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Computer systems firms in Silicon Valley are responding to rising costs of product development, shorter product cycles and rapid technological change by focusing and building partnerships with suppliers, both within and outside of the region. Well-known firms like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computers and lesser known ones like Silicon Graphics and Pyramid Technology are organized to combine the components and sub-systems made by specialist suppliers into new computer systems. As these firms collaborate to both define and manufacture new systems, they are institutionalizing their capacity to learn from one another. Three cases - a contract manufacturer, a silicon foundry, and the joint development of a microprocessor - illustrate how inter-firm networks help account for the sustained technological dynamism of the regional economy.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

While the popular image of the Sherman Act is that of a “trust-busting” statute, conduct remedies have been more common than structural relief. This paper evaluates the effect on economic welfare of conduct remedies that have resulted from ten prominent Sherman Act monopolization cases. In general, we find that in some cases the behavioral relief has had no consequence other than the cost of litigation and cost of compliance; in other cases, the remedies probably reduced consumer welfare. Cases studied are United Shoe Machinery, AT&T, Std. Oil of California, IBM, United Fruit, Kodak, Safeway, GM, Jerrold, and Blue Chip Stamp.

The role of management control has not received sufficient attention in the literature on value creation so far. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the role of control in value creation in industrial networks. More specifically, the aim is to examine the management and control of interfaces between key resources within and between firms, in the networks surrounding firms, when they attempt to create value. All the firms that take part in a value-creation process have both formal and informal control systems: these firms have budgets, specific routines, reward systems, and sanctioned “ways to behave.” The paper relates the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group's research on interaction, relationships, and networks with control literature, and presents a framework for controlling resource interfaces in a network setting. Two in-depth cases illustrate the role of control in value creation. The first case covers the development of a low-weight newspaper grade that Holmen and its paper mill Hallsta initiated. The second case examines the attempt to develop and commercialize a new, energy efficient pulping technology.

The annual general meeting (AGM) constitutes, at least in theory, one of the main instruments to ensure good corporate governance. It also involves the release of corporate information to the financial market. We have examined the effects of the AGM on the volatility of stock returns and on the volume of shares traded. We have investigated the informative role of the AGM in the Spanish stock market during the period 2003–2009. This chapter constitutes the first investigation of the issue in a civil-law country. Extant research is scarce and limited to two common-law countries: the United States and the United Kingdom, where the AGM has been found to involve the release of relevant information to the market. Nevertheless, since the influential paper by La Porta, López de Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny (1998), evidence reported in common-law countries cannot be automatically extrapolated to countries with a different legal tradition. As expected our results indicate that the information content of the AGM is lower in Spain than in common-law countries. In fact, no relevant information is released during the AGM in the Spanish stock market. This result is robust to company characteristics like size and the level of insider shareholders within its capital. Our findings support that the AGM plays a less significant role in ensuring good corporate governance in civil-law compared with common-law countries.

This chapter explores Christian wisdom in peacemaking, with particular reference to the experience of Christian International Peace Service (CHIPS). It expounds on the fundamentals of the Servant Leadership model and then draws these two strands together into the realm of business, with examples of how they are relevant in a commercial setting. This research can be aligned with principles of ‘participatory action research’, in so far as the author has been part of the community of practice generated by and informing the work of CHIPS in a range of peacemaking activities. Although CHIPS never makes claims to have made peace, it has proven beyond doubt that teams of Christians living humbly in the tension area, employing Biblical principles in peace-making and Servant Leadership, are incredibly effective in contributing to peace. Furthermore, the successful employment of servant leadership and peacemaking principles within commercial settings are illustrated through three business examples.

In their well-known contribution to the “varieties of capitalism” debate, Peter Hall and David Soskice (2001, Ch. 1) highlight the distinction between a “coordinated market economy” as exemplified by Germany and a “liberal market economy” as exemplified by the United States. Under the heading, “Liberal Market Economies: The American Case”, Hall and Soskice (2001, p. 27), argue:Liberal market economies can secure levels of overall economic performance as high as those of coordinated market economies, but they do so quite differently. In LMEs, firms rely more heavily on market relations to resolve the coordination problems that firms in CMEs address more often via forms of non-market coordination that entail collaboration and strategic interaction. In each of the major spheres of firm endeavor, competitive markets are more robust and there is less institutional support for non-market forms of coordination.