Maria del Rosio Barajas/Leonel Gonzalez (El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico)
E-Mail address: rbarajas@colef.mx/leoglez74@hotmail.com
Development of organizational learning capacities into the subsidiary firms of the electronics industry in
the northern border of Mexico
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The study of the development of capacities of subsidiaries of important transnational corporations operating
on the northern border of Mexico is highly relevant. These capacities allow the subsidiary firms to
participate in complex productive higher value-added activities. At the same time, it encourages technology
transfer and helps create more qualified workers in Mexico.
The interest of this paper is to analyze the type of abilities, knowledge and workers skills that are developed
in the electronics industry. The organizational capacities attained by these firms are the result of the type of
the production and administrative activities in which these firms are involved.
The paper will report the results of a survey of 106 electronic firms located in three cities of the northern
border of Mexico .We are building a matrix of learning organizational capacities using the classification of
basic, intermediate and advanced capacities. We compare information across four categories of learning
capacities: organizational structure, central competences, technological innovation, and organizational
interaction.
The findings of this study are complemented with the results of several interviews with workers of the
electronics firms, it is in order to analyze how the development of these learning capacities impacts the
northern border region of Mexico.
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Tom Beckman (George Washington University, USA)
E-Mail address: tombeckman@starpower.net
Intelligent Organizations: Creating and Realizing Value from Business Systems
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A novel framework is proposed that encompasses both components and characteristics for an Intelligent
Organization. The Intelligent Organization is defined as a business system of interacting components and
is compared with nine other contributions by cyberneticians, systemic thinkers, and business strategists.
Value propositions for six stakeholder classes are discussed. Bundling of differing resource categories will
be explored, including how workforce, knowledge, and innovative IT can provide value to customers and
the organization. In addition, a methodology for developing and implementing these concepts is presented.
The implications for managing resources and knowledge in the cybernetics and systemic thinking context
will be explained. More importantly, proper management of the interplay and interaction of system
components can create significant value. Finally, the author will show how to apply the Business System
Approach across linked components to create potential value from resources, transformed into products and
services that realize and extract significant customer and business value.
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Stewart Clegg (UTS, Australia)
E-Mail address: s.clegg@uts.edu.au
Japan as Institutional Counterfactual
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Many Anglo-Saxon assumptions about the importance of objective knowledge, the scientific method and
individualism do not sit easily in a Japanese context. Japan's institutions – defined 'as rules of the game' –
privilege group-knowledge over individual knowledge and implicit understanding over explicit rules.
Within Japan's institutional framework, close community relationships amongst long-term colleagues lower
the marginal cost of information transfer and enable insiders to act as a group, able to ostracize and retaliate
against those who break their code. This redefinition of the interface for principal-agent conflict has
profound implications for the way that Japan has developed knowledge 'in the context of application'. It
also underscores the importance of collective tacit knowledge (which, tentatively, we will call mode 3
knowledge) retained within the organisation as a tool for shaping future practice. A pluralist approach to
the types of knowledge that mutually enable practice is used to reinterpret the mode 1 and mode 2 debate in
the context of Japan's institutional framework. By avoiding the idea of tacit-explicit 'knowledge
conversion', one can acknowledge the specificity of Japan's institutional context and consider its
implications for organizational learning elsewhere.
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Klaus Dörre/Ulrich Brinkmann (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)
E-Mail address: ulrich.brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
No trust without power? - Marketization of organizations and the spread of knowledge work as
conflicting principles
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Due to the specific characteristics of their jobs knowledge workers could – for a longer period of time – be
regarded as rather powerful agents in organizations. They had to be granted sufficient room for maneuver
and trust in advance to improve their productivity. All this meant a potential threat to the managers
affected. Thus the current processes of shifting market demarcations into enterprises and individuals by
top-management are interpreted – amongst other motives – as an attempt to rearrange the organizational
balance of power by confronting the knowledge workers with an increasing substitutability (e.g. by
freelancers), by diminishing zones of uncertainty (by formalization of former tacit knowledge), by reducing
complex activities to prices, and so on. This cold disempowerment of the organizational "high-flyers" leads
to a deterioration of trust and self-confidence that after all undermines the conditions for knowledge work
as such. These considerations are illustrated by empirical data from a case study about a reorganized
division in a major German bank. The paper concludes that the theoretical connection between trust and
power has to be revisited as a result of our findings.
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Jeff Dayton-Johnson (Dalhousie University, Canada)
E-Mail address: jeff.dayton-johnson@dal.ca
Artfilms, handicrafts and other cultural goods: the case for subsidy
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Although public subsidies for cultural activities (including the arts, heritage preservation, cultural
industries, and festivals) are widespread, few economic justifications have been offered for the practice.
We present a simple microeconomic model in order to analyse six types of market failure present in the
production and consumption of cultural activities. Regarding consumers' preferences, there is uncertainty,
in two forms. (i) "We don't know what we like most": cultural diversity generates a positive externality,
increasing the probability that consumers will find the variety of good they most prefer. (ii) "We don't
know what we may like in the future": cultural diversity raises the probability that future generations will
have the cultural resources they most desire. Our preferences are endogenous, in at least two ways. (iii)"We
like what our neighbours talk about": there are network externalities in the consumption of some goods.
(iv) "We like what commercials show us": particular forms of cultural consumption are habit-forming. Two
forms of market failure are technological. (v) In distinction to "learning-by-doing", the production of many
special cultural goods like handicrafts exhibits "forgetting-by-not-doing": if certain practices disappear
today, it may be prohibitively expensive to restart production in the future. (vi) There is a potential "deep
pockets" problem if smaller producers may face credit-market imperfections and may not be able to cover
the fixed cost, leading to the disappearance of the goods they produce. Our results have implications for
subsidies to and regulation of cultural activity, and for the treatment of cultural products in international-
trade agreements.
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Jeff Dayton-Johnson (Dalhousie University, Canada)
E-Mail address: jeff.dayton-johnson@dal.ca
The economics of cultural policy: the role of sociability
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What is the economic rationale for public policy promoting cultural activity (the fine and performing arts,
heritage preservation, cultural industries, festivals) in liberal capitalist democracies? While some have
proposed the existence of vague externalities, others have suggested that such positive spillovers are likely
to be small. The four papers in this bilingual (French-English) session argue that cultural activity is
important in the first instance because it generates new models of sociability. Without such models of
sociability, complex market-oriented economies cannot function. We affirm that there is a strong case to
be made that private, unregulated markets will not supply the mix and level of cultural activity that society
desires, and that judicious cultural policy can thus improve social welfare and economic efficiency. The
papers in this session draw upon a wide range of methodological approaches (microeconomic theory,
communication studies, the history of economic thought, and policy analysis) in order to establish the
economic rationale for public intervention in the cultural sector and to propose the appropriate design and
evaluation of such policy interventions.
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Ekkehard Ernst (European Central Bank, Germany)
E-Mail address: ekkehard.ernst@ecb.int
Time horizons, the evolution of financial markets and economic development
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Characteristics of individual behavior that are individually costly but group beneficial ("altruistic traits")
may nevertheless emerge as dominant behavior when the group is socially segmented or when group
competition constitutes a second evolutionary selection force. However, this is not a general result as it
depends on the form of competition between groups. In the paper, we will show that depending on the type
of competition – one-shot versus repeated competition – even individually beneficial traits may not survive
in a multi-group population when there is substantial uncertainty as to the outcome of group encounters and
the payoffs and variation of individual traits. Moreover, competition may more directly affect the benefits
the adoption of a certain trait brings about as it affects the risk distribution of the payoffs. These theoretical
considerations are discussed using the example of the emergence and viability of financial markets. It
shows the importance of a stationary stochastic environment for economic development and the possibility
for increasing returns to market development. Furthermore, we discuss these considerations using historical
examples.
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Gerhard Fuchs (Center for Technology Assessment, Germany)
E-Mail address: gerhard.fuchs@ta-akademie.de
Regional Development and Social Capital in a Knowledge-based Economy: Challenges for Policy
Makers
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Recent approaches to the study of innovations stress similar aspects of the innovation process in knowledge
based economies: the systemic and interrelated nature of innovation, and its grounding in dense networks
of geographically proximate firms engaged in related types of economic activity. One approach is rooted in
the innovation systems approach at both the national and regional or even local level. Recent research
suggests that even the most specialized forms of knowledge are becoming a short lived resource, due to the
accelerating pace of change in the global economy; it is the capacity to learn continuously and adapt to
rapidly changing conditions that determines the innovative performance of firms, regions and countries.
Another approach is to be found in studies on cluster development. Although they each operate at slightly
different spatial scales of analysis, both approaches identify a number of key factors that contribute to the
way in which a complex set of institutions and actors, comprising the innovation system of the cluster
respectively, contribute to the process of innovation and economic growth. However, both suffer from the
same limitation: a tendency to focus on the descriptive and analytical level at the expense of the
explanatory level. What local and regional authorities and policy makers are interested in is the process by
which clusters take hold and expand in the context of local and regional economies. This paper sets out to
explore what we currently know about this process and lays out a research agenda to further our collective
efforts in the field.
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Susanne Giesecke (VDI/VDE- Center for Information Technology, Germany)
E-Mail address: Giesecke@vdivde-it.de
Knowledge Production, Paths of Innovation and New Models of Corporate Governance
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Today's economic progress and our every day life are to a large degree influenced by the progress and
outcome of high tech developments. These features are characterized by an enormous pace, e.g. of the
produce life cycle, and by a high degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. New technological
developments generate unintended consequences in terms of personal and social security. The crisis of the
small caps at the stock markets has demonstrated the vulnerability of our belief in the economic stability of
new ventures and emerging technologies. Even more complexity as well as more possibilities and chances
are offered by the recently emerging dissolution of classical technological, disciplinary and sectoral
boundaries. Scientists and popular culture have outlines future scenarios of the problem solving potential
of "converging technologies". This has recently been reflected in the research programs of some policy
makers in industrialized countries. Especially prominent is the idea of the further miniaturization of the
classical sciences physics, chemistry and biology on the nanoscale. The United States has emphasized their
belief in the future of nanotechnology by concentrating various research efforts and financial support on
this subject. Other national R&D programs have followed. A further trend setting initiative is the
discussion on and funding of "converging technologies" triggered by the US National Science Foundation.
This comprises the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive
science and has the ambition to create a higher quality of life and of increasing the human performance.
Research on national innovation systems in the past 15 years has demonstrated that each country has
specific institutional arrangements, competitive advantages that favor some technological developments
over others. The effort of national R&D policies to improve the determinants to reach more innovative
performance have proved very difficult and complex. The state's capabilities to govern innovation
activities seems rather limited. The question arises if national innovation systems are fit for supporting the
convergence of technologies in order to create innovative activities and outcome or to what degree they are
able to meet this new challenge.
The paper will point out the most prominent efforts and tendencies of converging technologies and present
a reflection of their prospected outcomes. The respective national innovation systems will be analyzed in
terms of their supportiveness of converging technologies. It will then be summarized if the convergence of
technologies offers a new field of scientific and economic activities and if it has the potential to change the
"traditional" production of high tech knowledge and innovation.
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Devrim Goktepe (Lund Univ., Sweden)
E-mail: devrim.goktepe@innovation.lth.se
An Assessment of the Israeli Innovation Networks: The Experience of the Magnet
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Networking between the users and producers of knowledge thus the achievement of the synergy among participants
has been proposed as an efficient way for the better utilization of the benefits of the
knowledge-based economy (Sinha and Cusumana, 1991). Correspondingly, innovation networks
and national innovation systems have been acclaimed as accurate models for science, technology
and innovation systems of the twenty-first century (Edquist et al. 1997).
The notion of networking has been deeply rooted in the Israeli system even before the
establishment of the Israeli State in 1948. The research focuses on the Israeli Magnet Program
for pre-competitive generic technology production within the consortia of university, government
and industry (UGI). The analysis of the Magnet Program reveals the importance of the
interaction of domestic and international factors and typical organizational setting of
Magnet for the formation of innovation networks successful in Israel.
Consequently, a network-based innovation system, which provides the communication linkages
and basis among the actors of innovation, leads to the achievement of the synergy among
these actors of innovation. Such production system is believed to bring about much more
economic and industrial development to the Israeli nation than the sum of these participants
individually.
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Kieran Healy (University of Arizona, USA)
E-Mail address: kjhealy@arizona.edu
The Ecology of Open Source Software Development
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Open Source Software (OSS) is an innovative method of developing software applications that has been
very successful over the past eight to ten years. A number of theories have emerged to explain its success,
mainly from economics and law. We analyze a very large sample of OSS projects and find striking patterns
in the overall structure of the development community. The distribution of projects on a range of activity
measures is spectacularly skewed, with only a relatively tiny number of projects showing evidence of the
strong collaborative activity that is supposed to characterize OSS. Our findings are consistent with prior,
smaller-scale empirical research. We argue that these findings pose problems for the dominant accounts of
OSS. We suggest that the gulf between active and inactive projects may be explained by social-structural
features of the community that have received little attention in the existing literature. We suggest some
hypotheses that might better predict the observed ecology of projects.
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Suzan Ilcan/Daniel O'Connor (University of Windsor, Canada)
E-Mail address: silcan@uwindsor.ca
The Folding of Government: Contract Governance and the Canadian Public Sector
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The current era of liberalism has seen many western states retreat from the provision of public welfare
through the management of a standardized, merit-based workforce. Liberal governments are now
experimenting with the provision of public services by using various contractual relations to promote
flexible workforces. This pattern of workforce governance has been termed "contract government"
(Dominelli & Hoogvelt 1996) or "control by contract" (Marshall, Richardson & Hopkins 1999). The shift
from merit governance to contract government, or contract governance as we prefer to call it, is a shift that
reflects changes in the way work is managed within and beyond the state. The shift toward consumerism,
downsizing, and lean production means that more and more firms beyond the state rely on contractual
arrangements, flexible workforces, and networks of communication to promote efficiency and
competitiveness in the global marketplace.
This paper examines the governance of public sector work in the Canadian Federal Public Service context.
Based on an examination of various forms of contract governance currently operative within and beyond
the Canadian state, we argue that the shift from merit to contract governance is an ongoing process
involving a threefold articulation between the state and civil society. Rather than a strict focus on the
privatization of government services, we analyze the processes of unfolding, enfolding, and refolding, as
outlined by Mitchell Dean (2002), that take place between liberal government and civil society. In this
context, we identify key practices of contract governance and flexibilization that have been enfolded and
refolded into the conventional structures of governance, and unfolded into a liminal space between the
government and civil society through the creation of quasi-government special agencies and networks of
knowledge and information sharing.
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Sarah Kaplan (MIT Sloan School of Management, USA)
E-Mail address: skaplan@mit.edu
Making strategy under uncertainty: unpacking the role of cognition in shaping technology strategy in
the optical communications industry
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While there is general agreement that discontinuities create problems for established firms, there is no
consensus as to why they should be so difficult to manage. Though the literature devotes little attention to
the role played by managerial cognition, it seems likely that mental models play a critical role because they
filter management's perceptions about what is happening and what action should be taken, a particularly
critical function during periods of technical change when the degree of uncertainty is extremely high. To
understand the complex interplay of factors associated with firm response to technical change, this paper
ethnographically explores strategy making in a firm in the highly turbulent optical communications
industry. This effort to "bring work back in" to strategy reveals several insights into how cognition shapes
what information is collected, the interpretation of the data, the range of decision options considered and
the actual choices made.
Here, cognition should not be conceived of as frames but rather as a situated process of framing; it is
collective in that it is the product of interactions among people and "scaffolded" on social and material
circumstances. The embeddedness of representational repertoires explains the difficulty encountered in
changing mental models—and therefore firm strategies—in the face of radical change.
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S. Lee (University of London, United Kingdom)
E-Mail address: s.lee@bbk.ac.uk
Reconceptualising Knowledge Based Exchange: Implications of Trust, Identity and Property Rights
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The growing management literature on knowledge invariably tends to be framed in Polyani's (1966)
distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, which has resulted in narrow scope of theorising and
static causalities. This paper attempts to address the multi-dimensionality and complexity of knowledge
based exchange by incorporating a variety of sociological, anthropological and economic theories of
exchange. The paper focuses on the role of trust, identity and property rights while developing their
implications for international management. We suggest that an actor specific conception (inalienability) in
conjunction with the existing premise on intrinsic characteristics of goods (intangibility) could provide a
useful framework for analysing governance and co-ordination of knowledge based exchange. In doing so,
the paper elaborates on Kogut and Zander's (1992, 1993, 1995) conceptualisation of firms as "social
communities" and Nahapiet and Ghoshal's (1998) model of social and intellectual capital.
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Mita Marra (Italy's National Research Council, Italy)
E-Mail address: mita.marra@isfse.na.cnr.it
Evaluation Uses and the Patterns of Organizational Knowledge Creation: the Case of the World Bank
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International organizations' focus is increasingly on organizational learning. The experience accumulated
by development agencies throughout the world has become a source of organizational knowledge, which,
according to Nonaka, is transferred through processes of socialization, externalization, combination, and
internalization. Through four case studies and in depth-interviewing of World Bank managers and
evaluators over two years, this paper explores the contribution of evaluation to organizational learning. The
study analyzes the usage patterns of evaluation as a source of knowledge within the World Bank. Findings
show that participatory methods favor socialization of tacit knowledge through interaction between
individuals. Theory-driven evaluations help externalize tacit into codified or explicit knowledge. Particular
evaluation constructs – i.e., "chilling effect" – provide vocabulary that help organize and clarify discussion
and debate, combining tacit and explicit knowledge. Finally, "lessons learned" and recommendations
stimulate individuals to reflect critically on their own behavior and internalize new ways of action and
thinking.
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Eric Mulot (Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne-Matisse, France)
E-Mail address: eric.mulot@univ-paris1.fr
The evolution of the educative policies in Cuba since 1989. Preservation of egalitarian objectives in a
context of new inequalities development
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Since 1989, Cuban authorities have to cope with a deep economic crisis. Yet, the authorities try to preserve
the bases of the educative policies. This aspect of the Cuban adjustment process is very important because
it represents the will of Cuban authorities not to sacrify the priority objectives of the government that is
equality of conditions, constitutive of the socialism of the country, to the economic ones, which are
imposed by the unfavourable situation of the island.
To estimate the difficulties that Cuba has to face in this particular field, we will first recall the
characteristics of the Cuban educative system, in order to better understand the weight of the constraints
appeared in 1989. We will insist on the financial problems (drastic loss of wealth, creating difficulties to
maintain a costly educative system) and on the problems linked to the apparition of new inequalities
generated by the economic reforms that the educative system cannot manage. Finally, we will analyze the
principal changes in the educative policies, in order to understand how the authorities react to those
structural transformations, concentrating our reflection on the Cuban conception of equity and quality,
which are different from the one that prevails in Latin America.
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Lars Niklasson (Swedish Agency for Public Management, Sweden)
E-Mail address: Lars.Niklasson@statskontoret.se
Regional partnerships for growth. The Swedish experiences
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Since 1998, Sweden has pursued a policy of regional partnerships for growth. All relevant public and
private actors (agencies, companies, universities, unions, business organizations etc) have cooperated on a
regional basis to support local economic development. The policy is based on a cluster-model, where
increased cooperation is thought to bring about stronger economic growth.
A central aspect of this policy is to get various national agencies more coordinated and more open to the
needs of business. It forces policy segments to cooperate geographically and adds economic growth to the
aims of the welfare state.
The study is based on evaluations that have been conducted to support decision making on a regional level.
These evaluations differ in ambition, including comparisons with regional development in Finland and with
the programs pursued by the EU structural funds. The central question is whether the regional actors have
collected enough information to control these processes. Do they know enough about their own spending
and other activities, about growth and other effects? In other words, do they know what to do to stimulate
growth? The study is a first step in a full-scale evaluation of processes and effects of these partnerships.
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Birgitta Olsson (Stockholm Unviersity, Sweden)
E-Mail address: oln@fek.su.se
Understanding the cultural dimension of career development
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A career is according to general theory a set of occupational experiences and roles that makes up a person´s
working life. The aim of the paper is to discuss how the cultural dimension could be used to understand the
low mobility in many organizations which means that people getting "locked in" during decades even if
they do not view it that way by themselves. Does the cultural set boundaries restrain the occupational
growth among members of an organization?
Cultures are anchored in the organizational collective and exercise influence without the direct involvement
of particular key actors. Here the culture-as-root-metaphor according to Smircich has been applied. The
cultural is here viewed as a guide to interpret what goes on in organizations. Culture is not seen as a
variable but more as a fundamental dimension that permeates the system of occupational positions in an
organization.
The focus in the paper is on understanding the cultural dimension in a person´s occupational position. New
innovative measures have to be tested to break the old boundaries of careers. The paper is based on
empirical material from a project for career development program in a Swedish agency.
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Rachel Parker (University of Queensland, Australia)
E-Mail address: rachel.parker@uq.edu.au
Knowledge Intensive Activities in Australia, Denmark and Sweden
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At a broad level, it has been shown that different institutional contexts, policy regimes and business
systems affect the kinds of activities in which a nation specializes. This paper is concerned with the impact
of institutional contexts on knowledge intensive sectors in Australia, Denmark and Sweden. The paper
seeks to explain cross-national variations in knowledge activities in the three countries with reference to the
institutional and policy context within which firms operate.
Australia has been regarded as a variant of the competitive business system and has generally been
described as an entrepreneurial economy with a large small firm population. In contrast Sweden has been
described as having a coordinated business system that has favoured large firms. The Danish variant of the
coordinated model, with its well developed vocational training system, has been associated with a large
population of small and medium size enterprises. The countries also differ significantly with respect to the
existing stock of knowledge and competence in the economy, the potential for generation and diffusion of
new knowledge and the capacity for commercialisation of new ideas. This paper therefore seeks to explain
how variations in knowledge intensive activities in the three countries with reference to institutional
contexts. Reference is made to information and communications industries and services.
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Yusheng Peng (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
E-Mail address: yushengpeng@cuhk.edu.hk
What has Spilled over from Chinese Cities into Rural Industry?
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Rural industry in China has played an important role in driving national economic growth and facilitating
economic reform over past two decades. One prominent feature of rural industrialization in China is its
geographic concentration around urban centers. Existing literature suggested three possible mechanisms
for this spatial feature: (1) knowledge spillovers embodied in urban technical personnel from state owned
firms moonlighting in and commuting to nearby rural firms, (2) capital spillovers in the form of joint
ventures and subcontracts between urban state-owned firms and rural firms, and (3) urban consumer market
agglomeration. Statistical analysis of a large county-level data set (1985-1991) shows that proximity to
urban technical personnel and to urban consumer market has significant impacts on rural industrial growth
whereas the capital assets of urban state owned firms do not. The null finding of capital spillover suggests
that large state investment discouraged rural industrialization because local officials tended to milk revenue
from state owned firms rather than developing new tax base in the rural industrial sector.
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Julia Resnik (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
E-Mail address: juliares@mscc.huji.ac.il
Diffusion of the education-economic growth "black box": reformist educational networks in Israel and
France
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In an era in which socio-economic policies are elaborated on the basis of academic research, the
globalization of specific "social problems" results from the success of certain knowledge production
networks (researchers and experts) in imposing their "black boxes" on global networks. After World War
II econometric economists of education succeeded in imposing the "education-economic growth" black box
on intergovernmental organizations (UNESCO and OECD). The adoption of the black box by global
educational networks fostered a vast movement of educational reforms. Knowledge producers in Israel
were mainly connected to a global reformist network centered in American universities while in France
they were connected to a global reformist network centered in intergovernmental organizations. Based on
the same black box, knowledge producers in each country formulated "social problems" according to socio-
economic local features. In the name of these global "social problems", policy makers advanced their
reformist agenda. Reformist coalitions bringing together knowledge producers and political factors
succeeded in enhancing educational innovations. Global knowledge networks are becoming more
powerful, which means that black boxes circulating within the networks are even more influential and
knowledge producers, who belong to these global networks are becoming central actors of national
policies.
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Werner Rammert (Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany)
E-Mail address: werner.rammert@tu-berlin.de
Two Paradoxes of Fragmented Knowledge Production: Combining Heterogeneous and Cultivating
Non-Explicit Knowledge
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It is argued that the ongoing advancement and division of knowledge production is changing the character
of social differentiation: A fragmental type of differentiation emerges and gains superiority over the
hierarchical and functional type of differentiation. The heterogeneity of knowledge and the diversity of
knowledgeable actors challenges the established social institutions and technological instruments which
were designed to integrate and utilize the distributed stocks of knowledge, like the hierarchy between pure
and applied sciences, the disciplinary organization of knowledge production and reproduction, the
functional differentiation between academic, industrial and governmental institutions, the standardization
and packaging of knowledge pieces. The rise of networks of innovation are one institutional response to
the problem of a rising heterogeneity of knowledge and a growing diversity of agents. It shall be argued
that only a specific type of network organization shall fulfill the conditions to cope with the institutional
paradox of combining the heterogeneous without restricting innovative diversity.
The fragmentation and asynchronization of the knowledge production push forwards the agents of the
formalization and computerization. They revive the myth of a technical system of total collection, control
and integration of knowledge pieces. Whereas the internet technology up to now is designed to cope with
spatial dispersed, temporal asynchronical, and social heterogeneous knowledge, the organizational
information and intranet systems are mainly told of hierarchical and functional integration. I shall argue
that the latter ones shall fail to cope with the epistemological paradox of making explicit the non-explicit
knowledge. A policy of a balanced cultivation of local knowledge and of self-organized issue-focused
knowledge exchanges with other localities is proposed instead of a policy of global benchmarking and
evaluation systems.
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Sally Randles/Nathalie Moncel (University of Manchester, UK)
E-Mail address: Sally.Randles@man.ac.uk/N.Moncel@umist.ac.uk
Knowledge of Knowledge and the Challenge of Interdisciplinary Research
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Interdisciplinary research is demanded with increasing persistence by policy makers at both the European
and national level. This requirement is refracted through funding calls and in turn is played back by
research teams, confident they are delivering truly interdisciplinary programmes. This position is more
easily claimed than substantiated, and so our paper seeks to unpack and understand the challenge of
interdisciplinary scholarship in intellectual, practical, and policy terms.
To analytically frame the discussion the authors borrow from Bourdieu (2001) who appeals for greater
critical questioning by social scientists of the very processes by which and through which knowledge is
'produced'. Via an historical perspective on science in society Bourdieu wishes to reveal a realistic version
of the scientific field, which he presents as structured around normalised practices and system(s) of rewards
and within which competing agents struggle for position.
We present some historical and comparative examples to illustrate these processes within and across the
disciplines of economics, sociology, and their contemporary hybrids, economic sociology and socio-
economics. For example, we compare the a-priori assumptions made by contemporary authors seeking to
understand and theorise 'the nature of knowledge' from within different disciplines. Finally the paper
returns to the opening problematic to ask how Bourdieu's framework can shed light on the challenge of
interdisciplinary scholarship.
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Jorge Rosario (Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal)
E-Mail address: joloro@iseg.utl.pt
Knowledge representation and electronic learning communities
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Information revolutions change the way organizations produce, store and distribute knowledge, and new
features in the forms cognitive systems are taking place.
In order to share information space and to create meaning, the organization must represent a controlled
environment where individuals have a common ground for performing particular tasks. From a structure
built on centralized systems of information, a narrow and a homogeneous scope of formal knowledge are
used for controlling operations. Since knowledge within a communication network is freed from the
traditional spatial and physical constrains, the organization can be conceptualized as a group of nested
systems. New tools and instruments mediate the interactions between agents. In mediated environments,
the ability to externalize information and to manipulate cognitive artifacts is crucial for communicating and
organizing. When shared values, norms and common interests are developed a new playfulness becomes
possible beyond proximity, and the expansion of knowledge helps to legitimate the organization as a
learning community.
The objective of this research is to provide an account of the hermeneutic foundations of networks. Notions
of knowledge representation and interpretative systems are combined in a model of learning communities.
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Jakob Vestergaard (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
E-Mail address: jvj.lpf@cbs.dk
Mobilising Universities
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Recent scholarship on the role of universities in 'knowledge society' has been richer in vision than in
realism. Whether speaking of 'entrepreneurial universities' or 'Mode-2 universities', these bodies of
literature are surprisingly mute when it comes to assessing what it will take for this type of university to
emerge and prosper in knowledge society. This paper seeks to address such issues. It is argued that reforms
relating to the ownership, regulation and organisation of universities are prime conditions for mobilising
universities in the knowledge society.Such reforms will require, however, that present inconsistencies
among conventional wisdoms in higher education policy and science and techonology policy, respectively,
are addressed and worked out politically as well as culturally.
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Jenn-Hwan Wang (Tunghai University, Taiwan)
E-Mail address: wangjh@mail.thu.edu.tw
The Learning Economy of Taiwan: The Case of the IT Industry
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Taiwan's recent development in the IT sector has been argued by many as a successful story of latecomer'
learning that has transformed itself into one of the leading countries in the sector. This paper will
investigate the route of its learning process, the national system of learning and innovation, the networking
of expatriates and local firms, as well as the limitation of this sector when many of the major firms began to
migrate to China to search for cheaper labors. This paper will argue that formation of the IT sector has been
largely led by the state and the public research institutes, together with the knowledge transmitted from the
expatriates who have been working in the Silicon Valley that constitutes a global-local, public-private
networks which are favorable for the formulation of a learning economy. However, because of the
Taiwanese firms' innovations have been mainly based on process innovation (the lower order) rather than
on product innovation (higher order) that are easier to replicate in other areas, the firms' search for cheaper
labors in China may in the long run damage the development of the sector on the island, except that the
state provides stronger policies that push the local firms spend more expenditure on R&D and to research
for innovations on the edge.
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