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We examine the evolution of vertical specialization in three industries: chemicals, computers, and semiconductors. Vertical specialization is the restructuring of industry-wide value chains, such that different stages are controlled by different firms, rather than being vertically integrated within the boundaries of individual firms. In some cases, vertical specialization may span international boundaries and is associated with complex international production networks. After decades of vertical specialization, firms in the chemical industry are re-integrating stages of the value chain. By contrast, the semiconductor and computer industries have experienced significant vertical specialization during the past ten years. We examine how and why these contrasting trends in vertical specialization have co-evolved with industry maturation and decline, and underscore the importance and role of both industry factors and business strategies necessary for industries to become more specialized. We also consider the effects of vertical specialization on the sources of innovation and the geographic redistribution of production and other activities. We conclude that the evolution of vertical specialization in these three industries has both reflected and influenced the strategies of leading firms, while also displays industry-specific characteristics that are rooted in different technological and market characteristics.

This study intends to explore the relationship between digital finance and the vertical specialization of firms. The following questions are discussed: (1) As a representative new financial development model, what is the role of digital finance in the vertical specialization of firms? (2) If digital finance improves the level of vertical specialization of firms, what is the mechanism behind such improvement? (3) How does digital finance impact the vertical specialization of firms in different regions, industries, and firms?

A two-way fixed-effect model of panel data is proposed to verify the relationship between digital finance and the vertical specialization of firms. This model is constructed by matching the city-level data of digital finance with the data of China's A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2018. Meanwhile, the instrumental variable (IV) method and difference-in-difference (DID) method are adopted to deal with the endogeneity problem of the model.

The authors' study finds that digital finance has significantly improved the level of vertical specialization of firms. The result is robust under the endogeneity consideration and a series of robustness tests. After the dimensionality of the index is reduced, the depth of digital finance usage is more conducive to the improvement of the vertical specialization of firms compared with the width of digital finance coverage and the level of financial digitization. Digital finance mainly improves the level of vertical specialization of firms by reducing transaction costs and increasing the market thickness of the intermediate products. Moreover, digital finance has certain heterogeneity in promoting the vertical specialization of firms, an effect that is more significant in the eastern region, manufacturing industry and state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

The first limitation is the mechanism test. This research only analyzes the mechanism from transaction cost and the market thickness of the intermediate products. With the rapid development of information technology, digital finance will be further integrated into people's production and life. There will then be more mechanisms that should be explored between digital finance and the vertical specialization of firms. Another limitation is the data sample of this paper. The conclusions of this research are based only on the data of listed companies. However, in the authors' opinion, the specialization level of small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) should be higher. Therefore, the conclusions of this work are underestimated, which can be considered as the lower limit of digital finance for enterprise specialization.

As a favorable financing channel to supplement traditional financial service functions, digital finance plays a critical role in the operating efficiency of enterprises and the effective allocation of macro resources. The authors' research shows that digital finance has significantly improved the vertical specialization of firms. This conclusion provides guides to improve the production efficiency of enterprises and the quality of economic development.

This paper has three main contributions. (1) The relationship between financial development and the vertical specialization of firms is innovatively discussed from the perspective of digital finance, which implies that digital finance can effectively promote the level of vertical specialization of firms. (2) This paper provides new perspectives and ideas to reveal the impact mechanism of digital finance on the real economy by systematically analyzing the mechanism of digital finance on the vertical specialization of firms from the perspectives of transaction costs and financing constraints. (3) The regional differences in the development of digital finance, industry differences in the vertical specialization of firms and differences in the nature of enterprise property rights are all under consideration, which improves the effectiveness and pertinence of digital finance in promoting the vertical specialization of firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between structural arrangements of public agencies of Pakistan and their autonomy.

Data were collected through a questionnaire using the key informant approach from 70 public agencies of Pakistan. Hypotheses were drawn from the structural instrumental perspective to examine the relation between structure and autonomy. In order to test the hypotheses, multivariate regression analysis was performed on the data.

The research highlights that out of the three major structural dimensions, horizontal specialization, vertical specialization and governing board, only governing board is seen to affect the human resource management dimension of autonomy while vertical specialization is related to financial management autonomy. None of the three hypotheses were completely supported. The divergence of the results from the structural instrumental perspective points to other factors related to agencies including administrative culture and context of state that matter in delegation of autonomy to the agencies by the government.

This paper contributes to an on-going debate on globalization of public management reforms with emphasis on structural instrumental explanation of the agencification in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the analysis of the influence of organizational design variables on the creation of knowledge within the organization. The impact that enablers have on knowledge creation has been widely demonstrated and established in the relevant literature. Using this assumption as a starting‐point, the main aim of this study is to consider and explore the role of differentiation – horizontal and vertical – in knowledge creation using enablers as mediator variables.

The paper has created a model of relations of the design variables that correspond to differentiation – horizontal job specialization, vertical job specialization and number of hierarchical levels; the enablers – autonomy, redundancy and variety; and knowledge creation. This model is then contrasted with an empirical investigation of a quantitative nature, using a sample of 167 large Spanish firms.

The findings in the paper confirm both the impact of enablers on knowledge creation, as defined in the literature, and the fact that vertical specialization is shown to be a suitable design variable for creating knowledge through the autonomy enabler. However, the relation between the horizontal specialization of work and the number of hierarchical levels is not confirmed as being significant in terms of knowledge creation.

This paper considers the main limitation of this research to be that the questionnaire was answered by only one respondent, which forced one to consider the outcomes of this research with a certain degree of caution.

The results in the paper may be relevant for managers in decision making with regard to organizational design. Herein, reference is made to variables relative to job design and the number of hierarchical levels.

The value of this paper lies in two aspects. First, it overlaps two fields of research; organizational design and knowledge creation. Second, although there is a lot of literature on knowledge creation, there are very few empirical studies, especially of a quantitative nature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that account for variations in the export performance between private‐owned enterprises (POEs) and state‐owned enterprises from the perspective of value chain.

The authors conducted empirical analysis with the panel data of 19 industrial sectors in China between 2005 and 2007.

This study finds that labor input, state ownership and vertical specialization have positive effects on export performance while capital and technology inputs have negative effects. In particular, the study found that the superior export performance of state‐owned enterprises to private‐owned ones can be mainly explained by their positions of vertical specialization in the upper stage along the industrial value chain.

The paper shows that, given the significance of POEs in China's economy and foreign trade, restrictions on POEs to enter certain high‐end industrial sectors should be relaxed and policy makers should undertake favourable policies to help POEs to engage in high‐end activities along the industrial value chain.

Although export performance has always been a heated topic in both economics and business studies, the value chain perspective has been rarely investigated and this paper fills the research gap.

The aim of this paper is to determine what type of organizational structure provides appropriate conditions for the development of organizational learning.

The approach is a research model, which is based on research within the field, using a formative conceptualization for organizational learning.

The framework makes clear that organizational learning varies according to the kind of structure (organic and mechanistic). The study of the different design variables (specialization, formalization, autonomy, centralization and indoctrination) allows us to deepen our understanding of different organizational learning implications.

Organic structural profile helps favour organizational learning and greater knowledge creation rather than mechanics profile. The critical variables that facilitate learning are centralization and indoctrination.

The article responds to the need to provide empirical evidence about the influence of organizational structure on organizational learning, advancing in the measure of this emergent field of management research, using this formative conceptualization.

The distinction between nominal and effective tariffs (or protection) is well established in the theoretical literature, albeit in the context of the traditional analysis of inter‐industry trade flows. This analysis is based upon assumptions such as product and production homogeneity, non‐increasing returns, armslength trade, and small open economy country conditions. Relaxation of some or all of these assumptions has direct implications for effective protection analysis under any type of trade flows. As is now widely recognised, however, relaxation of these assumptions is also likely to be associated with intra‐industry specialisation and exchange. It is to this wider issue of effective protection analysis in the context of “within‐industry” specialisation (vertical and/or horizontal) and of two‐way trade, that this paper is addressed.

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a comprehensive model explaining what affects the scope of the firm and also to find out its impact on firm performance.

This paper is based on an empirical analysis of a sample of 312 hardware manufacturing companies in Taiwan.

The research findings indicate that capability exploitation and upgrading will exert a positive influence on corporate diversification. In addition, corporate diversification will exhibit a curvilinear effect on firm performance.

Under the logic of capability‐based growth, managers should manage portfolios of capability upgrading and capability exploitation; and then, managers have to conduct econometric analyses to find out a firm's optimal level of corporate diversification for performance maximization.

This study attempts to propose a dynamic capabilities perspective, which suggests that the successful growth of a firm hinges on a strategic logic of capability‐based growth management containing both capability exploitation and capability upgrading, for exploring the antecedents and consequences of corporate diversification.

An issue that is becoming yet more relevant to modern manufacturers is that of flexibility. As life cycles become shorter a manufacturing firm can easily be left with redundant stock and dated processes. In Taiwan this issue has been addressed at several levels, this case study describes one such project. A Taiwanese academic conducted a study, gaining business acceptance of a hierarchical set of theoretical flexibility factors, then rearranging these via pictorial representations of fuzzy logic-derived plane surfaces, and finally re-presenting them to business as a set of ordered propositions designed to identify the key factors contributing to flexibility. The learning points relate, first, to the empirical facts uncovered about the specific factors that have a major bearing on manufacturing flexibility. These factors are, of course, specific to Taiwan and the current environment there. Second, though, is the more enduring illustration of a mixed-method case approach; where interviews, fuzzy logic analytical methods, and pictorial representation of the fuzzy logic output all combine to give clear guidance to managers of an industrial sector under stress, and to the policy makers who exert significant control over their environment.

The paper proposes a model that will enable us to go deeper into the study of organizations, bringing forth a framework that will allow us to make many propositions explicit and thus provide a contrast to the alignment theory. We test the model in the Spanish hotel industry. We have been able to identify the internal processes and behavior that fit into each strategic pattern, which go deeper into the process of putting each strategy into practice (first objective: first set of hypotheses). Furthermore, the analysis of the internal processes and behavior that bring about the different degrees of effectiveness in each strategic type makes it possible to build or maintain the complementary nature of business strategy and internal process, and guarantee its success (second objective: second and third sets of hypotheses).