Many scholars see entrepreneurs as action-oriented individuals who use rules of thumb and other mental heuristics to make decisions, but who do little systematic planning and analysis. In this new article, Deepak Sardana and I argue that what distinguishes successful from unsuccessful entrepreneurs is precisely that the former vary their decision-making styles, sometimes relying on… More »
My Notes — Publications
The co-development of industrial sectors and academic disciplines
A model that conceptualizes the development of academic disciplines and related industries as intimately linked is presented. It predicts that the relative strength of a national industry which has a significant input on science or engineering knowledge is causally related to the strength of the nation's relevant science or engineering discipline and vice versa. At… More »
Marrying History and Social Science in Strategy Research
Strategy research at its core tries to explain sustained performance differences among firms. This article argues that one, out of the many, ways to create a productive marriage between strategy research and historical scholarship is to carry out historically informed comparative studies of how firms and industries gain and lose their competitive position. While much… More »
The Coevolution of Industries and Important Features of Their Environments
As the rate of innovation increases, organizational environments are becoming faster and more complex, posing greater challenges for organizations to adapt. This study argues that the concept of coevolution offers a bridge between the prescient adaptationist and ex post selectionist perspectives of organizational change to account for the increasing rates of change. The mutual causal… More »
Regional institutions, ownership transformation, and migration of industrial leadership in China
Scholars have emphasized the gradual ownership transformation of enterprises as a key driver of the Chinese economy's unprecedented growth. However, little work has been done on the issue of whether this transformation process takes place evenly across the various regions in China. This article describes the important role of regional institutions in shaping the ownership-based… More »
Constructing Relational Databases to Study Life Histories on Your PC or Mac
In this article, I present a strategy for designing relational databases with the program FileMaker Pro (FileMaker) to study the histories of individuals and organizations. The approach facilitates efficiency in inputting data and flexibility for constructing statistical analyses from the rawdata. The key feature of the strategy is to define the basic unit of observation… More »
Automatic Coding of Printed Materials
Traditionally most researchers working with printed data sources have entered data by hand to convert it into electronic format. If a research project involves large amounts of data from similarly formatted sources – for example, when one tries to create a longitudinal database of directory information spanning many years – entering this data by hand… More »
