Business and Management

This book argues that innovation is about creating meaning; that it is inherently social; and is grounded in existing social practices. To understand the social basis of innovation and technology development we have to move beyond the traditional product-centric view on innovations. Integrating concepts from several disciplinary perspectives and detailed analyses of the evolution of Internet-related innovations, including packet-switched computer networks, the World Wide Web, and the Linux open source operating system, the book develops foundations for a new theoretical and practical understanding of innovation. For example, it shows that innovative development can occur in two qualitatively different ways, one based on evolving specialization and the other based on recombination of existing socially produced resources. The expanding communication and collaboration networks have increased the importance of the recombinatory mode making mobility of resources, sociotechnical translation mechanisms, and meaning creation in communities of practice increasingly important for innovation research and product development.

Education, skill formation, and training continue to be important areas of consideration for both public policy and research. This book examines the particular types of vocational training known as collective skill formation systems, whereby the training (often firm-based apprenticeships) is collectively organized by businesses and unions with state support and cooperation in execution, finance, and monitoring.With contributions from leading academics, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of the varying historical origins of, and recent developments in, vocational training systems, offering in-depth studies on coordinated market economies, namely Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Denmark. It also contains comparative chapters that analyze how these countries react to common challenges such as deindustrialization, labor market stratification, academic drift, gender inequalities, and Europeanization.Whereas previous research has focused on the differences between various kinds of skill regimes, this book focuses on explaining institutional variety within the group of collective skill formation systems. The development of skill formation systems is regarded as a dynamic political process, dependent on the outcome of various political struggles regarding such matters as institutional design and transformations during critical junctures in historical development.

This book reflects on a number of challenges associated with management and social science research — the search for a ‘behavioral science’, the limits of rationality, the unreliability of many research findings, the social shaping of research agendas, cultures, and judgements. The book is chronologically structured and includes discussions of research projects and various methodological debates. This is a feisty argument based on all aspects of research — carrying out research programmes, evaluating research, tirelessly questioning the assumptions and claims of social science research, and never avoiding the awkward theoretical or practical challenges that face organizational researchers.

The governance of the public sciences has profoundly changed since the Second World War, especially with regard to funding structures, the autonomy, and accountability of public research organizations and universities, and the extent to which research is steered towards societal usefulness. Going beyond previous analyses of these changes in science studies, science policy, and higher education studies, this book presents and applies a novel approach that provides an integrated assessment of changes in public science systems and their impact on scientific innovation. Its basic assumptions are (i) that all changes in public science systems (PSS) affect authority relations — the interests and action capabilities of authoritative agencies in science — and (ii) that the authority relations concerning the selection of goals and approaches in research as well as the integration of research results are the channel through which changes in PSS affect the production of scientific knowledge and particularly scientific innovation. This focus on authority relations as the key interface integrating changes in governance and translating them into changes in the production of scientific knowledge is an important innovation because the effects of governance at the performance level of the science system have been largely neglected by other approaches.

In the modern world, there is no shortage of people who know what is best for others. Self-appointed experts, consultants, and organizations try to convince states, corporations, and individuals that they would be better off if they only followed some specific rules about what to do. These rules are presented as being voluntary and advisory. They are standards, not mandatory directives, and they abound in modern life. Standards may concern what characteristics a telephone should have, how a company should report its financial transactions, how organizations should be managed, how states should treat their citizens, how children should be raised, and so forth. Even organizations as powerful as states and large corporations follow standards on how to organize, which policies to pursue, what kinds of services to provide, or how their products should be designed. Standards enable a higher degree of global order in the modern world than would exist without them. They facilitate coordination and cooperation even among people and organizations that are far apart. The book states that standardization is a much neglected area of social science — an area that has by no means received the attention it deserves in view of its importance to society. This book redresses the balance by providing an in-depth examination of a number of aspects of standardization, how it is formed, and what effects it has on the world in which we live.