Small Firms and Economic Transformation in Bulgaria

The pace of transition to a market economy has been slower in Bulgaria than in some other east European countries in the 1990s. Output levels in the state owned sector, which has not yet been subject to mass privatisation, have fallen sharply and there has been a dramatic increase in unemployment. There has however also been a rapid growth in the number of small firms, and the ability of this sector to generate new jobs will be an important component of labour market dynamics in the future. Some of the main characteristics of this emergent sector are identified on the basis of a sample survey of nearly 400 small Bulgarian firms, covering competitiveness, entrepreneurship, innovation, networking, labour relations and business performance of the small firms. Key features of a subset of small firms with an orientation towards employment growth are identified.     

Developing Countries' Changing Participation in World Trade

Recent years have seen substantial reductions in trade policyand other barriers inhibiting developing country participationin world trade. Lower barriers have contributed to a dramaticshift in the pattern of developing country trade—awayfrom dependence on commodity exports to much greater relianceon manufactures and services. In addition, exports to otherdeveloping countries have become much more important. Thesechanges have profound implications for the role played by developingcountries in the world economy and trade system.      

Asymmetric performance: the market share impact of scale and link alliances in the global auto industry

This study investigates how participating in strategic alliances with rivals affects the relative competitive positions of the partner firms. The paper builds on studies that show significant differences in the outcomes of scale and link alliances. The study argues that the more asymmetric outcomes of link alliances translate into greater changes in the relative market shares of the partner firms, due to unbalanced opportunities for inter‐partner learning and learning by doing. We find support for this argument by examining 135 alliances among competing firms in the global automobile industry, from 1966 to 1995. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adolph Lowe's Methodological Alternative for Economic Research and Policy

A bstract . Social scientists and philosophers are engaged in a profound re-examination of the foundations of economic science. Among them the economist, Adolph Lowe , opened a new vista. First, in his Economics and Sociology: A Plea for Cooperation in the Social Sciences (1935) he argued compellingly for a unified social science. Lowe introduced there the concept of " instrumental analysis " which he greatly modified in On Economic Knowledge (1965) and applied to a major issue of contemporary economics in The Path of Economic Growth (1976). Instrumental analysis is intended to achieve a system of " political economics ," a theory for deriving one or more paths—a sequence of positions—over which an initial state of an economy can be transformed into a terminal state—a goal itself stipulated by political decision. Instrumental analysis is also used to determine measures of public control to achieve the behavioral pattern suitable to set and keep the system on the goal-adequate trajectory.     

Management accounting and corporate governance: An institutional interpretation of the agency problem

Challenging the dominant economic agency theory of corporate governance with a new discourse drawn from institutional theory, the paper analyses how management accounting is implicated in corporate governance. The proposed institutional theory of agency links the micro-institutions of the organization that are informed by the practices of management accounting with external institutional players and stakeholders. The paper identifies emerging narratives in which the management accounting profession has recognised a distinctive, post-Enron set of sensibilities. Although techniques drawn from strategic management accounting can be adapted to embed better corporate governance practices, the institutional theory of agency identifies tensions between the heroic CEO narrative and the routinization of strategy implicit in strategic management accounting.     

The role of geographic distance in completing related acquisitions: Evidence from U.S. chemical manufacturers

Acquisitions often do not reach completion when buyers' initial evaluations change during post‐announcement due diligence investigations, but research offers only limited explanations for when such deal‐cancelling new information will be most common. Drawing from the spatial geography and acquisition strategy literatures, we argue that successful completion of acquisitions can be partially explained by their spatial characteristics. We start by predicting that geographic distance has a particularly strong impact in reducing the likelihood of completing related acquisitions; we then identify contingencies based on multiple forms of direct, contextual, and vicarious experience that can help acquirers overcome the constraints of distance. We test the arguments with a sample of 1,603 domestic acquisitions announced by 724 U.S. chemical manufacturing firms between 1980 and 2004. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE OF A LARGE BRITISH FINANCIAL INSTITUTION

This study represents an analysis of the changes in the environment, context and structure of an organization, using the full Aston Interview Schedule.² The limitations of generalizing from a single case are acknowledged, but the longitudinal analysis provides support for the notion that organizations can and do develop self-evaluative capacities when threatened by external change. The results of the process of self-evaluation on the part of the organization are shown as changes in the organization's scores on the various scales of organizational context and structure developed by the Aston school, at two points in time. These changes provide support for a number of conjectures arising from previous analyses of the relationships among the structural dimensions of organizational form displayed by the Aston methodology; notably the relationship between size/standardization and centralization/standardization. The analysis also suggests that the centralization scale can be viewed as having two components – one related to policy decisions, the other to operational decisions.