Knowledge is People Doing Things, Knowledge Economies Are People Doing Things with Better Outcomes for More People

Description ‘The second volume of the Handbook on the Knowledge Economy is a worthy companion to the highly successful original volume published in 2005, extending its theoretical depth and developing its coverage. Together the two volumes provide the single best work and reference point for knowledge economy studies. The second volume with fifteen original essays by renowned scholars in the field, provides insightful and robust analyses of the development potential of the knowledge economy in all its aspects, forms and manifestations.’ – Michael A. Peters, University of Illinois, US

Global forest governance

This book identifies the fundamental legal principles and the governance requirements of sustainable forest management. An analytical model for assessing forest regulation is created which identifies the doctrinal concepts that underpin forest regulation (justice, property, sovereignty and governance). It also highlights the dominant public international institutions involved in forest regulation (UNFF, UNFCCC and WB) which is followed by analysis of non-state international forest regulation (forest certification and ecosystem markets). The book concludes by making a number of practical recommendations for reform of global forest governance arrangements and suggested reforms for individual international forest institutions.

New Perspectives On Firm Growth

This insightful volume presents a collection of innovative works by two of the leading researchers of firm growth: Per Davidsson, Director, Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research and Professor of Entrepreneurship, Queensland University of Technology, Australia and Jönköping International Business School, Sweden and Johan Wiklund, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Syracuse University, US and Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. The studies extend previous research by providing stronger theoretical underpinnings and using longitudinal databases that can separate in time the firms’ growth from its presumed causes. They also break new ground by examining different modes of growth, such as sales growth vs. employment growth, and organic growth vs. acquisition-based expansion. Further, the studies investigate the drivers of firm growth and take a critical look at the effects, such as under what circumstances high growth is associated with high profitability. The issue of how firm growth is achieved and managed, and what consequences it has for different stakeholders is both theoretically interesting and practically important. The book will strongly appeal to academics of entrepreneurship, small business management and strategy.

Handbook on the Knowledge Economy : Volume Two

The second volume of the Handbook on the Knowledge Economy is a worthy companion to the highly successful original volume published in 2005, extending its theoretical depth and developing its coverage. Together the two volumes provide the single best work and reference point for knowledge economy studies. The second volume with fifteen original essays by renowned scholars in the field, provides insightful and robust analyses of the development potential of the knowledge economy in all its aspects, forms and manifestations.

Asset specificity and behavioral uncertainty as moderators of the sales growth-employment growth relationship in emerging ventures

New venture growth is a central topic in entrepreneurship research. Although sales growth is emerging as the most commonly used measure of growth for emerging ventures, employment growth has also been used frequently. However, empirical research demonstrates that there are only very low to moderately sized correlations between the two (Delmar et aL, 2003; Weinzimmer, et al., 1998). In addition) sales growth and employment growth respond differently to a wide variety of criteria (Baum et al., 2001; Delmar et al., 2003). In this study we use transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1996) as a theoretical base to examine transaction cost influences on the addition of new employees as emerging ventures experience sales growth. \\le theorize that transaction cost economics variables will moderate the relationship between sales growth and employment growth. W'e develop and test hypotheses related to asset specificity, behavioral uncertainty, and the influence of resource munificence on the strength of the sales growth/ employment growth relationship. Asset specificity is theorized to be a positive moderator of the relationship between sales growth and employment growth. When the behavioral uncertainty associated with adding new employees is greater than that of outsourcing or subcontracting, it is hypothesized to be a negative moderator of the sales growth/employment growth relationship. We also hypothesize that resource scarcity will strengthen those relationships.

Towards an integrative framework for future research on small firm growth

Our review has demonstrated that small firm growth is a complex phenomenon. The concept ‘growth’ denotes both a change in amount and the process by which that change is attained. Further, the growth can be achieved in different ways and with varying degrees of regularity, and it manifests itself along several different dimensions such as sales, employment, and accumulation of assets. This complexity has naturally led researchers to adopt different approaches to studying growth and to use different measures to assess it. Further, although our review shows that it can fruitfully be regarded as a growth issue, the research on small firms' internationalization has largely developed as a separate stream. Similarly, other relatively separate literatures have evolved, which effectively focus on different modes of growth although mostly without regarding the studies first and foremost as growth studies. This goes for topics such as mergers and acquisitions, diversification, and integration - research streams which have largely ignored the particularities of small firms and which in turn have been largely ignored among researchers focusing on small firm growth.

Growing profitable or growing from profits : putting the horse in front of the cart?

Top lists of and praise for the economy's fastest growing firms abound in business media around the world. Similarly, in academic research there has been a tendency to equate firm growth with business success. This tendency appears to be particularly pronounced in-but not confined to­ entrepreneurship research. In this study we critically examine this tendency to portray firm growth as more or less universally favorable. While several theories suggest that growth drives profitability we first show that the available empirical evidence does not support the existence of a general, positive relation­ ship between growth and profitability. Using the theoretical lens of the Resource-Based View (RBV) we then argue that sound growth usually starts with achieving sufficient levels of profitability. In summary, our theoretical argument is as follows: In a population of SMEs, superior profitability is likely to be indicative of having built a resource-based competitive advantage. Building such a valuable and hard to-copy advantage may at first constrain growth. However, the underlying advantage itself and the financial resources generated through high profitability make it possible for firms in this situation to now achieve sound and sustainable growth - which may require building a series of temporary advantages- without having to sacrifice profitability. By contrast, when firms strive for high growth starting from low profitability, the latter often indicates lack of competitive advantage. Therefore growth must be achieved in head-to-head competition with equally attractive alternatives, leading to profitability deterioration rather than improvement. In addition, these low profitability firms are unlikely to be able to finance strategies toward building valuable and difficult-to-imitate advantages while growing.

Organic and acquisitive growth : re-examining, testing and extending Penrose’s growth theory

The Theory of the Growth of The Firm by Edith Penrose, first published in 1959, is a seminal contribution to the field of management. Penrose's intention was to create a theory of firm growth which was logically consistent and empirically tractable (Buckley and Casson, 2007). Much attention, however, has been focused on her unintended contribution to the resource-based view (henceforth RBV) (e.g. Kor and Mahoney, 2004; Lockett and Thompson, 2004) rather than her firm growth theory. We feel that this is unfortunate because despite a rapidly growing body of empirical work, conceptual advancement in growth studies has been limited (Davidsson and Wiklund, 2000; Davidsson et ai., 2006; Delmar, 1997; Storey, 1994). The growth literature frequently references Penrose's work, but little explicit testing of her ideas has been undertaken. This is surprising given that Penrose's work remains the most comprehensive theory of growth to date. One explanation is that she did not formality present her arguments, favouring verbal exposition over formalized models (Lockett, 2005; Lockett and Thompson, 2004). However, the central propositions and conclusions of her theory can be operationalized and empirically tested.

Performance configurations over time: implications for growth-and profit-oriented strategies

Entrepreneurship research and practice places emphasis on company growth as a measure of entrepreneurial success. In many cases, there has been a tendency to give growth a very central role, with some researchers even seeing growth as the very essence of entrepreneurship (Cole, 1949; Sexton, 1997; Stevenson & Gumpert, 1991). A large number of empirical studies of the performance of young and/or small firms use growth as the dependent variable (see reviews by Ardishvili, Cardozo, Harmon, & Vadakath, 1998; Delmar, 1997; Wiklund, 1998). By contrast, the two most prominent views of strategic management – strategic positioning (Porter, 1980) and the resource-based view (Barney, 1991; Wernerfelt, 1984) – are both concerned with achieving competitive advantage and regard achieving economic rents and profitability relative to other competitors as the central measures of firm performance. Strategic entrepreneurship integrates these two perspectives and is simultaneously concerned with opportunity seeking and advantage seeking (Hitt, Ireland, Camp, & Sexton, 2002; Ireland, Hitt, & Sirmon, 2003). Consequently, both company growth and relative profitability are together relevant measures of firm performance in the domain of strategic entrepreneurship.

Getting published — and cited in entrepreneurship : reflections on ten papers

I grew up in academic heaven. At least for me it was. Not only was Sweden in the late 1980s paradise for any kind of empirical research, with rich and high-quality business statistics being made available to researchers without them having to sign away their lives; 70+ percent response rates achieved in mail surveys to almost any group (if you knew how to do them), and boards of directors opening their doors to more qualitatively orientated researchers to sit in during their meetings. In addition, I perceived an environment with a very high degree of academic freedom, letting me do whatever I found interesting and important. I’m sure for others it was sheer hell, with very unclear career paths and rules of the game. Career progression (something which rarely entered my mind) meant that you tried as best you could and then you put all your work – reports, books, book chapters, conference papers, maybe even published articles – in a box and had some external committee of professors look at it. If you were lucky they liked what they saw for whatever reasons their professorial wisdom dictated, and you got hired or promoted. If you were not so lucky you wouldn’t get the job or the promotion, without quite knowing why. So people could easily imagine an old boys club – whose members were themselves largely unproven in international, peer review publishing – picking whoever they wanted by whatever criteria they choose to apply. Neither the fact that assessors were external nor the presence of an appeals system might have completely appeased your suspicious and skeptical mind, considering the balance of power.

Legal Reasoning in Environmental Law : a Study of Structure, Form and Language

This book analyses the structure, form and language of a selected number of international and national legal instruments and reviews how an illustrative range of international and national judicial institutions have responded to the issues before them and the processes of legal reasoning engaged by them in reaching their decisions. This involves a very detailed discussion of these primary sources of international and national environmental law with a view to determining their jurisprudential architecture and the processes of reasoning expected of those responsible for implementing these architectural arrangements. This book is concerned not with the effectiveness or the quality of an environmental legal system but only with its jurisprudential characteristics and their associated processes of legal reasoning.

Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries : Innovation, Employment and Education

Creative workers are employed in sectors outside the Creative Industries often in greater numbers than within. This is the first book to explore the phenomena of the embedded creative and creative services through a range of sectors, disciplines, and perspectives. Despite the emergence of these creative workers, very little is known about their work life, and why companies seek to employ them. This book asks: how does creative work actually ‘embed’ into a service or product supply chain? What are creative services? What work are embedded creatives doing? Which industries are they working in? This collection explores these questions in relation to innovation, employment and education, using various methods and theoretical approaches, in order to examine the value of the embedded creative and creative services and to discover the implications of education and training for these creative workers. This book will be of interest to practitioners, policy makers and industry leaders in the Creative Industries, in particular digital media, application development, design, journalism, media and communication. It will also appeal to academics and scholars of innovation, Cultural Studies, business management and Labour Studies.

Embedded digital creatives

Digital creatives are spread widely across the economy, and growing rapidly in number. New industries such as mobile applications (apps) development are creating new occupations and services, and transforming some older ones. Digital creatives are driving innovation and economic growth in these industries and service sectors. Digital technologies and processes are becoming increasingly important in virtually all spheres of creative work, as they are across the economy. And yet there is no broad agreement either in Australia or worldwide about the constitution of the digital creative grouping, and only limited understanding of both the role of creatives in the digital economy and innovation, and of the issues and challenges they face. Who are they? Where are they working? Where are their numbers growing? The answers to these questions will help to inform the development of policy and the fostering of an environment that promotes digital content and creativity.