Trust Within and Between Organizations


Book Description

Trust has become a much-discussed, sought-after resource in the current business environment. The contributors to this volume shed new light on the role trust can play in and between organizations.




Information, Opportunism and Economic Coordination


Book Description

An integrated collection of a dozen of Peter Earl's lively and thought-provoking essays, carefully edited and updated. Theoretical topics include the prediction of corporate behaviour, the economic foundations of marketing and shopping mall design, pricing strategy and its relationship with the existence of second-hand markets, and the microfoundations of macroeconomics. Case studies include co-operation in the car industry, managerialist reforms in New Zealand and the university sector, structural change in the advertising industry and the place of GB Richardson and GLS Shackle in the literature of economics.




Opportunism


Book Description

In this bold and forward-looking book, an Israeli civic leader shows how reorienting our society to make the most of "opportunity" could restore the global economy to health—and give added value to the contributions of the new class of knowledge workers. For most of us, opportunism is a tainted concept. Shraga F. Biran thinks otherwise. He shows that our present economy favors the wealthy few more than at any point in history. But such an economy is both unstable and outmoded, unable to recognize the true value of the work done by the new knowledge class, whose commerce is in ideas, not financial assets. This is why most of us have seen no real gains from the spectacular increases in paper wealth during the past three decades. Biran sees a transformative new way in Opportunism. In today's economy, he argues, the way to thrive is to create an opportunity and make the most of it. With great passion, he proposes that we as a society should establish a "right of opportunity," akin to patents and copyrights, enabling all members of society to lay claim to their ideas and benefit from them financially. Thus empowered, the new opportunists can help bring about a revolution in applied knowledge on the scale of the Industrial Revolution— and a more just, stable, and prosperous society.




Governance Structures and the Employment Relationship


Book Description

Table of Contents Figures 9 Tables 11 Abbreviations 15 Acknowledgements 17 1 Introduction 19 1.1 Governance Structures for the Employment Relationship 19 1.2 The Evolution of Collective Bargaining in Britain 21 1.3 Research Questions and Plan of this Book 27 2 Governance Structures for the Employment Relationship 29 2.1 The Employment Relationship 29 2.2 Governance Structures 46 2.3 Optimal Governance Structures 67 2.4 Conclusions 79 3 Evolution of Governance Structures 81 3.1 Previous Theoretical Literature 82 3.2 The Evolutionary Framework to Governance Structures 106 3.3 Conclusions 129 4 Determinants of Employer Demand for Governance Structures 131 4.1 Company-Level Factors 132 4.2 Markets 164 4.3 Institutions 169 4.4 External Organisations 172 4.5 Conclusions 188 5 Governance Structures 1780-2000: Description and Analysis 191 5.1 The Emergence and Evolution of Governance Structures 1780-2000 191 5.2 The Role of External Organisations 218 5.3 Conclusions 227 6 Determinants of Employer Demand 1980-1998: Bivariate Analyses 229 6.1 Research Design 229 6.2 Company-Level Factors 236 6.3 Markets 279 6.4 Institutions 284 6.5 External Organisations 286 6.6 Conclusions 292 7 Determinants of Employer Demand 1980-1998: Multivariate Analyses 295 7.1 The Current State of Research 295 7.2 Research Design 300 7.3 The Empirical Results 318 7.4 Conclusions 348 8 Conclusions 353 8.1 Determinants of Governance Structures: The Findings 353 8.2 Whodunit? The Decline of Collective Bargaining in Britain 357 8.3 The Implications of Decollectivisation for Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations 360 8.4 Optimal Governance Structures for the Employment Relationship: A Role for Public Policy? 362 Appendix 367 Bibliography 383 Index 409




The Economic Analysis of Civil Law


Book Description

This comprehensive textbook provides a thorough guide to the economic analysis of law, with a particular focus on civil law systems. It encapsulates a structured analysis and nuanced evaluation of norms and legal policies, using the tools of economic theory.




Trust, Control, and the Economics of Governance


Book Description

In today’s world, we cooperate across legal and cultural systems in order to create value. However, this increases volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity as challenges for societies, politics, and business. This has made governance a scarce resource. It thus is inevitable that we understand the means of governance available to us and are able to economize on them. Trends like the increasing role of product labels and a certification industry as well as political movements towards nationalism and conservatism may be seen as reaction to disappointments from excessive cooperation. To avoid failures of cooperation, governance is important – control through e.g. contracts is limited and in governance economics trust is widely advertised without much guidance on its preconditions or limits. This book draws on the rich insight from research on trust and control, and accommodates the key results for governance considerations in an institutional economics framework. It provides a view on the limits of cooperation from the required degree of governance, which can be achieved through extrinsic motivation or building on intrinsic motivation. Trust Control Economics thus inform a more realistic expectation about the net value added from cooperation by providing a balanced view including the cost of governance. It then becomes clear how complex cooperation is about ‘governance accretion’ where limited trustworthiness is substituted by control and these control instances need to be governed in turn. Trust, Control, and the Economics of Governance is a highly necessary development of institutional economics to reflect progress made in trust research and is a relevant addition for practitioners to better understand the role of trust in the governance of contemporary cooperation-structures. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of economics and business management, institutional economics, and business ethics. Note that this work is the first of its kind that explicitly reflects on the societal realities, how these drive the assumption setting process, and how these assumptions influence the theory outcome.







R. Edward Freeman’s Selected Works on Stakeholder Theory and Business Ethics


Book Description

Ed Freeman’s influential ideas on stakeholder theory, business ethics, humanities, and capitalism became foundational in the management field and turned around the mainstream thinking about business. Stakeholder theory developed by Freeman and others posits that business is not as much about profits, but rather about creating value for its stakeholders, including employees, customers, communities, financiers, and suppliers. The relationship between a company and its stakeholders is the essence of business and should be of utmost attention to its managers. Managers should avoid resorting to trade-offs by prioritizing one stakeholder group (e.g., shareholders) over the others and strive to run their companies in the interests of all stakeholders. The idea of pursuing the interests of all stakeholders became revolutionary in management and went far beyond the management field, expanding to Law, Health Care, Education, Public Policy and Administration, and Environmental Policy. This book is a collection of Ed Freeman’s most influential and important works on stakeholder theory as well as business ethics, humanities, and capitalism.




Trust and Economic Learning


Book Description

'This book is a welcome addition to two growing literatures in economics: on "trust" and "learning". . . . The book is well produced and well edited by Lazaric and Lorenz who provide a useful introduction and overview in their chapter on "The learning dynamics of trust, reputation and confidence".' - Jonathan Michie, The Economic Journal Trust and Economic Learning brings together innovative research by an internationally recognised group of scholars from Europe and the United States. The distinction between trust and a variety of related concepts, including reputation, implicit contracts and confidence is examined.




Small Firms and Network Economies


Book Description

Recent development experience points to the way business can be the key to a dynamic small business sector, especially where those links are built on high trust co-operative relations. This book reviews different types of small business network, illustrated by an international selection of case studies, including: * Chinese family business networks * ethinic minority business networks * Japanese and South Korean business group networks * Taiwan's subcontracting networks * European industrial districts Network promotion initiatives in Singapore, New Zealand, Scandinavia and the UK are each discussed to provide a comprehensive comparative assessment of small business networks.