J.-C. Spender

The Resource-Based View: A Review and Assessment of Its Critiques

The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has been around for over 20 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 criticism from five of these quite well provided the RBV’s variables, boundaries, and applicability are adequately specified. Three critiques that cannot be readily dismissed call for further theorizing and research. They arise from the indeterminate nature of two of the RBV’s basic concepts—resource and value—and the narrow conceptualization of a firm’s competitive advantage. As their suggestions for this work indicate, the authors feel the RBV community has clung to an inappropriately narrow neoclassical economic rationality, thereby diminishing its opportunities for progress. The authors’ suggestions may assist with developing the RBV into a more viable theory of competitive advantage, especially if it is moved into a genuinely dynamic framework.

Managerial and organizational cognition

Interest in the field of managerial and organizational cognition has been intense over the last few years. This book explores and provides an in-depth overview of the latest developments in the area and presents answers to the questions accompanying its growth: Is the field distinctive? How does it extend our understanding of managerial processes? From different disciplinary perspectives and empirical settings, the contributors study patterns of managerial cognition. In particular, the longitudinal approach reflected in the volume contributes to its impact as a grounded, practice-based analysis of cognition in organizations.

The interaction of intellectual capital assets and knowledge management practices in organizational value creation

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 assets and their management mechanisms might interact in organizational value creation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and argue a theoretical model depicting the connections between IC, KM practices and organizational performance outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on IC and KM literatures to build a theoretical model on how intellectual asset assets and their management practices interact in producing organizational performance. Several conceptual models and related discussion on the interaction of IC and KM practices are put forth. Findings – Organizational value creation is based on both static (IC assets) and dynamic ...

Management as a Regulated Profession: An Essay

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 disciplines present difficulties nor an appropriate focus for our critics. Rather, history suggests we finally parted company with managers after the 1959 Ford and Carnegie reports, as we presumed rationality alone was the sufficient basis for understanding them and their doings. These reports helped us turn management education into a profession even as management itself has yet to become one. To return closer to managers, the author suggests rationality captures one dimension of their practice, whereas the notion of business as an art form might capture its complement. Reformed art education, covering arts history, aesthetics, criticism, and production, provides a framework for studying the managerial art, and leads us to a rich, dynamic theory of the firm.

Data, meaning and practice: how the knowledge-based view can clarify technology's relationship with organisations

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 insufficient. Our knowledge is also insufficient on how to create, acquire, identify, possess or transfer and manage knowledge and skills. Drawing on radical constructivism, we suggest a novel knowledge typology reflecting: a realist/interpretive distinction; an intellectual/practical distinction; a rationality/creativity distinction. The resulting model relates technologies to organisations, illuminating their interaction and the essential learning processes as organisations adopt technologies developed by others.

Speaking about management education: Some history of the search for academic legitimacy and the ownership and control of management knowledge

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the notion of management as a regulated profession and provide a critique of some of the recent critiques of the profession, noting from whence the profession has come and offering a number of alternative ways forward.Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores the notions of ownership and control of professional knowledge, at least as it relates to management, and considers how the profession might fare if it is seen in the light of metaphors other than the rational, scientific approaches.Findings – The paper finds that management education has become professionalised around quasi‐scientific research methods and a regulated body of knowledge which is visibly distant from what managers usePractical implications – The future shape of management education and the place of B‐schools in that process hang on the decisions made about the ideas presented here.Originality/value – This paper provides some interesting insights into the development of management...

How a knowledge-based approach might illuminate the notion of human capital and its measurement

Human capital measurement and accounting has been under discussion for years without any satisfactory methodology emerging. The economic significance of todays knowledge-intensive organizations makes better HC measurement more pressing. We draw on insights from the knowledge-based theory of the firm and conclude we can only make sense of its human capital by looking in detail at its practices. Human capital is the value added at the level of the work practice-as traced by activity-base accounting. Overall the firms human capital totals into its goodwill. The human capital can be estimated and then managed by allocating the goodwill to the activities taking place, a complex distribution process but one precisely complementary to that of activity-base accounting.

Innovation and Learning in High-Reliability Organizations: A Case Study of United States and Russian Nuclear Attack Submarines, 1970–2000

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 ldquoplatform strategyrdquo to facilitate modular innovation in its attack submarine program while maintaining high reliability. We compare the United Statespsila submarine development program against that of the Soviets, who innovated by building a number of different types of nuclear attack submarines to test their new design concepts and thereby aggressively push both manufacturing and performance limits. We illustrate that, by adopting a platform strategy, the U.S. development program was able to sustain reliability by controlling factors that derived from four classes of concern: (1) operational; (2) manufacturing and design; (3) resource limitations, and (4) cultural constraints. The use of a platform strategy assists in maximizing system-wide organizational learning, which helps enrich a culture of reliability. However, at the same time, a platform strategy can hinder revolutionary and architectural innovation and reduce operational flexibility. Finally, we consider whether an HROs innovation strategy is partially shaped by its decision-making process.

Intangibles: theory, categories, and the Kozminski matrix

Analyzing the strategic significance of a firms 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 source of estimates, the same managers whose application of strategic assets sets the value-adding processes of the firm in motion. This is a constructivist approach that raises important theoretical and methodological questions about the nature of the firm and its value-creating capabilities. Objective measures cannot grasp these capabilities, and current efforts to establish such metrics are deeply counter-productive. We propose the ‘business model’ as the firm-specific natural language within which the future value of the intangible assets can be estimated.

The business school model: a flawed organizational design?

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 teaching impractical ideas. The purpose of this paper is to look at this discussions micro foundations and offers a novel approach that presumes managerial judgment is crucial to firms’ processes and, indeed, is the reason firms exist. Design/methodology/approach – The paper combines discussion of the conceptual nature of firms and managing them with data about business schools’ growth and curriculum evolution. Findings – If we presume firms are rational apparatus for achieving known goals, managing is little more than computing; and if Knightian uncertainty is taken seriously, managerial judgment becomes the core of the analysis. But schools that attempt to train st...