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In this chapter, we explore the impact of socioemotional and financial wealth on the resource management of family firms. We use MoDo, a Swedish pulp and paper firm, covering three generations of owner-managers from 1873 to 1991, to grasp the shifting emphases on socioemotional and financial wealth in the management of the company. Identifying four strategic issues of decisive importance for the development of MoDo, we analyze the organizational values that guided the management of these issues. We propose that financial and socioemotional wealth stand for two different rationalities that infuse organizational values. The MoDo case illustrates how these rationalities go hand in hand for extended periods of time, safeguarding both financial success and socioemotional endowments. However, in a situation where the rationalities are no longer in line with the development of the industry context, the conflict arising between the two rationalities may have fatal consequences for the firm in question.

This chapter is about the production, diffusion and use of knowledge seen in an economic perspective. Fundamental distinctions between tacit and explicit knowledge and between know-how, know-why, know-what and know-who are related to distinctions between public/private and local/global knowledge. It is argued that the idea of the economy as being knowledge based is misleading and that we have moved into a learning economy where interactive learning is a key to economic performance of firms, regions and nations. This is one reason why a narrow economic perspective is insufficient. When it comes to understand industrial dynamics in the learning economy it is necessary to bring in other disciplines than economics in the analysis.

This chapter studies the negative signals associated with nonpromotion. I first show theoretically that, when workers' productivity rises little with additional years on the same job level, the negative signal associated with nonpromotion leads to wage decreases. On the other hand, when additional job-level tenure leads to a sizable increase in productivity, workers' wages increase. I then test my model's predictions using the personnel records from a large US firm from 1970–1988. I find a clear hump-shaped wage-job-tenure profile for workers who stay at the same job level, which supports my model's prediction.

In this chapter it is shown that, in spite of the fundamental importance for economic growth of product innovation, standard economic theory – neo-classical as well as transaction cost approaches to industrial organization – tends to neglect it. It is also shown that moving the focus to product innovation leads to very different conclusions on how alternative institutional set-ups affect economic performance. Institutional set ups assumed to optimise allocation and minimise transaction costs do not support innovation and growth. That is why producer goods where innovation is a regular phenomenon are transacted neither in pure markets nor in hierarchies. The omnipresence of “organized markets” reflects the need for users as well as producers to engage in on-going information exchange and interactive learning in connection with product innovation.

This chapter seeks to explain how societal institutions, which may exist at the national or regional levels, shape the types of organizational learning predominating at the level of the firm. It focuses on education and training systems, and labour markets as key societal institutions shaping the micro-level processes of learning and knowledge creation within and between firms. The chapter argues that tacit knowledge, which is difficult to create and transfer in the absence of social interaction and labour mobility, constitutes a most important source of learning and sustainable competitive advantage in the knowledge economy. It looks at the cases of Japan, the high-technology clusters in the USA and U.K., and Denmark as illustrative examples.

The aim of this book is to contribute to the understanding of product innovation – how it takes place and how it affects the economy. Our analysis of product innovation links it to interactive learning and to the performance of firms. On the basis of unique data sets and detailed case studies we study the interconnections between these three elements from different angles. We believe that the book will prove helpful for managers, employees and policy makers as well as for all those in academia who wants to understand the role of product innovation in the economy.

This study examines chronic illness, disability and social inequality within an exposure-vulnerabilities theoretical framework.

Using the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a preeminent source of national behavioral health estimates of chronic medical illness, stress and disability, for selected sample years 2005–2014, we construct and analyze two foundational hypotheses underlying the exposure-vulnerabilities model: (1) greater exposure to stressors (i.e., chronic medical illness) among racial/ethnic minority populations yields higher levels of serious psychological distress, which in turn increases the likelihood of medical disability; (2) greater vulnerability among minority populations to stressors such as chronic medical illness exacerbates the impact of these conditions on mental health as well as the impact of mental health on medical disability.

Results of our analyses provided mixed support for the vulnerability (moderator) hypothesis, but not for the exposure (mediation) hypothesis. In the exposure models, while Blacks were more likely than Whites to have a long-term disability, the pathway to disability through chronic illness and serious psychological distress did not emerge. Rather, Whites were more likely than Blacks and Latinx to have a chronic illness and to have experienced severe psychological distress (both of which themselves were related to disability). In the vulnerability models, both Blacks and Latinx with chronic medical illness were more likely than Whites to experience serious psychological distress, although Whites with serious psychological distress were more likely than these groups to have a long-term disability.

Several possibilities for understanding the failure to uncover an exposure dynamic in the model turn on the potential intersectional effects of age and gender, as well as several other covariates that seem to confound the linkages in the model (e.g., issues of stigma, social support, education).

This study (1) extends the racial/ethnic disparities in exposure-vulnerability framework by including factors measuring chronic medical illness and disability which: (2) explicitly test exposure and vulnerability hypotheses in minority populations; (3) develop and test the causal linkages in the hypothesized processes, based on innovations in general structural equation models, and lastly; (4) use national population estimates of these conditions which are rarely, if ever, investigated in this kind of causal framework.