Embedded Enterprise and Social Capital


Book Description

This title was first published in 2002. The concept of embeddedness refers to the social construction of inter-firm relationships and the enmeshing of economic relationships within broader social structures and relationships in particular places. Previous research has suggested embedding is the best way to generate local growth and social capital and has focused on SMEs in Europe and North America, although the existing model is being more widely adopted now. This volume is the first to examine the complex processes of embedding in this wider context. Bringing together a broad range of case studies from the developed and developing world which address the nature of embeddedness from various perspectives, it not only questions the universality of the current model and the policy initiatives it has spawned but also provides a much wider understanding of embeddedness . It does so by discussing the social dimensions more fully and by throwing light on the spatial and temporal ambiguity of the concept and its inadequate treatment of power.




Social Capital and Entrepreneurship


Book Description

Social Capital and Entrepreneurship concludes by examining the tension between the properties of social networks used in entrepreneurship researchers' models and the limited perspective on networks available to practicing entrepreneurs.




Accelerating Knowledge Sharing, Creativity, and Innovation Through Business Tourism


Book Description

Business tourism is a newly coined terminology in social sciences and management literature. It is defined as individuals traveling and staying outside of their hometowns for not more than one successive year for the purpose of enjoyment and other drives (e.g., learning and business activities). Key business tourism activities include attending a variety of meetings, conferences, and workshops as well as exhibitions. Understanding the negative and positive aspects of business tourism is essential to promoting employee learning and knowledge transfer skills. Accelerating Knowledge Sharing, Creativity, and Innovation Through Business Tourism is an essential reference source that discusses how differences in cultures, communities, rituals, norms, and scope of business tourism could influence knowledge sharing practices. Moreover, this book promotes an understanding on how to learn from different cultures and enhance absorptive capacity by interacting with different personalities and cultures. Featuring research on topics such as knowledge management, social capital, and consumer behavior, this book is ideally designed for business professionals, managers, administrators, hotel executives, IT specialists, executives, entrepreneurs, managing directors, and students looking to boost their existing skills and expertise with innovation and creativity by interacting with others and in a new context.




The Embedded Entrepreneur


Book Description

Embedded Entrepreneurs find customers and build a solution for and with them. Learn how to think "audience-first."




Bleeding-Edge Entrepreneurship


Book Description

This book contains an Open Access chapter Bleeding-edge Entrepreneurship illuminates new possibilities within the domain of business theory and practice, expanding entrepreneurship’s massive potential to create unexplored physical and virtual realms.




Enterprising Worlds


Book Description

This book is the culmination of several years of work by geographers, planners, and economists. The chapters included in this volume represent the collective efforts of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on the Dynamics of Economic Spaces, at their 2005 annual meeting in Toledo, Ohio (USA). The papers were selected based on their contribution to the community of economic geographers and policymakers and to demonstrate the inherent interconnectedness of these themes.




Collaborative Knowledge Creation


Book Description

This book presents perspectives on the knowledge creation metaphor of learning, and elaborates the trialogical approach to learning. The knowledge creation metaphor differs from both the acquisition and the participation metaphors. In a nutshell trialogical approaches seek to engage learners in joint work with shared objects and artefacts mediated by collaboration technology. The theoretical underpinnings stem from different origins, including Bereiter and Scardamalia’s theory on knowledge building and Engeström’s activity theory. The authors in this collection introduce key concepts and techniques, explain tools designed and developed to support knowledge creation, and report results from case studies in specific contexts. The book chapters integrate theoretical, methodological, empirical and technological research, to elaborate the empirical findings and to explain the design of the knowledge creation tools. The target audiences for this book are researchers, teachers and Human Resource developers interested in new perspectives on collaborative learning, technology-mediated knowledge creation, and applications of this in their own settings, for higher education, teacher training and workplace learning. The book is the result of joint efforts from many contributors who took part in the Knowledge-practices Laboratory (KP-Lab) project (2006-2011) supported by EU FP6.




Learning from Clusters


Book Description

Jan Lambooy retired in October 2002. When Jan was asked how he wanted to celebrate this occasion, he was adamant that no great festivities should take place. Characteristically, Jan wanted just a scientific conference so he “could learn something from it” and, as he insisted, no great festivities. So that is what we did and a conference was organised in Amsterdam on 25 October 2002, hosted by the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics of the University of Amsterdam. Friends of Jan’s from academia in the Netherlands and abroad participated and thus paid homage to Jan, both as a scientist and as a person. We are now very proud to present this festschrift, firstly as the palpable result of this conference and secondly as a token of sincere respect and great affection for Jan. Edited volumes run the danger of being a hotchpotch of contributions on a wide variety of topics. Here, we have explicitly focused on a central theme in contemporary economic geography and regional science, namely the relationship between learning, innovation and clustering. Internationally renowned scientists made both theoretical and empirical contributions to this volume. We think this book constitutes a broad palette of contemporary thinking and research on the relationship between spatial concentration and innovation and hope it will play a significant role in future debates on this issue.




Understanding the Firm


Book Description

Firms are at the very heart of modern day life. They come in a seemingly infinite variety - from transnationals to small firm, from corporations to branch plants, to subsidiaries and joint ventures, from subcontractors to franchisees, from sole proprietorships to partnerships, from manufacturers to service providers and retailers. For the most part we view them as the creators, destroyers, and repositories of jobs - the creators and destroyers of people's livelihoods, lives, and dreams. But, deciding just what a firm is is neither a simple nor a straightforward task. Against a background of the dynamic complexity and plurality that business forms (and firms) can assume, there is a constant search within academic research for the processes that create and maintain both enterprise and enterprises in capitalist societies: a search for a theory of the firm. This book addresses some of the gaps in the current state of the theory of the firm from an economic geography perspective: issues around the boundaries of the firm; the collective agency of the firm; the political firm, financial markets, and the state; and the firm in place.




Social Capital in the Asia Pacific


Book Description

Social capital is broadly conceptualised as consisting of resources and network ties embedded in the social structures and relationships that facilitate beneficial outcomes for the actors within those structures. Despite the number of research studies on social capital, there have been fewer attempts to examine social capital in the context of service-oriented firms, particularly in the Asia Pacific. This is surprising as the service industry plays an important role in the global services trade transactions and business activities. Social capital enables and maintains social relations for business transformation for service-oriented firms. Indeed, it would be unimaginable for any economic activity, particularly in service-oriented firms, to occur without social capital. This examination of social capital in the Asia Pacific region provides the context for recognising the cultural, social and economic opportunities and challenges of several Asia Pacific countries that can potentially enrich our knowledge and understanding of the region. Contributions are drawn from cases based in Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, China and Australia, for relevant application in the areas of social capital and service-oriented firms in the Asia Pacific. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.