Johannes Glückler

Bridging Uncertainty in Management Consulting: The Mechanisms of Trust and Networked Reputation:

This article analyzes the market of management consulting and identifies institutional and transactional uncertainty as its principal features. Based on these uncertainties, we argue that competition in this market takes place on entirely different grounds than in other business sectors. We suggest that the main drivers of competitiveness are neither price nor measurable quality, but rather experience-based trust and a mechanism we label ‘networked reputation.’ An embeddedness perspective is employed to develop the concept of networked reputation as an intermediate mechanism that complements the duality of system versus personal trust and accounts for firm growth. We reinterpret secondary data on the German consulting market, illustrate the significance of these mechanisms, and demonstrate how management consulting is situated in structures of social relations.

The Relational Economy: Geographies of Knowing and Learning

How are firms, networks of firms, and production systems organized and how does this organization vary from place to place? What are the new geographies emerging from the need to create, access, and share knowledge, and sustain competitiveness? In what ways are local clusters and global exchange relations intertwined and co-constituted? What are the impacts of global changes in technology, demand, and competition on the organization of production, and how do these effects vary between communities, regions, and nations? This book synthesizes theories from across the social sciences with empirical research and case studies in order to answer these questions and to demonstrate how people and firms organize economic action and interaction across local, national, and global flows of knowledge and innovation. It is structured in four clear parts: - Part I: Foundations of Relational Thinking - Part II: Relational Clusters of Knowledge - Part III: Knowledge Circulation Across Territories - Part IV: Toward a Relational Economic Policy? The book employs a novel relational framework, which recognizes values, interpretative frameworks, and decision-making practices as subject to the contextuality of the social institutions that characterize the relationships between the human agents. It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate students across the social sciences, and practitioners in clusters policy.

Resources in Economic Geography: From Substantive Concepts towards a Relational Perspective

Resources are crucial for the technological and economic development of firms in spatial perspective. In this paper we contrast two ways of conceptualizing resources, and argue that a conventional, substantive understanding implies a number of shortcomings which can be overcome through the application of a relational conception of resources. In examining four types of resources—material resources, knowledge, power, and social capital—our argument is that resources are constituted in a relational way in two aspects. First, resources are relational in that their generation, interpretation, and use are contingent. This depends on the particular institutional structures and social relations, as well as on the knowledge contexts and mental models of the agents involved. Second, some types of resources, such as power and social capital, are also relational because they cannot be possessed or controlled by individual agents. They are built and mobilized through day-to-day social practices. Individuals or groups of agents may appropriate the returns, but not the resources themselves. We conclude that a relational concept reflects the contextual and interactive nature of the selection, use, and formation of resources. This offers new insights into the explanation of heterogeneity in firm strategies and trajectories, as well as regional differences in the development of localized industry configurations, such as clusters.

Institutional change in economic geography

This paper develops a rigorous concept of institutions to investigate the interrelationships between institutional and economic change from the perspective of economic geography. We view institutions neither as behavioural regularities nor as organizations or rules, but conceive institutions as stabilizations of mutual expectations and correlated interaction. The paper discusses how economic interaction in space is shaped by existing institutions, how this leads to economic decisions and new rounds of action, and how their intended and unintended consequences impact or enact new/existing institutions. The paper explores three modes of institutional change – hysteresis, emergent change, and institutional entrepreneurship.

Making embeddedness work: social practice institutions in foreign consulting markets

This paper develops conceptual and empirical evidence for the importance of social practice institutions in the internationalisation process of management-consulting firms. Personal trust and reputation rather than price are examined as key mechanisms of foreign market entry and penetration. Empirical case studies in London, Frankfurt, and Madrid produce three findings. First, enduring client relations and client referrals facilitated most foreign firm entries and the majority of local client acquisition. Second, interview findings imply a critical assessment and reconceptualisation of trust and reputation. Empirically, goodwill trust and networked reputation are substantiated as particularly important transaction mechanisms. Third, a triangulation of interview and survey data reveals a causal relation between trust and reputation that enhanced a cumulative growth of social networks within the new host markets. This research points to the importance of social practice institutions for economic organisation and exchange across geographic distance.

Emerging themes in economic geography: outcomes of the Economic Geography 2010 Workshop

Background Economic Geography sponsored a workshop to brainstorm collectively the emerging research themes in economic geography. We gathered a small group of midcareer scholars from 19 institutions in 7 countries on April 12–13, 2010, in Washington, D.C., to address what we considered a collective concern: that our discipline could use a significant boost in theoretical and thematic developments at this particular juncture. The workshop was intended to be one of the journal’s many contributions to disciplinary activities and ongoing efforts to keep the discipline vibrant for the next generation.The workshop aimed to achieve multiple goals. First, this was an attempt to develop a sense of collective responsibility for the discipline’s future. Economic geography is no longer monological and singularly centered, as Peck and Olds (2007) observed in their assessment of the Summer Institute of Economic Geography. Indeed, prior to the workshop, quite a few participants reported that they did not have a particular identity affiliation to the discipline but instead enjoyed multiple disciplinary affiliations through joint appointments or appointments in multidisciplinary departments. The increasingly specialized and fragmented nature of the discipline and the resulting “disappearing of the middle” translate into fewer scholars who are dedicated to the discipline, which, in turn, endangers the survival of the discipline. As Johnston (2002, 425) stated, “eternal vigilance is necessary to survival” of a discipline, and mobilization, as in the language of Latour, is a first step in disciplinary change (Johnston 2006).Thus, as editors with a disciplinary name that crowns the journal, we thought that the time was ripe for a deliberate intellectual mobilization.ecge_1114 111..126

A Relational Typology of Project Management Offices

This explorative article develops a relational typology of PMOs based on their roles with stakeholders. A multi-case study was used to identify the roles of PMOs in multiple-PMO settings. A three-dimensional role space allows locating the complex relational profiles that PMOs take on with respect to their stakeholders in practice. Superordinate, subordinate, and coequal roles were identified in a framework of servicing, controlling, and partnering in organizations. While servicing (subordinate role profile) and controlling (superordinate role profile) support organizational effectiveness and exploitation of knowledge, partnering (coequal role profile) creates the slack necessary for potential exploration of new knowledge.

Exploring PMOs through community of practice theory

This article explores project management offices (PMOs) through community of practice theory. Preliminary results from a national health care case study are used to confirm the legitimacy of this approach. Todays knowledge-based economy calls for mechanisms to share knowledge. The issue of making more with less is at stake in order to reuse good practices, support innovative practice, and prevent the reinvention of the wheel. Members of these communities are at the heart of the learning process. The originality of this research is that it sheds light on PMOs in a new theoretical perspective within the field of knowledge management.

Project Management Knowledge Flows in Networks of Project Managers and Project Management Offices: A Case Study in the Pharmaceutical Industry

This study investigates the knowledge flows among and between project managers and project management office (PMO) members in a pharmaceutical R&D company in China, using a mixed-methods approach. The results show that knowledge exchange happens in clusters, where each cluster forms around a PMO member. Contrary to expectations, PMO members were not identified as the most popular knowledge providers in these clusters; instead, knowledge was requested from earlier collaborators. A three-tiered model is developed for knowledge governance at the cluster level, across clusters and the link with corporate and project governance structures. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.

What makes mobile computer supported cooperative work mobile? Towards a better understanding of cooperative mobile interactions

Abstract Despite the high availability of mobile phones and personal digital assistants with online capabilities, mobile computer supported cooperative work is still in its infancy. So far, only little is known about the distinct attributes of mobile cooperative work in comparison to its stationary counterpart. Across which dimensions does cooperation via mobile devices differ from traditional hard-wired settings and what implications have to be drawn for future research? To bring more light to this question, we conducted an experimental business-case at Frankfurt University with 16 graduate students and analysed their collaborative behaviour across mobile and non-mobile channels of communication over a 5 week period. We find that mobile messages differed from stationary messages in terms of size and that the use of mobile emails prevailed over stationary emails under conditions of stress. Finally, we found that the social structure of mobile communication corresponded with the structure of stationary communication. This indicates that mobile communication technologies support existing communication relations rather than creating new relations. From the perspective of system designers, these results may serve as practical insights into the user behaviour of mobile technologies and might support the future development of mobile computer supported cooperative work environments.