J.-C. Spender

Kozminski University · International Business

In 1937 Ronald H. Coase famously suggested micro economists did not understand the 'nature of the firm' and could not answer his 'killer questions': Why firms existed? Why their boundaries and internal arrangements were as they were? Why their performance was so varied? Given private firms are the 'engines' of our capitalist system Coase's charge w...

Getting to grips with Knightian Uncertainty - with Aristotle's help

The community of management researchers, especially the folk in business schools, continues to hide the fact that much research is based on assumptions that make the conclusions irrelevant to practicing managers. There are many reasons for this; one is that the research activity is for their professional academic advancement and is not intended to...

Strategizing implies making agentic choices in some middle ground between un-analyzable free will and agency-denying determinism. Paradoxically, neither view can capture the strategist’s situation or process. So how are strategy theorists approach agency? In our opening sections, we review the mainstream literature and find seven main arguments or...

Purpose Based on the growing interest devoted to knowledge management (KM) in inter-organizational contexts, the purpose of this paper is to systematize existing literature and understand how it developed over time, thus tracing its roots and evolution to unveil gaps and suggest new promising areas for future research. Design/methodology/approach...

Spender, J.-C. 2018. Management Education and Duff McDonald’s Report on the Harvard Business School. Journal of Intercultural Management and Ethics, 1(2): 7-23.

The typical story is that Williamson took off from and tidied up (operationalized) Coase's intuition/s. This story is simply not tenable to anyone who reads deeply into these two writers' work. Unpacking the source of their divergence is trickier. This paper argues they were in completely different camps, using different approaches to seek quite di...

Harvard Business School looms large over management education everywhere. Duff McDonald's history reveals much about how it evolved, but also much about its hypocrisy and self-dealing. Provides important insights into what our industry is up to and how it is developing. Essential reading for Deans everywhere.

In 1937 Coase explored the ‘nature of the firm’ and concluded economists cannot explain why firms exist, why their boundaries are where they are, why their internal arrangements are as they are, or why their performance is so varied. Without a viable theory of the firm we educators have no sound basis for teaching managing them. Economists have not...

a relic of the Academy of Management's submission constraints. It should be rewritten into something longer and more relaxed, a book perhaps-along with a fuller bibliography. That may be the draft's future, in the meantime I am looking for feedback on the points made. These make up a story that leads in several directions but it is tough to see any...

Purpose Startup companies represent a powerful engine of open innovation (OI) processes. The purpose of this paper is to represent a first step in building a map of the state-of-the-art knowledge of the “startups in an OI context” phenomenon. Through the selection and analysis of relevant literature, this study aims at deepening our understanding o...

I argue that the university administration’s challenges arise from the plurality of research and pedagogical methods being deployed and in the varied natures of the knowledge produced in the different scientific disciplines. Thus, a one-size-fits-all logic cannot be applied to universities embracing disciplines as diverse the natural sciences, the...

Business leadership is a hot topic; much new writing, consulting, and teaching. This may be driven by exploding student interest in entrepreneurship as they confront their grim job situation. It may also be driven by management theorists' century of failure to deliver the long-promised "science of managing". The paper is basically methodological, l...

Simon's reputation and legacy are curious and extensive, but opaque. Many talk of bounded rationality without understanding what he meant by it. His 1978 Nobel Prize in economics shocked the economics community, which did not see him as an economist at all. His PhD thesis, eventually published as Administrative Behavior has gone to four editions, y...

Purpose – This paper aims to introduce and explore the creation, transfer, diffusion and application of knowledge in the Chinese context and the Chinese aerospace management modes, methodologies and mechanism, etc., based on the successful managerial experience of China’s aerospace. The paper then illustrates the current research domains and the fu...

Plenty has been written about the history of Knowledge Management (KM), but it has been difficult to know whether there has been much progress over the period discussed. For most authors the challenges begin with trying to define knowledge, and not much has changed here. This chapter takes a different tack, focusing instead on the firm the KM proje...

The paper’s focus is on the business ethics literature and its history, and how it might be reconstituted around a viable theory of the firm. Key here is ‘viable’. Management academics often take ‘the firm’ for granted, ignoring Coase’s question “Why do firms exist?” Yet any answer has fundamental social and ethical implications. Those seeing firms...

We consider the origin, nature, threads, and aims of the movement to search anew for micro foundations to organizational, economic, and strategic analysis. The movement has already generated a substantial literature, one measure of academic success. But its disciplinary contribution is less evident. We argue, first, that the movement’s real and con...

The economics literature on the ‘theory of the firm’ is extensive. But it fails to address Coase’s 1937 ‘killer questions’, his pointing out that we have no rigorous theory of the firm that can explain or justify their existence. In particular we have no theory of how real people, as opposed to computational devices, fit into notions of the firm th...

Histories of management have two deficiencies; (a) they fail to distinguish managing a business from other types of managing, (b) they are more often histories of writing about management than of doing it. Explaining management requires attention to the nature of the thing being managed - the firm. The history must hinge on specific aspects that di...

Business strategy covers business practice and academic research but the two are not strongly related. A history of the topic is presented and two views are contrasted. One is the academic discipline’s view that strategy is the rigorous pursuit of optimal performance. The other, a practitioner’s view, sees strategizing as addressing the “What do we...

Simon’s reputation and legacy are curious and extensive, but opaque. Many talk of bounded rationality without understanding what he meant by it. His 1978 Nobel Prize in economics shocked the economics community, which did not see him as an economist at all. His PhD thesis, eventually published as Administrative Behavior has gone to four editions, y...

Technology is a puzzle despite its evident impact on our lives.

In his 1967 JMS article, Herbert A. Simon argued that the central problem of designing a business school is to find ways to integrate disparate bodies of knowledge and skills into a synergistic relationship for the goal of improving managerial practice. Such knowledge and skills come essentially from two relatively isolated bases of information: “t...

In 1937 Coase explored the ‘nature of the firm’ and concluded economists cannot explain why firms exist, why their boundaries are where they are, why their internal arrangements are as they are, or why their performance is so varied. Without a viable theory of the firm we educators have no sound basis for teaching managing them. Economists have not...

Purpose ‐ Organizational performance is increasingly grounded on knowledge-related issues. The two key academic discussions addressing knowledge in organizations are the intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management (KM) literatures. However, there are very few earlier studies systematically combining these approaches and demonstrating how IC...

What is managing? Most 'stories' hinge on (a) markets, or (b) resources, or (c) individuals-­‐ and the integrating relations managers set up to pursue profit. Presuming adequate information and rationality the stories are (a) managers follow the dictates of market forces, (b) managers acquire and apply resources, and (c) managers direct others. Fir...

Decision-making about innovative change in high-risk networks is exceptionally difficult because system failure may result in catastrophe. We adopt a historical method to compare the US and Soviet choices in their nuclear attack submarine programs between 1970 and 1996 and to surface their complex political, technological, and operational relations...

Purpose – There has been considerable discussion recently about business schools’ shortcomings and how their curriculum should be changed. Many presume discipline-wide agreement that managing is a rational and model-able decision-making practice. But practitioners are not convinced and often suggest rationality-dominated business schools are teachi...

An Essay on the Nature of Managerial Judgment and it Place in Our Discourse about Firms

Decision-making about innovative change in high-risk networks is exceptionally difficult because system failure may result in catastrophe. We adopt a historical method to compare the US and Soviet choices in their nuclear attack submarine programs between 1970 and 1996 and to surface their complex political, technological , and operational relation...

An examination of the contrasting theorizing of Frank Knight and Ronald Coase that opens up a theoretical space for a theory of entrepreneurship and the firm as an apparatus to articulate the entrepreneurial idea.

En 1937, Ronald Coase plantea varias preguntas asesinas sobre la naturaleza de la empresa, ¿por qué (a) existen, (b) están sus fronteras donde ellas están, (c) son sus mecanismos internos como son, y (d) su rendimiento es tan variado. Estas preguntas dio lugar al surgimiento de nuevas "teorías de la empresa" - teoría principal-agente, el análisis d...

Draft v1

Analyzing the strategic significance of a firm's intellectual capital separates tangible assets from intangible assets, and demands close attention to how the latter are valued. Conventional methods based on cost or market value are of little relevance. Ultimately, the analysis turns on who makes the estimate and to what end. We argue for a third s...

Our Festschrift is dedicated to lauding and explicating Professor Nonaka’s thinking, contributions and influence. His impact has been especially notable in the field of knowledge management (KM). Clearly KM began long ago as the ancient activity of developing, codifying, testing, storing, transmitting and applying human knowledge — or, as Nonaka an...

We critically examine Herbert Simon's 1967 essay, The Business School a Problem in Organizational Design. We consider this essay within the context of Simon's key ideas about organizations, particularly those closely associated with the 'Carnegie perspective' on organizations and how they influenced the reinvention of American business schools in t...

“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state o...

Social scientists in general, and BSchool faculty in particular, are in sore need of a theory of the private sector firm that relates managers' activity to the creation of economic value. Rational-man based theorizing admits only managers' computable inputs so it cannot address value creation. Along with Adam Smith, I presume individual creativity...

Most organizations fail to take full advantage of their employees' knowledge, initiative, and imagination. in this accessible and practical book, J.-C. Spender and Bruce Strong provide a guide for building entrepreneurial workforces through carefully designed conversations between management and employees. These 'strategic conversations' make emplo...

Design discipline has been relatively slow to recognize the impacts and existence of postmodernism as compared to sociology, political science, marketing and management disciplines, however, recently postmodernist implications have begun to be explored by design scholars. Yet our review of the literature led us to conclude that the relationship bet...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital provides an authoritative, inter-disciplinary, and up-to-date survey of relevant concepts, research areas, and applications of human capital. Macroeconomic research on human capital - the stock of human capabilities and knowledge - has been extensively published but, until now, the literature had lacked a compre...

Porter’s extraordinary record of private, public, academic, and corporate accomplishment has diverse roots, but it is clear that the genesis, publication and impact of Competitive Strategy shifted a promising career as a young award-winning Harvard economist into a very different gear. In this chapter we puzzle why the book has such impact and with...

An exploration of how business schools came to dismiss judgment and praise quantitative methods over all overs.

The chapter presents an overview of the present state of thinking and research around intellectual capital (IC). I explore IC's potential as a concept and/or a path towards improved organizational measurement and performance. I distinguish theorizing IC as an alternative form of capital that can be summed with tangible capital (TC) from thinking of...

This article considers the 'obvious' relationship between human capital (HC) and agency theory (AT) with two goals in mind. First, to show how principal-agent theory (PAT) - the AT variant most understood by agency theory - clarifies HC as a way of describing individuals in the organizational context. Second, to explore how PAT's own shortcomings i...

The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has been around for over twenty years - during which time it has been both widely taken up and subjected to considerable criticism. The authors review and assess the principal critiques evident in the literature, arguing they fall into eight categories. They conclude the RBV’s core message can withstand cri...

This chapter consists of an exchange of ideas about knowledge governance. It aims to seek first principles and microfoundations for the knowledgebased view of organization. Two different opinions and conjectures about knowledge governance are offered and considered broadly. Such matters as the merits of a focus on the individual-level as a starting...

Given their complexity and tight coupling, one of the most serious challenges high-reliability organizations (HROs) face is how to innovate, learn, and adapt without upsetting the internal processes that lead to their reliability. This paper describes the success of the United States Navy in using a “platform strategy” to facilitate modular innovat...

Draws together theorizing in learning, organization and management studies in order to consider the nature of the problems by which the practice of knowledge management is animated. Though in places propositional, the points being made remain deliberately suggestive insofar as they invoke a wide-ranging past to consider what might be probable futur...

Theorists of technology, firms and organisations are now treating knowledge and skills as strategically significant. This is the good news. The bad news is that what we know about what knowledge and skills are is insufficient. Our knowledge is also insufficient on how to create, acquire, identify, possess or transfer and manage knowledge and skills...

Our work on this Special Issue began with a showcase symposium on the philosophical foundations of knowledge management (KM) at the AoM 2004 meeting and was continued through KM tracks at the EURAM 2005 and EGOS 2005 conferences. Our hope was to corral the variety of approaches in the KM literature and expose solid underpinnings against which the f...

The history of management education shows the rigor and relevance gap has been around for centuries, well before its appearance in the United States. Nor is it peculiar to management. It is neither germane to our discipline's present difficulties nor an appropriate focus for our critics. Rather, history suggests we finally parted company with manag...