This paper develops a resource-based—knowledge-based—theory of the firm. Its thesis is that the organizational mode through which individuals cooperate affects the knowledge they apply to business activity. We focus on the polar cases of organization within a firm as compared to market contracting. There will be a difference in the knowledge that is brought to bear, and hence in joint productivity, under the two options. Thus, as compared to opportunism-based, transaction-cost theory, we advance a separate (yet complementary) answer to the question: why do firms exist? Our aim is to develop an empirically relevant and complementary theory of why firms are formed: a theory based on irreducible knowledge differences between individuals rather than the threat of purposeful cheating or withholding of information. We assume limited cognitive abilities on the part of individuals (bounded rationality), and assume that opportunistic behavior will not occur. The latter allows us to determine whether resource-based...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2635286.pdf

A Resource-Based Theory of the Firm: Knowledge Versus Opportunism

This research examines the role played by the ‘causally ambiguous’ nature of knowledge in the process of knowledge transfer between strategic alliance partners. Based on a cross-sectional sample of 147 multinationals and a structural equation methodology, this study empirically investigates the simultaneous effects of knowledge ambiguity and its antecedents—tacitness, asset specificity, prior experience, complexity, partner protectiveness, cultural distance, and organizational distance—on technological knowledge transfer. In contrast to past research that generally assumed a direct relation between these explanatory variables and transfer outcomes, this study’s findings highlight the critical role played by knowledge ambiguity as a full mediator of tacitness, prior experience, complexity, cultural distance, and organizational distance on knowledge transfer. These significant effects are further found to be moderated by the firm’s level of collaborative know-how, its learning capacity, and the duration of the alliance. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ambiguity and the process of knowledge transfer in strategic alliances

This paper provides an overview of the main theoretical elements and empirical underpinnings of a managerial power approach to executive compensation. Under this approach, the design of executive compensation is viewed not only as an instrument for addressing the agency problem between managers and shareholders but also as part of the agency problem itself. Boards of publicly traded companies with dispersed ownership, we argue, cannot be expected to bargain at arm's length with managers. As a result, managers wield substantial influence over their own pay arrangements, and they have an interest in reducing the saliency of the amount of their pay and the extent to which that pay is de-coupled from managers' performance. We show that the managerial power approach can explain many features of the executive compensation landscape, including ones that many researchers have long viewed as puzzling. Among other things, we discuss option plan design, stealth compensation, executive loans, payments to departing executives, retirement benefits, the use of compensation consultants, and the observed relationship between CEO power and pay. We also explain how managerial influence might lead to substantially inefficient arrangements that produce weak or even perverse incentives.

/pdf/executive-compensation-as-an-agency-problem-nn4xarpjrz.pdf

Executive Compensation as an Agency Problem

Since the early 2000s, scholars from a variety of disciplines have used the concept of financialization to describe a host of structural changes in the advanced political economies. Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society. This paper evaluates the insights of more than a decade of scholarship on financialization. Three approaches will be discussed: the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life. It is argued that a deeper understanding of financialization will lead to a better understanding of organized interests, the politics of the welfare state, and processes of institutional change.

Making sense of financialization

In this paper we argue that unobservable constructs lie at the core of a number of influential theories used in the strategic marmgement literature—including agency theory, transaction cost theory, and the resource-based view of the firm. The debate over how best to deal with the problem of unobservables has raged in the philosophy of science literature for the best part of the current century. On the one hand, there are the positivists, who believe that theories containing unobservable constructs are only useful as tools for making predictions. According to positivists, such theories do not inform us about the deep structure of reality. On the other hand, there are the realists, who believe that our theories can give us knowledge about unobservables. Herein we review this debate, we argue for adopting a realist position, and we draw out the implications for strategic management research.

The problem of unobservables in strategic management research

During the 1990s, U.S. managerial capitalism underwent a profound transformation from a technocratic to a "proprietary" form. In the technocratic era, managers had functioned as teams to sustain the firm and to promote social welfare by satisfying the demands of competing stakeholders. In the new proprietary era, corporate bureaucratic teams broke up into tournaments in which managers competed for advancement toward the CEO prize. The reward system of the new era depended heavily on stock options that were accompanied by downside risk protection. The tournaments turned managers into a special class of shareholders who sought to maximize their individual utility functions even if deviating from the firm's best interest. Once this new regime became established, managers discarded their technocratic, stakeholder creed and adopted a property rights ideology, originally elaborated in academia by financial agency theorists. Managers hardly noticed (or cared) they were capturing a disproportionate share of the new wealth being generated in the U.S. economy. When critics brought this fact to light, managers replied like well-schooled economists: markets worked efficiently. Whether they worked fairly was a question they did not address.

The End of Managerial Ideology: From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Social Indifference

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) played the lead role in pursuing large-scale leveraged buyouts in the U.S. market for corporate control in the 1980s by taking advantage of investment opportunities created by three decades of public policies regarding antitrust, pensions, corporate governance, and banking. KKR's innovations were its ability to overcome investors' collective action and monitoring problems by arranging takeovers through limited partnerships and by managing acquired firms through shared equity ownership with management. These organizational innovations, when combined with the financial changes of the 1980s, allowed KKR and its investor-controlled associations to challenge managerially controlled firms.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and the Restructuring of American Capitalism

Oliver Williamson has greatly contributed to refining neoclassical economics by incorporating transaction costs and internal organization; yet, his new institutional economics too easily dismisses the role of technology. In doing so, he has replaced the determinism of technological production efficiencies with the determinism of transaction cost efficiencies. A review shows that Williamson's new institutionalism has evolved through three stages in terms of the focus of his analysis and his views of transactions. Throughout this evolution, however, his proposed solutions to organizational failures have actually continued to rely heavily upon technology.

Technology and Oliver Williamson's transaction cost economics

Selecting an Organizational Structure for Implementing Issues Management: A Transaction Costs and Agency Theory Perspective

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The End of Managerial Ideology: From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Social Indifference

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and the Restructuring of American Capitalism

Technology and Oliver Williamson's transaction cost economics

Selecting an Organizational Structure for Implementing Issues Management: A Transaction Costs and Agency Theory Perspective