Max Boisot

Is your firm a creative destroyer? Competitive learning and knowledge flows in the technological strategies of firms

Abstract A firms technology strategy can be described either as a war of position or a war of movement. The first kind of strategy leads the firm to hoard its technological assets in an attempt to defy the equilibrating action of market forces (neoclassical or N-learning), the second pushes for a selective diffusion of its technological assets that will move it beyond market equilibrium and towards new opportunities (Schumpeterian or S-learning). Using Boisots (1986) culture space as an analytical tool the paper explores the difference between N- and S-learning and how they each affect a firms technological prospects.

Markets and Hierarchies in a Cultural Perspective

The scope given to cultural phenomena in organizational analysis has been growing but little conceptual integration has taken place. In this paper, a cultural analysis of organizational phenomena is developed using a conceptual framework that throws new light on the Markets and Hierarchies debate. In particular, it is shown that a choice between markets and hierarchies does not reduce to a choice between external and internal transactions. The framework is introduced and developed in sections one and two for the general case and is applied to the modern corporation in section three. The implications of the analysis are discussed in section four.

The Nature of Managerial Work in the Chinese Enterprise Reforms. A Study of Six Directors

This paper applies a conceptual framework, developed by Boisot (1986), to an analysis of the behaviour of Chinese enterprise managers. In a replication of Mintzbergs 1973 study of US managers, six Chinese enterprise directors were time studied over a period of six days, and the findings analyzed using the framework. It appears that although Chinese enterprise managers in the sample share many behavioural characteristics with their US counterparts, they do so in an institu tional setting that places a different construction on their behaviour. In particular, the analysis suggests that the Chinese firm is not available to them as an extension of their managerial prerogative and, if anything, is institutionally designed to constrain it. In such a setting, opportunistic behaviour expresses a personal survival strategy rather than a quest for personal gain.

The I-Space: a framework for analyzing the evolution of social computing

Abstract Advances in the design of computer architectures and networks have led to new ways of representing, creating, manipulating and distributing knowledge. This paper takes a sociotechnical view of computing and considers the impact of computer architectures which are based on connectionist principles and the growth in computer networks on the representation of the learning process and strategies for dealing with complexity. It calls for a new economic view of knowledge and intellectual property rights more appropriate for the analysis of information flows in networks. Finally, the Information Space (I-Space) is presented as a framework for the analysis and evaluation of information flows.

Connectivity, Extremes, and Adaptation: A Power-Law Perspective of Organizational Effectiveness

Managers are often required to respond in adaptive ways to the threats and opportunities presented by rare, extreme outcomes. Given these, management scholars frequently face a stark choice: say something useful to practitioners using narratives in which dramatic effects are often achieved at the expense of academic rigor or maintain the latter by sacrificing practitioner relevance. Recent developments in complexity science offer a new perspective. The article distinguishes between the simplicities achieved by reductionism (equilibrium, law-like equations, linearity, and predictability) and the complexity triggered by initiating “butterfly events”—nonlinearity, scale-free causes, and power laws (PLs). Schema formation and adaptation within Gaussian and PL ontologies are framed in terms of Ashby’s law of requisite variety. Variety perceived to be requisite is sensitive to the type of ontological assumptions that are made. PL approaches to management inquiry focusing on rank/frequency distributions, fractal structures, and scale-free dynamics are outlined.

Generating knowledge in a connected world: The case of the ATLAS experiment at CERN

The spatial challenges posed by the dynamics of globalization together with the availability of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have fostered the development of virtual collaboration. Driven by organizational authority systems, however, much of this activity remains of a top-down, hierarchical nature. Although the proportion of bottom-up activity has increased, it has not displaced the top-down bias in the governance structures of firms and the formal processes that give them effect. Yet recent developments are challenging the organizational assumptions that underpin such structures and processes. In what follows, we first offer a theoretical perspective on the above questions and then illustrate it with a look at the way that the ATLAS experiment at CERN—one of the four experiments that are using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)— is organized and managed. The ATLAS Collaboration—the team of physicists responsible for the experiment— consists of a culturally heterogeneous and loosely coupled population of agents, each operating in a different institutional setting. We shall use our theoretical perspective to interpret some of the issues raised by this kind of ‘big science’ experiment and discuss their implications for a broader class of organizations.

Sim-I-Space: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach to Knowledge Management Processes

In the chapter we offer a verbal description of Sim-I-Space, an agentbased model that operationalises key features of a conceptual framework: the Information-Space (I-Space). The I-Space relates the speed and extent of information flows between agents to how far their messages have been structured through acts of codification and abstraction. The more structured a message, the faster and more extensively it diffuses to other agents—intentionally or not.

Action Learning with Chinese Characteristics: The China-EEC Management Programme

Beliefs in the need to combine theory and practice have a long and respectable ancestry in both East and West. And even if that respectability has been occasionally tarnished as it was in China when the belief was reduced to a slogan by Red Guards in order to justify the excesses of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Western Europe, and particularly in the field of management development, it has given rise to a number of educational approaches that could be broadly subsumed under the various headings of ’Action Learning’, ’Action Research’, ’Learning by Doing’, and

Information, economics, and evolution: What scope for a ménage à trois?

Abstract The second half of the twentieth century will be remembered as the period in which information came to replace energy as the central fact of life in post‐industrial societies. Yet we continue to confront the phenomenon with the conceptual tools of an energy based economy. These take information to be costless and freely available as a support to economic transactions. In the paper information is taken to be the focus of an economic transaction. The second section of the paper traces the energy based approach to economic analysis to a nineteenth century obsession by economists to emulate the success of the physical sciences by borrowing and adapting their concepts. In the third section the need for an economics that can cope with discontinuous and evolutionary change—and hence with information processing as a form of economizing—is discussed and developed. In section four, a distinction is drawn between knowledge, information, and data, the latter being a form of low level energy that has the capa...

Book Reviews : Joseph B. Tamney: The Struggle Over Singapore's Soul 1996, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 238 pages

able to eat their cake and have it too: economic freedom and political authoritarianism together. The Singaporean development experience has been of particular interest to China’s leaders. The city state successfully managed to build for itself a rational-legal bureaucratic order, whereas the bureaucratic order in China remained and still remains resolutely patrimonial in flavour (Boisot and Child 1988, 1995). If Singapore, a fellow Confucian, can pull it off without losing political control, why not its bigger brother’? The issue, of course, is whether Confucianism has anything to do with