Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, their routines and processes, and their corporate cultures as they seek to improve their current performance and their growth prospects. In the process they are changing the scope of their business operations, redrawing their organization charts, redefining the allocation of decision-making authority and responsibility, revamping the mechanisms for motivating and rewarding people, reconsidering which activities to conduct in-house and which to out-source, redesigning their information systems, and seeking to alter the shared beliefs, values and norms that their people hold. In this book, John Roberts argues that there are predictable, necessary relationships among these changes that will improve performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner. The Modern Firm develops powerful conceptual frameworks for analyzing the interrelations between organizational design features, competitive strategy and the business environment. Written in a non-technical language, the book is nevertheless based on rigorous modeling and draws on numerous examples from eighteenth century fur trading companies to such modern firms such as BP and Nokia. Finally the book explores why these developments are happening now, pointing to the increase in global competition and changes in technology. Written by one of the world's leading economists and experts on business strategy and organization, The Modern Firm provides new insights into the changes going on in business today and will be of interest to academics, students and managers alike.

The theoretical basis of commercial law, corporate governance law, and corporate law is still unsatisfactory. There essentially is no theory of commercial law, and existing theories of corporate governance and corporate law cannot explain the behaviour of firms or the contents of existing regulation. This book proposes a coordinated solution for all three areas. The starting point is that all three areas deal with the organisation of firms. Commercial law, corporate governance, and corporate law are therefore studied from the perspective of the firm rather than that of the judge or the investor. Changing the perspective makes it easier to formulate an "umbrella" theory of commercial law, and theories of corporate governance and corporate law as applications of the main theory. The book provides examples of how the proposed theories work by studying legal corporate governance tools and practices that increase the sustainability of the firm. Sustainability can be bolstered by making the governance model more self-enforcing and ensuring that it fosters innovation.

As a leader, it's your job to extract maximum talent, energy, knowledge, and innovation from your customers and employees. But how? In The Social Organization, two of Gartner's lead analysts strongly advocate exploiting social technology. The authors share insights from their study of successes and failures at more than four hundred organizations that have used social technologies to foster—and capitalize on—customers’ and employees’ collective efforts. But the new social technology landscape isn’t about the technology. It’s about building communities, fostering new ways of collaborating, and guiding these efforts to achieve a purpose. To that end, the authors identify the core disciplines managers must master to translate community collaboration into otherwise impossible results: • Vision: defining a compelling vision of progress toward a highly collaborative organization. • Strategy: taking community collaboration from risky and random success to measurable business value. • Purpose: rallying people around a clear purpose, not just providing technology. • Launch: creating a collaborative environment and gaining adoption. • Guide: participating in and influencing communities without stifling collaboration. • Adapt: responding creatively to change in order to better support community collaboration. The Social Organization highlights the benefits and challenges of using social technology to tap the power of people, revealing what managers must do to make collaboration a source of enduring competitive advantage.

"Books and articles come and go, endlessly. But a few do stick, and this book is such a one. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process broke fresh ground in the understanding of strategy at a time when thinking about strategy was still in its early days, and it has not been displaced since." —David J. Hickson, Emeritus Professor of International Management & Organization, University of Bradford School of Management Originally published in 1978, Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process became an instant classic, as it bridged the formerly separate fields of strategic management and organizational behavior. In this Stanford Business Classics reissue, noted strategy scholar Donald Hambrick provides a new introduction that describes the book's contribution to the field of organization studies. Miles and Snow also contribute new introductory material to update the book's central concepts and themes. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process focuses on how organizations adapt to their environments. The book introduced a theoretical framework composed of a dynamic adaptive cycle and an empirically based strategy typology showing four different types of adaptation. This framework helped to define subsequent research by other scholars on important topics such as configurational analysis, organizational fit, strategic human resource management, and multi-firm network organizations.

The book enhances current economic understanding of the firm as an institution and an organization, looking beyond the narrow boundaries of neoclassical economics to an interdisciplinary approach based on accounting and law as well as economics itself. It represents the first synthesis of the authors' research work on the subject and provides the groundwork for the development of a comprehensive framework centred on the firm as an entity. The volume starts with a synthesis and a critique of the current state of the different economic theories of the firm and further develops them through new insights and neglected lessons from different traditions of thought. The economic theory and analysis of the firm is given new life here by looking at the firm as a whole: as an institution and an organization, which has special functions and a distinct role in the economy and society.

A systematic treatment of the economics of the modern firm, this text draws on the insights of various areas in modern economics and other disciplines and presents the central problems in organizations of motivating people and co-ordinating their activities.