Mark Lehrer

The Institutionalization of Stewardship: Theory, Propositions, and Insights from Change in the Edmonton Public Schools

Prior scholarship on stewardship as a principle of administration largely portrays stewardship as too idealistic and dependent upon situational factors to be institutionalized in large-scale organizations. Through a case study of the Edmonton Public Schools, this study explores the extent to which stewardship can be institutionalized as a central organizing principle, thereby ensuring performance and checking corruption in ways that are consistent with the primacy of intrinsic motivation. The study deepens our understanding of the challenges that managers face in reconciling stewardship with a bureaucratic context, documents practices that have been used to deal with these challenges, and more broadly discusses how it might be possible for islands of stewardship to emerge in a world governed by assumptions of human opportunism. To this end the paper develops a model of the choice that organization members face in deciding to elect a principal-agent or a stewardship posture within large-scale organizations. This model draws on assumptions of human ambivalence in choosing between self-serving and altruistic modes of conduct.

Facilitating Ambidexterity in Replicator Organizations: Artifacts in Their Role as Routine-Recreators

Replicator organizations compete by transferring their business models and their embedded organizational routines across various geographical sites. Based on empirical results from case-study research, we show how a globally operating replicator firm integrates the logic of ambidexterity into its organization. We explain how artifacts — especially rulebooks — facilitate not only standardized replication, but also innovation. Finally, we emphasize that artifacts such as rules and codified knowledge need to be interpreted through a common frame of reference, one which can serve as a knowledge bridge that enables contextual ambidexterity in replicator organizations.

Thinning Knowledge: An Interpretive Field Study of Knowledge-Sharing Practices of Firms in Three Multinational Contexts

Knowledge is often tacit and “sticky,” that is, highly context-specific and, therefore, costly to transfer to a different setting. This article examines the methods used by firms to facilitate cross-site knowledge sharing by “thinning” knowledge, that is, by stripping knowledge of its contextual richness. An interview-based study of cross-site knowledge sharing in three industries (consulting, industrial materials, and high-tech products) indicates that highly developed knowledge-sharing systems do not necessarily involve extensive codification and recombination of personalized knowledge. Many multinational firms evidently conceive their knowledge-sharing systems with more modest objectives in mind than any large-scale “learning spirals” featuring iterative conversion of personalized knowledge into codified knowledge and vice versa. A typology of knowledge-thinning systems is derived by interpreting the field study results from the perspective of knowledge-thinning methods used in earlier eras of history. The typology encompasses topographical, statistical, and diagrammatic knowledge-thinning systems.

Germany’s industrial family firms: Prospering islands of social capital in a financialized world?

The international expansion and employment growth of many German family firms has made family enterprise a component of the German political economy that can no longer be ignored. A theory of ‘social capital enterprises’ is developed to explain the competitive advantages of many family firms over ‘capital market enterprises’, i.e., publicly traded, ‘financialized’ large companies. The theory takes account of multiple contingencies: (1) not all sectors are propitious for family firms; (2) not all family firms base their competitive advantage on social capital; (3) not all owning families are able to maintain effective family control when the firm grows large, albeit the number that do is surprising. For this reason, we focus on the industrial Mittelstand of Germany as having an especially high concentration of family firms that meet all three of these contingencies. Family firm ownership appears to be especially advantageous in capital goods segments where accumulated social capital forms an important competitive asset.

Integration-Responsiveness and Knowledge-Management Perspectives on the MNC A Typology and Field Study of Cross-Site Knowledge-Sharing Practices

This interview-based study of eight multinational corporations (MNCs) in five industries investigates varying patterns of cross-site knowledge sharing associated with MNCs pursuing global, multidomestic, and transnational strategies. The study revealed considerable polarization in knowledge-sharing practices between MNCs implementing transnational and global strategies, with cross-site knowledge sharing being of very high intensity among the former and quite minimal among the latter. MNCs pursuing global, multidomestic, and transnational strategies each tended to share qualitatively different kinds of knowledge as well. The relationship between MNC strategy and intrafirm knowledge sharing is encapsulated in a framework that bridges two hitherto largely separate research streams: the integration-responsiveness framework and knowledge-management studies of the MNC.

Competitive advantage from exposure to multiple national environments: the induced internationalisation of 'born-multidomestic' firms

Recent work on early internationalisers and born-global firms emphasises the entrepreneurial orientation of these firms. In contrast, this paper analyses the neglected, but nonetheless prevalent, phenomenon of firms that enter foreign markets at a relatively early stage because their home country and/or line of business embeds them in an international environment. Such ‘induced’ early internationalisers can be called born-multidomestic firms. A basic model of causes and competitive effects of induced early internationalisation is illustrated with a longitudinal study of software maker SAP AG of Germany.

Boundary-spanning and boundary-buffering in global markets: A German perspective on the internationalization of family firms

Purpose This paper aims to provide a novel way of thinking about firm internationalization. We offer a stylized view of family firms as internationalizers who choose to engage in “boundary-spanning” across global product markets while engaging in “boundary-buffering” to insulate themselves from global financial markets. Design/methodology/approach The case of Germany, with its large stock of internationalized family firms, shows how boundary-buffering vis-a-vis global capital markets can be compatible with successful and sustained internationalization and boundary-spanning in global product markets. Statistics are supplied. Findings To compensate for the lack of resources stemming from their abstinence from global financial markets, German family firms draw on country-specific conditions favorable to the proliferation of large internationalized family firms. Insights from the German case serve to derive propositions. Originality/value The developed concept of an internationalization pathway for family firms contrasts with the much more established concept of an internationalization process for family firms. The contrast between a “pathway” and a “process” amounts to the distinction between ends and means: the internationalization pathway (as defined here) has largely to do with strategic choice, whereas the internationalization process (as defined in the literature) focuses more on barriers to internationalization and means for overcoming them.

The improvement trajectory of PCR DNA replication and ERP software as general purpose technologies: an exploratory study of ‘anchor technologies’

ABSTRACT As an effort to peek into the black box of large-scale general purpose technologies (GPTs) like biotechnology and information technology, we develop the concept of ‘anchor technologies’. An anchor technology is a core technology of a large-scale GPT (‘mega-GPT’) that opens a new era in the development and diffusion of the mega-GPT. We trace the historical evolution of two process-based, yet otherwise very different, anchor technologies: enterprise resource planning (ERP) software within the mega-GPT of information technology and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) DNA replication within the mega-GPT of biotechnology. The case studies reveal the utility of ‘productisation’ as an important means of commercialising innovations in anchor technologies; more generally, the interplay between improvement in process-based technologies and in complementary product-based technologies provides insight into how ERP and PCR were able to sustain a path of continued improvement within their respective mega-GPT.

Temporary Modes of Project-Based Organization within Evolving Organizational Forms: Insights from Oticon's Experiment with the Spaghetti Organization

Project-based organization (PBO) can serve as a temporary organizational form in response to uncertainty or turbulent environmental conditions. An updated retrospective study of the Danish hearing aids maker Oticon illustrates the role of PBO (the so-called spaghetti organization) in guiding the company through a specific period of industry turbulence and the company leaders search for a more effective structure to organize innovation within the company. The spaghetti organization was experimental in two distinct senses. First, the spaghetti organization tested the limits of decentralization, bottom-up self-organizing innovation, and PBO. Inspired by the experience of just how dysfunctional hierarchy could become, Oticons spaghetti organization tested the limits of nonhierarchy. And unlike the failed Brook Farm utopia of the 1840s, the utopia of radical project-based organizing at Oticon proved highly successful as a means of promoting innovation even if the spaghetti organization was not sustainable in its original form and required subsequent modification. Second, Oticon was essentially a natural experiment testing and refuting the complementarities-based claim that intermediate forms of organization which include elements of both hierarchical organization and team (or project-based) organization are inherently unstable.

Wissensbasierte Steuerung Multinationaler Unternehmen – Eine empirische Studie über den Zusammenhang von Strategie, Organisationsstruktur und Wissenstransfer unterschiedlicher MNU-Typen

Forschungsergebnisse im Zusammenhang mit Wissenstransfer in Multinationalen Unternehmen (MNU) sind vielfaltig (Subramanian/Venkatraman 2001, Foss/Pedersen 2002, Cho/Lee 2004, Jensen/Szulanski 2004, Harzing/Noorderhaven 2006). Es gibt jedoch wenige theoretische und noch weniger empirische Ansatze, diese Ergebnisse als Steuerungsmoglichkeit zwischen Konzernzentralen und Niederlassungen mit traditioneller MNU-Forschung in Bezug auf Strategie und Organisationsstruktur (Perlmutter 1969, Prahalad/Doz 1987, Bartlett/Ghoshal 1989, Roth et al. 1991) zu verbinden. Genau diese Lucke zu schliesen, ist unser Ziel. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf der Verknupfung von Wissensmanagement mit der Strategie und der Organisationsstruktur von Unternehmen und fuhrt zu folgender Forschungsfrage: Wie beeinflussen Unterschiede hinsichtlich der Strategie und Organisationsstruktur den Wissenstransfer multinationaler Konzerne?