Riccardo Leoncini - Böcker

Changes in technology and demand require firms to learn how to continuously reshape unique and non-imitable resources and competences. A firm’s capacity to achieve this is captured by the concept of dynamic capabilities. This book offers an analysis of how firms manage to reconfigure their pool of idiosyncratic resources, skills and competencies to deal with the highly turbulent environments in which they are embedded, thus tackling the issue of how dynamic capabilities must be defined and conceptualized. This book brings together several contributions aimed at showing how firms’ differential exploitation of their dynamic capabilities comes to be highly dependent on the role of socio-territorial entities and on the institutional set up. Thus, different formal and informal types of organization are observed at different levels of analysis. In so doing, the book aims at conveying a transversal perspective to the analysis of firms’ dynamics, calling for a multidisciplinary and multilayer approach.

This book focuses on three main areas, each of which is central to economic theorising: firms’ organisation and behaviour, technological change and the process of globalisation. Each subject can be analysed by using different methods, which range from purely theoretical abstractions to case studies and from econometrics to simulations. What this collection provides is a broad view of the three topics by concentrating on different aspects of each of them, and utilising different methods of investigation. Internationalization, Technological Change and the Theory of the Firm looks in detail at various questions surrounding firms’ organisation, including why we can observe ordered paths of production, whether proximity between firms matters, and whether patenting is always worthwhile. In addition, several essays explore technology and innovation, including the persistence-cum-development of old technologies. Furthermore, this book focuses on those processes which concern small- and medium-sized firms, considering the usefulness of stage theory, the possibilities of production off-shoring and the skill composition of manufacturing firms. Overall, the book is characterised by original ideas, renewed applications of mathematical and statistical methods and the use of new databases. This valuable collection will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers focusing on innovation, theories of the firm and globalisation; and should also be useful to a professional readership as it presents up-to-date research with the aim of improving our understanding of the phenomena of technological change, firms’ strategies, and globalisation.

Changes in technology and demand require firms to learn how to continuously reshape unique and non-imitable resources and competences. A firm’s capacity to achieve this is captured by the concept of dynamic capabilities. This book offers an analysis of how firms manage to reconfigure their pool of idiosyncratic resources, skills and competencies to deal with the highly turbulent environments in which they are embedded, thus tackling the issue of how dynamic capabilities must be defined and conceptualized. This book brings together several contributions aimed at showing how firms’ differential exploitation of their dynamic capabilities comes to be highly dependent on the role of socio-territorial entities and on the institutional set up. Thus, different formal and informal types of organization are observed at different levels of analysis. In so doing, the book aims at conveying a transversal perspective to the analysis of firms’ dynamics, calling for a multidisciplinary and multilayer approach.

This book focuses on three main areas, each of which is central to economic theorising: firms’ organisation and behaviour, technological change and the process of globalisation. Each subject can be analysed by using different methods, which range from purely theoretical abstractions to case studies and from econometrics to simulations. What this collection provides is a broad view of the three topics by concentrating on different aspects of each of them, and utilising different methods of investigation. Internationalization, Technological Change and the Theory of the Firm looks in detail at various questions surrounding firms’ organisation, including why we can observe ordered paths of production, whether proximity between firms matters, and whether patenting is always worthwhile. In addition, several essays explore technology and innovation, including the persistence-cum-development of old technologies. Furthermore, this book focuses on those processes which concern small- and medium-sized firms, considering the usefulness of stage theory, the possibilities of production off-shoring and the skill composition of manufacturing firms. Overall, the book is characterised by original ideas, renewed applications of mathematical and statistical methods and the use of new databases. This valuable collection will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers focusing on innovation, theories of the firm and globalisation; and should also be useful to a professional readership as it presents up-to-date research with the aim of improving our understanding of the phenomena of technological change, firms’ strategies, and globalisation.