤矿工人…… “我一直想和煤矿工人一起在井下过春节,今天,这个愿望终于实现了。”     

Globalization, new ecologies, new zoologies, and the purported death of the eclectic paradigm

This paper provides a commentary to John Mathews' article in issue 23(1) of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management. I discuss how globalisation is fundamentally altering the milieu within which international business is conducted, and this new ‘ecology’ may indeed require scholars to consider a new ‘zoology’ of firms in the future. However, his specific suggestions are based on sparse evidence, and his alternative to the eclectic paradigm is founded on a misunderstanding of some fundamental concepts.     

小车“超人”再定位

尽管已经进入中国快20年,铃木的口碑仍只是在小型车领域传播,出于品牌向上的考虑,它终于推出了自己的B级车。     

Hiring,Training, and Retaining the Hard-Core

The objective of this paper is to present a model that can explain and predict behavior on programs designed to hire, train, and retain the hard-core unemployed. More than 50 variables and their relationships have been specified. Some of these variables have been identified in other studies, or can be derived from the organization change literature, but this paper tries to provide a comprehensive list of the extensive set of empirically based variables.     

改革体制 创新机制 建设大型煤炭企业集团

黑龙江是东北煤炭资源大省、产煤大省和惟一的煤炭输出省，有鸡西、鹤岗、双鸭山、七台河4个国有重点煤矿。四矿煤炭地质储量150亿吨，煤种有焦煤、1／3焦煤、气煤、肥煤、褐煤等，煤质低硫、低磷、低灰、高挥发分、高热值。煤炭产品有冶炼精煤、动力煤等，主要销往东北三省冶金、电力等企业，部分销往沿海地区和出口国外。有39个生产矿、16个选煤厂以及矿区铁路、水电通讯、建筑建材、火工机加、农林牧副等产业。     

Bureaucracy,economic regulation,and the incentive limits of the firm

This paper uses a transactions cost perspective to examine the development of organizational tendencies that plague the governance of unregulated subsidiaries by regulated parent companies. By focussing on what Williamson (1985) calls the ‘incentive limits’ of firms, conditions that should exacerbate the problems facing these firms as they diversify are identified. Empirical testing of hypotheses drawn from this discussion is conducted using a sample of nonutility, nonregulated subsidiaries of 54 electric utilities. The analysis, using both linear regression and event history methods, confirms the connection between the characteristics of the regulated parent company and subsidiary performance. The paper concludes with a discussion of how further research might extend the state of knowledge on the topic of the economic losses of bureaucracy.     

Envy,comparison costs,and the economic theory of the firm

An economic theory of the firm must explain both when firms supplant markets and when markets supplant firms. While theories of when markets fail are well developed, the extant literature provides a less than adequate explanation of why and when hierarchies fail and of actions managers take to mitigate such failure. In this article, we seek to develop a more complete theory of the firm by theorizing about the causes and consequences of organizational failure. Our theory focuses on the concept of social comparison costs that arise through social comparison processes and envy. While transaction costs in the market provide an impetus to move activities inside the boundaries of the firm, we argue that envy and resulting social comparison costs motivate moving activities outside the boundary of the firm. More specifically, our theory provides an explanation for ‘managerial’ diseconomies of both scale and scope—arguments that are independent from traditional measurement, rent seeking, and competency arguments—that provides new insights into the theory of the firm. In our theory, hierarchies fail as they expand in scale because social comparison costs imposed on firms escalate and hinder the capacity of managers to optimally structure incentives and production. Further, hierarchy fails as a firm expands in scope for the simple reason that the costs of differentially structuring compensation within the firm to match the increasing diversity of activities also rises with increasing scope. In addition, we explore how social comparison costs influence the design of the firm through selection of production technologies and compensation structures within the firm. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In with the old,in with the new: capabilities,strategies, and performance among the Hollywood studios

An increased focus on turbulent environments has led to a growing interest among researchers in the concept of dynamic capabilities. In this study, we approach dynamic capabilities in a framework of two complementary processes. On one hand, firms can build upon existing capabilities in products and markets in which they have experienced recent success; on the other hand, they can also intentionally focus on other products and markets in which they seek to build capabilities to address their lack of recent success. We examine these two processes within project‐based industries and identify replication and renewal as two types of strategies that firms use to add a dynamic component to their capabilities. We also theorize that the success of each of these strategies is tied to differentiation from rivals, and to firm‐level resource availability and industry‐level demand characteristics. We test these propositions by focusing on the film genres that were offered by the Hollywood studios over a thirty‐year period. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finance,Corporate Governance,and the Employment Relationship

This comparative paper examines the relationship between equity markets and corporate governance on one hand, and job tenure, training, and pay on the other. Two dimensions of equity markets and corporate governance are used: share trading activity and mergers and acquisitions. There is support for the posited links between these measures and job tenure, employee stock ownership plans, pay dispersion, and collective bargaining arrangements. Evidence on the relationship with training is more mixed.     

Antitrust,the Rule of Reason,and Democracy

Professor Barnes responds to William Curran's fictional dialogue between Senator John Sherman and philosopher John Rawls, with a fictional letter from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Professor Barnes discusses the importance of the anarcho-socialist movement of the late nineteenth century to the adoption of the Sherman Act, the historical and logical inevitability of adoption of a rule of reason in antitrust law, the relevance of efficiency to the rule of reason, and the relationship between competition and the promotion of democratic ideals.     

Partial monitoring,adverse selection,and the internal efficiency of the firm

The paper investigates an adverse selection model with monitoring of managerial effort. In contrast to the literature, we assume that the manager can be punished only if his effort is below a certain level that is monitored by the principal. Surprisingly, the optimal labor contract may induce an equilibrium effort which is lower than in the standard model without monitoring. This result holds for any discrete distribution of managerial types. In the continuous type case, the optimal contracts for high-quality (low-quality) managers are purely output-dependent (effort-dependent).