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Product harm crises are becoming increasingly common, and recent examples include Toyota and Vioxx. This chapter examines country differences that impact consumer blame attributions for an ambiguous product harm crisis, and proposes a framework for a crisis response strategy. The first step involves assessing the level of uncertainty avoidance and crisis severity which serve as an indicator of the urgency felt by consumers to assess blame. The second step involves examining consumer beliefs and information processing biases to determine who consumers will most likely blame in order to resolve the uncertainty. Based on information gathered from these steps, a crisis response strategy is suggested for global brand managers.

How can leaders adopt a mindset that maximizes learning, remains responsive to short-term emergent opportunities, and simultaneously strengthens longer-term dynamic capabilities of the organization? This chapter explores the organizational decisions and practices leaders can initiate to extend, strengthen, or transform “ordinary capabilities” (Winter, 2003) into enhanced improvisational competence and dynamic capabilities. We call this leadership logic the “jazz mindset.” We draw upon seven characteristics of jazz bands as outlined by Barrett (1998) to show that strategic leaders of business organizations can enhance dynamic capabilities by strengthening practices observed in improvising jazz bands.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

In Japan a network system called keiretsu exists (Abegglen & Stalk, 1985; Gerlach, 1992; Sheard, 1994). Keiretsu may involve formal and informal relationships with suppliers that have developed over the years or other interfirm links (for example, among manufacturers and supporting financial institutions). In the late 1990s, the Japanese economic system has undergone some changes such as the dissolution of cross-shareholdings and the decline of the main bank system (relationship-based financing) leading to changes in the corporate ownership and the governance system of Japanese companies.

Originally developed by the Japanese firm Toyota in the 1950s, the core innovation of lean production is to reorient all organizational activity around continuous improvement and the elimination of waste. We use the case of lean production in two healthcare organizations to explore the process of translating management models into new environments (Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996; Mohr, 1998). We draw on insights from organizational sociology and social movement theory to understand the strategies of actors as they attempt to overcome opposition to model transfer (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986). We examine two attempts to export lean production to healthcare organizations: Riverside Hospital, a research and teaching institution, and Lakeview Associations, a managed health provider. We use these cases to illustrate two ways that management models can get lost in the process of institutional translation: model attenuation, and model decoupling.

The authors argue that organization design needs to play a more active role in the explanation of differential performance and outline a set of ideas for achieving this both in theoretical and empirical research. Firms are heterogeneous in terms of (1) how well they do things, capturing persistent productivity differences, and (2) how they do things – and both reflect firms’ organization design choices. Both types of heterogeneity can be persistent, and are interdependent, although they have typically been studied separately. The authors propose a simple formal framework – the “aggregation function framework” – that aligns organization design thinking with the emphasis on performance heterogeneity among firms that is characteristic of the strategy field. This framework allows for a more precise identification of how exactly organization design may contribute to persistent performance differences, and therefore what exactly are the assumptions that strategy and organization design scholars need to be attentive to.

In this chapter I would like to recall how I got started on my research on the multinational enterprise (MNE) and outline how my thinking on this important economic institution has evolved through the years.11I thank Sondra Grace of Gracefully Put for editing this manuscript.

I integrate several literatures on how networks relate to firms and markets. While the logic of strong ties (based on mutual goodwill, trust, and commitment) is distinct from the style of interaction classically associated with hierarchical firms and free markets, such ties in fact depend on the legal environments constituted by firm and market. A key role is played by credible commitments to refrain from exercising rights to control others and exit relationships with them. But since such commitments to employees conflict with commitments to contractors, strong ties may be prevalent internally or externally, but not in both simultaneously.

We study whether group identity mitigates inefficiencies associated with appropriable quasi-rents, which are often created by relationship-specific investments in bilateral trade relationships. We conjecture that group identity strengthens the effect of an agent’s generous action in increasing his trade partner’s altruistic preferences, and this effect helps reduce incentives to undertake ex-post inefficient opportunistic behavior such as investment in an outside option. Our experimental results, however, do not support this conjecture, and contrast with our previous experimental findings that group identity mitigates distortions in ex-ante efficient relation-specific investment. We discuss a possible cause of the difference and its implications for the theory of the firm.