The business systems approach holds considerable promise for improving our understanding of the relations between societal institutions and technological and economic outcomes. Nonetheless, there ...have been surprisingly few attempts to validate its proposed typology of business system types. In this paper, I take up this issue and conduct a large-scale empirical assessment of the national business systems typology. I use data on 30 OECD countries from 2000 and 2011 to assess the validity of the typology, and explore its value for comparative institutional analysis through a fuzzy-set analysis of innovation specialization patterns. The findings illustrate that while the national business systems typology needs to be extended, it remains relevant for describing variety in national institutional frameworks. In addition, the detail it adds may provide the nuance needed for exploring more complex relations between institutions and technological and economic outcomes.
The field of international business (IB) has been successful in developing a unique body of knowledge on the multinational corporation and on country-level contexts. A recurring debate concerns its ...claim to uniqueness, and to associated scholarly characteristics that distinguish IB from other fields of research. I discuss what makes IB research unique by looking at what IB theory can explain and predict. To that end, I leverage key theoretical arguments and empirical insights to advance an understanding of IB centered around a firm’s ability to create added value in more than one location. I introduce a stylized model of the multi-locational firm embedded in multiple business systems characterized by equifinality. As a result of the qualitative disjunctures that separate one place from another, multi-locational firms are confronted with additional managerial and organizational challenges. These challenges are rooted in the process of “othering”. Theorizing on the critical constructs of place, space, and organization, I argue that IB offers the most generalizable approach to understanding firms doing business in more than one location. IB’s ultimate uniqueness lies in the potential of advancing a general theory of the firm in space.
The current study explores the relationship between contextual hardships and women's career calling. We examine how the formation of career calling drive is linked to how an individual perceives and ...affectively reacts to forms of oppression within and across institutional subsystems. In conceptualizing career calling formation, we attempt to broaden our understanding of this concept to include external and negative contextual factors. Our core argument holds that the perception and experience of contextual hardships play a key role in the formation of career calling. Based on 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with successful women in Lebanon whose work fits the scholarly definition of career calling, our findings show that these women's career narratives are constructed in close relation to perceptions of oppression (i.e., violence, marginalization, powerlessness, exploitation and cultural imperialism) experienced across the political, financial, education and labor, and culture subsystems. Taken together, our main findings demonstrate that experiences of negative and external contextual hardship elicit affective responses that foster a career calling drive. Our findings help bridge the neoclassical and modern approaches to career calling by showing the important role that external sources can play in driving the internal formation of career calling.
•Attention to context is needed for a better understanding of career calling.•Contextual hardships were found to play a formative role in women's career calling.•Affective reaction to oppression may lead to a career-calling drive.•A feminist approach helps unpack power dynamics shaping women's career calling.•Our findings help bridge the neoclassical and modern approaches to career calling.
Since 1992, the national business systems (NBS) approach has been increasingly used to analyse not only firm characteristics, structures and strategies within NBS, but also the nature of ...international business and its interactions with both national and transnational institutions. In reviewing 25 years of NBS literature, we heed calls in IB journals urging researchers to use NBS notions and findings in IB research. Our systematic review of 96 articles analyses the patterns and contributions of NBS literature, revealing four thematic junctures: (1) comparative business systems, (2) firm internationalisation and the management/organisation inside MNCs, (3) the role of internationalisation in the development of organisational capabilities and innovation and (4) the emergence of transnational communities in and across firms and societies. Themes are described in terms of (a) the research questions (RQ) they focus on, (b) how NBS approach investigates the RQ and what are the major findings, (c) how IB frames and approaches the same RQ, (d) how does the NBS approach extend the perspectives of IB and (e) what are the problems faced by NBS in terms of developing further insights into the RQ. Our review contributes to the recent endeavour of IB research to institutionalism, encouraging a productive dialogue between IB and NBS research.
Information Systems Research (
“Wirtschaftsinformatik”
) basically follows two research approaches: the behavioristic approach and the design-oriented approach. In this memorandum, 10 authors propose ...principles of design-oriented information systems research. Moreover, the memorandum is supported by 111 full professors from the German-speaking scientific community, who with their signature advocate the principles specified therein.
Purpose
– With recent advances in internet technologies, internet of things (IoT) technology is having an increasing impact on our daily lives, and beginning to offer interesting and advantageous new ...services. The current research aims to develop and test an integrative model of factors determining consumers' acceptance of IoT technology.
Design/methodology/approach
– Based on technology acceptance model (TAM), the authors proposed an IoT acceptance model that consists of three technology factors (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and trust); one social context factor (social influence); and two individual user characteristics (perceived enjoyment and perceived behavioral control). Data from 368 Chinese consumers were used to test the research model through the use of structural equation modeling.
Findings
– The results showed particularly strong support for the effects of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social influence, perceived enjoyment, and perceived behavioral control. However, trust played an insignificant role in predicting the intention. In addition, perceived ease of use and trust were found to affect perceived usefulness. Compared with the individual TAM model, the integrated model provides more explanation on user behavioral intention toward IoT usage.
Originality/value
– The integrated model explores the driving factors of individuals' willingness to use IoT technology from the perspectives of the technology itself, social context and individual user characteristic. It links the constructs of social influence, enjoyment, and perceived behavioral control to the TAM and successfully extends TAM in the IoT technology context.
We study digital multisided platforms as complex adaptive business systems (CABS) where multiple sides have different and evolving objectives, preferences, and constraints. CABS are characterized by ...irreducible uncertainty, which cannot be reduced by the traditional approaches of collecting and processing data. Irreducible uncertainty in the system gives rise to a complex search matching problem between agents and value enhancing transactions. This paper presents a recommender systems-based approach for taming the complexity by allowing agents to coevolve and learn in the system. We propose a novel two-sided recommender system framework, which considers emergence on both sides of the platform and adapts to the changing environment to influence agents. An agent-based simulation model is developed based on popular internet-based educational platforms to study this complex system and test our hypotheses. Our results show the value of a two-sided recommender system to tame complex search matching in platforms. We discuss implications for information systems and complexity science research.
The type of activity in which entrepreneurs engage is likely to influence the potential contribution of entrepreneurship to economic growth and prosperity. Yet the entrepreneurship literature has ...focused largely on identifying the determinants of the level, rather than the type, of entrepreneurial activity. In this paper we hypothesize that a country's institutional environment will influence the allocation of entrepreneurial effort, and in particular will influence the extent to which entrepreneurial effort is directed toward high-growth activities. We test our hypotheses using data on 40 countries over the period 2002-2004. We find that the allocation of entrepreneurial effort toward high-growth activities is positively related to a country's financial and educational activities targeted at entrepreneurship, and is negatively related to a country's level of corruption. Our study is the first to provide empirical evidence that institutional characteristics significantly influence the allocation of entrepreneurial effort, and it is therefore the first to identify an empirically important channel through which a nation's institutions may contribute to economic growth.
Building on a historical case study on the first two stock exchanges to adopt the now globally dominant for-profit organizational form, the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 1993 and the Helsinki Stock ...Exchange in 1995, we argue that interaction among socially proximate peers contributes to pioneering organizational form adoption within an industry, particularly when such forms are introduced by established organizations. Peer interaction can induce a search for technically efficient organizational forms through the sharing of collective experiences, the establishment of collective assumptions, and a joint search for solutions. Together, these factors contribute to the legitimization of novel organizational forms in the local setting before the adoption of the first instantiation of those forms. We propose a context-sensitive multilevel model of peer-interaction-induced pioneering organizational form adoption that considers shared macro environmental drivers, idiosyncratic local environmental drivers, and peer interaction as central social mediators between the two.
Much research has been devoted over the years to investigating and advancing the techniques and tools used by analysts when they model. As opposed to what academics, software providers and their ...resellers promote as should be happening, the aim of this research was to determine whether practitioners still embraced conceptual modeling seriously. In addition, what are the most popular techniques and tools used for conceptual modeling? What are the major purposes for which conceptual modeling is used? The study found that the top six most frequently used modeling techniques and methods were ER diagramming, data flow diagramming, systems flowcharting, workflow modeling, UML, and structured charts. Modeling technique use was found to decrease significantly from smaller to medium-sized organizations, but then to increase significantly in larger organizations (proxying for large, complex projects). Technique use was also found to significantly follow an inverted U-shaped curve, contrary to some prior explanations. Additionally, an important contribution of this study was the identification of the factors that uniquely influence the decision of analysts to continue to use modeling, viz., communication (using diagrams) to/from stakeholders, internal knowledge (lack of) of techniques, user expectations management, understanding models’ integration into the business, and tool/software deficiencies. The highest ranked purposes for which modeling was undertaken were database design and management, business process documentation, business process improvement, and software development.
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