Gordon Walker

Southern Methodist University | SMU · Department of Strategy & Entrepreneurship

The globalization of financial markets and the concomitant restructuring decisions of firms challenge the historical legacy of national systems of governance. German corporate ownership patterns and restructuring events in the 1990's are examined here in this light. The results show that ownership links among German firms constitute a “small world”...

A profit centre is an operating unit in a diversified corporation and is so named because it makes a profit or loss on sales in an external product market (Anthony and Govindarajan 2006). The apposite comparison is with a cost centre, which incurs expenses but no revenues to cover them. A profit centre acts and is treated like a stand-alone busines...

Research summary: Juxtaposing competing theories of whether superior profits endure, this article investigates differences in the rates at which firms' profit advantages persist following a significant regulatory change in the rules governing industry competition. Such a change creates two cohorts of firms, Entrants that lack experience in the indu...

The paper examines the dynamics of personnel flows from incumbents to entrants after a break in industry regulation. Following Gould (2002) we argue and observe first that the time-varying network of personnel mobility between incumbent firms forms a status hierarchy, which is split in three discrete groups – high-, middle-, and low-status firms. F...

Who owns the firm (the state, private ownership, foreign investors) has long been an important topic for research on organizations. This paper estimates how much ownership contributes to firm performance, compared to other factors, including industry, region, firm size, year and the firm itself. The data are on manufacturing firms in mainland China...

In this paper we examine how personnel flows from incumbents to entrants affect entrant growth after a significant break in the rules governing competition in an industry. We argue that the time-varying network of personnel mobility between incumbents produces a status hierarchy and measures how technical knowledge and social resources are distribu...

This paper tests the influence of owner type on firm product innovation, controlling for the time-invariant characteristics of the firms themselves. Our data come from a very large sample of manufacturing firms in China from 1998 to 2007 across all regions and thirty industries. We identify three owner types - state owned, privately held, foreign o...

This chapter examines the changes in governance networks, small-world characteristics, and corporate acquisitions in Germany and the U.S. during the period from 2000 to 2005. It analyzes how the properties of the governance networks influence firms’ propensity to make acquisitions and evaluates the effect of the ownership networks on every announce...

An empirically rich study of the influence of social networks on corporate governance across countries and the emergence of a new transnational community. The financial crisis of 2008 laid bare the hidden network of relationships in corporate governance: who owes what to whom, who will stand by whom in times of crisis, what governs the provision of...

In this paper we examine how personnel flows from incumbents to entrants affect entrant growth after a significant break in the rules governing competition in an industry. We argue that the time-varying network of personnel mobility between incumbents measures how technical knowledge and social resources are distributed among them. Consequently, wh...

Syndicated investments in startups within a particular industry follow an evolutionary path consistent with models of industry growth and evolution. Some industries spend a long time gestating, while others grow and mature quickly. Entry into ecommerce industry segments has both characteristics. What spurred the sector's slow emergence and subseque...

The recorded transactions of venture capital investments permit a direct examination of the Braudel hypothesis that regional markets evolve dynamically and interdependently in reference to a global system. This hypothesis contradicts the popular belief that regional financial development is anchored in dense clusters. Using methods of complex graph...

This paper examines how two general cohorts of firms, entrants and incumbents, differ in their competitive intensity following price and entry deregulation in the trucking industry from 1980 to 1993. The results demonstrate that the competitive strength associated with entrants' experience is reduced as they grow. However, organizational size dampe...

This paper develops a dynamic, stochastic growth system for money market fund families and tests how search behavior within this system affects fund family exit. The outcome of search behavior is measured as the time-varying parameters of the growth system, estimated by the Kalman filter. The results provide no evidence that the continuously update...

There is a fundamental conflict in the formation of a network. On the one hand, there are powerful forces toward the reproduction of dense regions of relationships. Reproduction is powerful because it is based upon the accumulation of social capital that requires the maintenance of and reinvestment in the structure of prevailing relationships. Yet,...

This commentary addresses the problem of interfirm network formation from the perspective of multiple types of relationship content and of network structure. The approach builds on Burt’s (1980) typology of network structures and on a range of empirical studies on interorganizational networks. The chapter by Moldoveneau, Baum and Rowley on network...

Although the resource-based view (RBV) is one of the most popular and fruitful areas of strategy research, it often perplexes scholars from other disciplines. Also, it is unclear whether strategy scholars themselves agree on the RBV's basic issues and premises. To clarify the contribution of the RBV, in this paper we elaborate its basic tenets and...

Research analyzing interfirm performance heterogeneity examines how much variance is explained by different classes of analysis such as industry, corporate or business-unit. If the level of performance heterogeneity is determined in part by the stages of industry and firm evolution, separating entrants from incumbents as the industry ages and exami...

Why do firms do what they do? Why does one cut prices while its neighbor buys out competitors? Why does one diversify into new industries while its neighbor spins off subsidiaries to focus on its core competence? Why do some strategies rise while others fall? These are central concerns of both strategic management theorists and economic sociologist...

A fundamental theme in comparative crosscountry research is the convergence of organizational forms in diverse national settings. In this paper we examine a special instance of this theme: the pattern of diversification across industries. A common argument is that technical and market forces compel firms to adopt “coherent” strategies of diversific...

This paper examines the variation in performance of incumbents and entrants following the deregulation of prices and entry in the airline industry. Our approach is similar to earlier studies of interfirm performance heterogeneity across industries. Drawing on theories of industry evolution, we hypothesize that the performance of entrants will have...

The globalization of financial markets and the concomitant restructuring decisions of firms challenge the historical legacy of national systems of governance. German corporate ownership patterns and restructuring events in the 1990's are examined here in this light. The results show that ownership links among German firms constitute a "small world"...

Testing the causal link between a firm-specific competence and its antecedents or consequences has become a key objective for strategy research over the past decade. On one hand, case studies can identify a competence, but with their small sample size, their retrospective research design, and their tendency toward sampling on the dependent variable...

This paper summarizes results from an exploratory field study of application software acquisition decisions and outcomes. We argue that outsourcing for application software is easiest when the objective is to obtain knowledge codified in artifacts such as packaged programs and their documentation. It is more complex when the objective is to get acc...

The formation of a network is determined by the opposition of two forces. The first is the reproduction of network structure as a general social resource for network members. The second is the alteration of network structure by entrepreneurs for their own benefit. The idea of reproduction is a conventional one in organizational sociology but has ta...

This paper investigates how the structure of cooperation in an industry influences the dynamics of entry by start-up firms. Competition over technological dominance induces the entry of start-up firms into new subfields as incumbent firms seek to expand the consumer base using their technology. By cooperating, incumbent firms succeed to varying deg...

The problem of vertical integration is a venerable but increasingly important focus of attention in profit-seeking organizations. Over the past ten years, many industries have seen increased cooperation between buyers and suppliers to achieve more difficult goals caused by rising product market competition. In many firms, this cooperation is balanc...

Do organizations and markets govern transactions differently? This question has motivated a large body of research that has reached divergent conclusions. Proponents of transaction cost theory (Williamson, 1985) have found that organizations and markets differ in their governance capabilities. Other authors (Eccles & White, 1988; Granovetter, 1985;...

This paper examines the association between interfirm cooperation and the innovation output of startup firms in the biotechnology industry. A reciprocal association is hypothesized. The results, however, show only that cooperation affects innovation. Several control variables are related to cooperation and innovation, especially the startup's posit...

This paper examines the association between interfirm cooperation and the innovation output of startup firms in the biotechnology industry. A reciprocal association is hypothesized. The results, however, show only that cooperation affects innovation, not the reverse. Several control variables are related to cooperation and innovation, especially st...

This paper addresses criticisms of transaction-cost theory that it overstates the effect of asset specialization on vertical integration and understates the costs of managing interunit relationships within an organization, particularly for nonstandard organizations and markets. We apply the theory simultaneously to decentralized supply relationship...

In managing strategic risk in sourcing relationships, an organization is assumed to order inputs and operations in terms of their value to accomplishing the firm's product market performance goals. Supplier relationships involving higher value inputs and operations have higher levels of strategic risk, since failure by the supplier leads to greater...

The present study examined the relationship between differences in cognition among the members of a software firm and the position a member occupied in the network of task relationships in the organization. Cognition was measured through judgments about means-ends associations relevant to software product success. The network was analyzed as a bloc...

A theory was developed on the creation, growth, and decline of relationships among organizations and was tested, using a longitudinal study of 95 dyadic relationships among child care and health organizations in Texas. Using LISREL V, the test of the theory showed that substantial revision of the model was required to explain the data adequately. W...

This study focuses on make-or-buy decisions as a paradigmatic problem for analyzing transaction costs. Hypotheses developed from Williamson's efficient boundaries framework were tested in a multiple-indicator structural equation model. The influence of transaction costs on decisions to make or buy components was assessed indirectly through the effe...

"January 1984."

This research examines and compares patterns of coordination among clusters of organizations which are all members of a larger network of human service agencies. The blockmodeling procedure developed by Breiger et al. was used to analyze the data collected, and three tightly connected clusters of agencies werefound to exist in the network. By evalu...

"June 4, 1984."

"January 1984."