Alexander Styhre

Business administration is a scientific field described as complex, diverse, and eclectic. Acknowledging the multiplicity of the field and the many challenges faced by students of business administration, there is a need for a book on theories and perspectives and how they can be applied. This book outlines a broad set of contemporary and frequently used theories and perspectives.Based on a selection conducted through a survey and discussions with colleagues, sixteen theories and perspectives are presented by the contributing authors. The book covers both a tradition based on the assumption of economic man and the more interpretivist-oriented traditions. It addresses undergraduate and graduate students who want to apply a specific theory or perspective to study phenomena within the field of business administration research.

Organizations, Institutions, and Intellectual Norms: An Analytical Philosophy View of Institutional Change provides a new perspective on institutional theory by incorporating an analytical philosophy framework. This volume critiques the traditional assumptions that institutional logics or work inherently shape societal structures, arguing instead that intellectual norms and everyday language play a central role in the establishment, reproduction, and modification of institutions. It includes empirical studies on legal and regulatory changes in the US, examining the role of intellectual norms in shaping antitrust legislation, economic inequality policies, and bankruptcy law. The book introduces a groundbreaking analytical model that bridges institutional theory and analytical philosophy, offering a novel approach to understanding institutional change. Readers will benefit from the book’s comprehensive theoretical foundation combined with empirical case studies that substantiate the framework. It challenges established assumptions in management studies and social sciences, providing tools for scholars to reconsider how institutions are formed and justified. This book is ideal for academics and researchers in management studies, social sciences, and philosophy, particularly those interested in institutional theory, legal frameworks, and intellectual norms. It also appeals to policy makers and professionals seeking to understand the deeper epistemic underpinnings of institutional change.

In economic theory and in management studies, innovation is widely regarded as the motor of economic activities and as being the primary source of renewal in the economic system. This view emphasizes how innovation work is organized in specialized teams inside the firm, or, alternatively, located to start-ups and similar small ventures that are strongly incentivized to innovate to survive. Rather than assuming that innovation work is a mere product of incentives provided by the market system, propelled by the individual and collective skills of the innovation team participants and the resources that they mobilize in their work, this volume examines how a market for innovation ideas is being constructed on the basis of policy making and legislative activities. Innovation Management and the Law examines how the idea of value creation is understood to be a matter of innovation activities and how such innovation activities are premised on legal rights that create not only incentives, corporations, and markets, but also more widely signal to market actors what kind of activities are consistent with policy makers’ economic and social welfare objectives. The volume thus adds to the innovation management literature by introducing a comprehensive analysis of the patent system, illustrating that the patent system is itself an institution and that it should be examined in such terms when studying how innovations are generated on the basis of team production activities and legal rights that are enforceable. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, professionals, and advanced students in the fields of management, economic theory, and law.

Despite the conventional wisdom that affordable housing, either in the form of homeownership or through access to rental units, has beneficial effects for households, society, and the economy more broadly, there is a noteworthy lack of empirical studies of housing development and construction companies or building societies that actively work to supply this asset class in the economy. There are several reasons for this condition, including the “thin market” for such business activities. This book offers a case study that includes two Swedish housing development companies that have targeted a market niche for affordable homes that few other companies and market actors are concerned with. One company is part of a major construction company conglomerate which produces prefabricated housing modules to better serve the low-end niche of the housing market. The other company is a municipality-owned housing development company that acts on the basis of market practices and rules but that also on policymakers’ stated ambition to provide affordable homes for the residents in the municipality, the largest municipality in a major Swedish metropolitan area. Taken together, the study of these two companies provides first-hand insights into how the production of affordable homes takes place in a real-world economy. The book is of relevance for a variety of readers, including graduate students, management scholars, policymakers, and management consultants.

This book critically examines the concept of rationality, a central theme in economics and management theory, through the lens of an analytical philosophy framework. Alexander Styhre advocates for rationality to be grounded in practical reason, emphasizing the shared capacity to use language as a means of expressing ideas, beliefs and propositional attitudes.Styhre explores the key theories used in the curriculums and research within business schools, demonstrating that our understanding of rationality within these concepts needs to be understood in holistic terms. He argues that business schools should focus on developing theories of rationality that comprise of logically consistent and plausible content, instead of depending solely on the conventional assumption that such claims are authoritative due to empirical evidence. The book ultimately formulates a more logically consistent theory of agency, premised on the idea of rationality.Academics in management studies, the economics of education, sociology and sociological theory will greatly benefit from this compelling book. It is also an essential resource for policymakers, practitioners and consultants in management and organization, particularly pertaining to universities.

No professional is an island. Despite their capacity to monopolize and erect entry barriers in terms of either formal credentials or membership of certain organizations, professionalism is inextricably bound up with collective accomplishments on a day-to-day basis and the capacity to share all the resources that constitute the professional domain of expertise. Knowledge Sharing in Professions looks at professionalism as a form of systematic and institutionalized knowledge sharing. It analyses professionalism through the everyday practices in professional communities and the organizations where they work. Three empirical studies, of pharmaceutical clinical trials researchers, management consultants, and architects, are presented, serving to illustrate the relational nature of these and other professions, and how members of professional communities are constantly exchanging data, information, and know-how in their everyday work. Alexander Styhre seeks to understand the role of professions and other forms of experts in contemporary society on the basis of complementary perspectives, that is to say, the communal and collegial nature of professional work. This book represents a valuable contribution both to the sociological literature on professions and the business orientated literature on knowledge management and should promote further new research on professionalism.

In Reproductive Medicine and the Life Sciences in the Contemporary Economy, Alexander Styhre and Rebecka Arman illuminate issues that have given rise to terms such as 'the bioeconomy' and 'the baby business'. The life sciences play an increasing role in providing services and commodities consumed by businesses and the public. Based on an in-depth study of clinics offering assisted fertilization in Sweden, this book is the first to examine the commercialization and commodification of know-how derived from the life sciences, from the point of view of organization theory. In the field of reproductive medicine there has been significant growth of both public and private clinical work. Clinics are places where individual interests and concerns and social and institutional arrangements intersect. With a front office where patients encounter various professional groups and a back office comprising the laboratories wherein human reproductive materials are handled and stored, they are more than just places in which medicine is applied in a clinical setting. Clinicians in this field actively influence policy-making and the regulatory frameworks that monitor and set the boundaries for their work. These are places where social and cultural interests and concerns are translated into policies and practice. The clinics are open social systems, responding to and influencing discussions. This book combines organization theory, sociological theory, gender theory, science and technology studies, and philosophy. It emphasises the critical importance of a sociomaterial perspective on organization, stressing how material and social resources are always of necessity folded into each other in day-to-day organizing.

With more than 14,000 business schools worldwide, what is included in their curricula matters for how the economy and the corporate system are managed. Business schools should be subject to scholarly inquiries and critical reflection. While many studies of business schools examine its general role in the tertiary education system and in society more broadly, this volume examines how one specific theoretical perspective and a normative model derived therefrom were developed and gradually appropriated within the business school setting. This volume demonstrates that agency theory, based on a daring conjecture that firms can be construed as bundles of contacts, rose to prominence in the business school context. It examines how the elementary proposition of agency theory, that the firm is to be considered theoretically and practically as a "nexus of contracts," was never consistent with corporate law and contract law, and it was empirically unsubstantiated.Business schools are under pressure to teach not only practically useful theories and models, but also theories that are also scientifically qualified. Despite having this ambition, certain theories are widely taught despite failing to live up to such declared ambitions, which means that business schools may be criticized for including theories on ambiguous grounds in the curricula. This book examines how business schools seek to honour the ambition to teach both scientifically verified theories and practically useful concepts and models, and how the tensions derived from this duality may be problematic to handle. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and advanced students in the fields of management education, organizational studies, and legal theory.

In economic theory and in management studies, innovation is widely regarded as the motor of economic activities and as being the primary source of renewal in the economic system. This view emphasizes how innovation work is organized in specialized teams inside the firm, or, alternatively, located to start-ups and similar small ventures that are strongly incentivized to innovate to survive. Rather than assuming that innovation work is a mere product of incentives provided by the market system, propelled by the individual and collective skills of the innovation team participants and the resources that they mobilize in their work, this volume examines how a market for innovation ideas is being constructed on the basis of policy making and legislative activities. Innovation Management and the Law examines how the idea of value creation is understood to be a matter of innovation activities and how such innovation activities are premised on legal rights that create not only incentives, corporations, and markets, but also more widely signal to market actors what kind of activities are consistent with policy makers’ economic and social welfare objectives. The volume thus adds to the innovation management literature by introducing a comprehensive analysis of the patent system, illustrating that the patent system is itself an institution and that it should be examined in such terms when studying how innovations are generated on the basis of team production activities and legal rights that are enforceable. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, professionals, and advanced students in the fields of management, economic theory, and law.

The economic system of competitive capitalism has proven to be both resilient and flexible over time and has contributed to the economic welfare of citizens in liberal and coordinated market economies in diverse regions and countries. At the same time, over the entire post-World War II period, there has been a notable endemic shortage of affordable housing in many advanced economies. This book points at both the causes and the consequences of this circumstance and provides an integrated economic and legal view of how housing production is dependent on housing finance, which, in turn, means that legal conditions and the sovereign state play an active role. Further, the book contributes to the literature from two otherwise partially separated disciplines-housing and urban development studies on the one hand and the institutional centrality of the finance industry in the contemporary economic system on the other. The author asserts that although somewhat assimilated due to the ambitions of policy makers to optimize social and economic welfare for their constituencies, the combining of these two realms of expertise generates many favorable outcomes, but also some costs derived from finance industry instabilities. The book connects theoretical perspectives and provides an empirical explanation for how affordable housing is generated in an actual real world economy context. The book will be relevant to the work of a number of academic disciplines including economics, government studies, housing policy and urban planning, social geography and law and society.

Despite the conventional wisdom that affordable housing, either in the form of homeownership or through access to rental units, has beneficial effects for households, society, and the economy more broadly, there is a noteworthy lack of empirical studies of housing development and construction companies or building societies that actively work to supply this asset class in the economy. There are several reasons for this condition, including the “thin market” for such business activities. This book offers a case study that includes two Swedish housing development companies that have targeted a market niche for affordable homes that few other companies and market actors are concerned with.One company is part of a major construction company conglomerate which produces prefabricated housing modules to better serve the low-end niche of the housing market. The other company is a municipality-owned housing development company that acts on the basis of market practices and rules but that also on policymakers’ stated ambition to provide affordable homes for the residents in the municipality, the largest municipality in a major Swedish metropolitan area. Taken together, the study of these two companies provides first-hand insights into how the production of affordable homes takes place in a real-world economy.The book is of relevance for a variety of readers, including graduate students, management scholars, policymakers, and management consultants.

In this compelling book, Alexander Styhre presents a comprehensive analysis of the role and purpose of theory within the university setting. Critiquing current university governance practices which assess research quality based on citation frequency data, Styhre proposes an alternate measure of research quality based on contentful concepts in the space of reason.Focusing on the inner workings of scholarly communities, The Value of Theorizing evaluates the ‘quality as popularity’ fallacy and highlights the importance of alternative methods of thinking. Styhre draws on American pragmatism and analytical philosophy to construct his approach, bringing together theories of instrumental and methodological pragmatism. He goes on to dissect inferentialist theory, the semantics of language, and the political economy of new theory, amalgamating these to make an invaluable contribution to this ever-changing field.Highlighting the importance of reason in assessing the quality of theory in a university setting, this innovative book will prove an intriguing read for scholars of management and the social sciences with an interest in their research environment, as well as researchers of American pragmatism, analytical philosophy and the philosophy of language. It will also appeal to scholars, policy makers and university employees who are interested in refining university governance practices and the process of research.

This book examines social status as a social mechanism and a social fact that strongly shapes how markets and organizations are regulated, managed, and preserved over time. The first part of this book identifies a number of organizational issues and managerial concerns that can be framed as being a matter of the cognitive perspectives of social actors, and better explained on the basis of such conditions. The second part demonstrates the analytical value of the concept of status in a variety of organizational settings and market contexts. In the three empirical settings, status does play a key role when resources such as legitimacy (in urban development projects), revenues from sales (in video game marketing), and access to venture capital (in life science companies) are distributed. This book summarizes and reviews the academic literature on status and organization studies, as well as providing valuable information for researchers conducting empirical testing. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Organizations and Social Systems.

Reproductive medicine has been very successful at developing new therapies in recent years and people having difficulties conceiving have more options available to them than ever before. These developments have led to a new institutional landscape emerging and this innovative volume explores how health and social structures are being developed and reconfigured to take into account the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF treatments. Using Sweden as a central case study, it explores how the process of institutionalizing new assisted reproductive technologies includes regulatory agencies, ethical committees, political bodies and discourses, scientific communities, patient and activists groups, and entrepreneurial activities in the existing clinics and new entrants to the industry. It draws on new theoretical developments in institutional theory and outlines how health innovations are always embedded in social relations including ethical, political, and financial concerns.This book will be of interest to advanced students and academics in health management, science and technology studies, the sociology of health and illness and organisational theory.

With more than 14,000 business schools worldwide, what is included in their curricula matters for how the economy and the corporate system are managed. Business schools should be subject to scholarly inquiries and critical reflection. While many studies of business schools examine its general role in the tertiary education system and in society more broadly, this volume examines how one specific theoretical perspective and a normative model derived therefrom were developed and gradually appropriated within the business school setting. This volume demonstrates that agency theory, based on a daring conjecture that firms can be construed as bundles of contacts, rose to prominence in the business school context. It examines how the elementary proposition of agency theory, that the firm is to be considered theoretically and practically as a "nexus of contracts," was never consistent with corporate law and contract law, and it was empirically unsubstantiated.Business schools are under pressure to teach not only practically useful theories and models, but also theories that are also scientifically qualified. Despite having this ambition, certain theories are widely taught despite failing to live up to such declared ambitions, which means that business schools may be criticized for including theories on ambiguous grounds in the curricula. This book examines how business schools seek to honour the ambition to teach both scientifically verified theories and practically useful concepts and models, and how the tensions derived from this duality may be problematic to handle. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and advanced students in the fields of management education, organizational studies, and legal theory.

Social science theorists from various scholarly disciplines have contributed to a recent literature that examines how the finance industry has expanded and now wields increasing influence across a variety of economic fields and industries. In some cases, this tendency towards a more sizeable and influential finance industry has been referred to as "the financialization" of the economy. This book explains how what is referred to as the finance-led economy (arguably a more neutral and less emotionally charged term than financialization) is premised on a number of conditions, institutional relations, and theoretical propositions and assumptions, and indicates what the real economic consequences are for market actors and households.The book provides a theoretically condensed but empirically grounded account of the contemporary finance-led economy, in many cases too complicated in its design and rich in detail to be understood equally by insiders—empirical research indicates—and lay audiences. It summarizes the relevant literature and points at two empirical cases, the construction industry and life science venturing, to better illustrate how the expansion of the finance industry has contributed to the capital formation process, and how the sovereign state has actively assisted this process. It offers a credible, yet accessible overview of the economic conditions that will arguably shape economic affairs for the foreseeable future.The book will find an audience amongst a variety of readers, including graduate students, management scholars, policymakers, and management consultants.

The economic system of competitive capitalism has proven to be both resilient and flexible over time and has contributed to the economic welfare of citizens in liberal and coordinated market economies in diverse regions and countries. At the same time, over the entire post-World War II period, there has been a notable endemic shortage of affordable housing in many advanced economies. This book points at both the causes and the consequences of this circumstance and provides an integrated economic and legal view of how housing production is dependent on housing finance, which, in turn, means that legal conditions and the sovereign state play an active role. Further, the book contributes to the literature from two otherwise partially separated disciplines-housing and urban development studies on the one hand and the institutional centrality of the finance industry in the contemporary economic system on the other. The author asserts that although somewhat assimilated due to the ambitions of policy makers to optimize social and economic welfare for their constituencies, the combining of these two realms of expertise generates many favorable outcomes, but also some costs derived from finance industry instabilities. The book connects theoretical perspectives and provides an empirical explanation for how affordable housing is generated in an actual real world economy context. The book will be relevant to the work of a number of academic disciplines including economics, government studies, housing policy and urban planning, social geography and law and society.

This book examines social status as a social mechanism and a social fact that strongly shapes how markets and organizations are regulated, managed, and preserved over time. The first part of this book identifies a number of organizational issues and managerial concerns that can be framed as being a matter of the cognitive perspectives of social actors, and better explained on the basis of such conditions. The second part demonstrates the analytical value of the concept of status in a variety of organizational settings and market contexts. In the three empirical settings, status does play a key role when resources such as legitimacy (in urban development projects), revenues from sales (in video game marketing), and access to venture capital (in life science companies) are distributed. This book summarizes and reviews the academic literature on status and organization studies, as well as providing valuable information for researchers conducting empirical testing. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Organizations and Social Systems.

This book presents a study of so-called indie video game developers that are widely regarded as the creative and innovative fringe of the video game industry. The video game industry is an exemplary entrepreneurial high growth industry that combines digital media, cinematographic representations and interactive gaming technologies, and uses global digital distribution channels to reach local gaming communities. The study examines a number of issues, concerns, challenges, and opportunities that indie developers are handling as part of their development work. The love of gaming and video games more specifically is the shared and unifying force of both so-called Triple-A developers and the indie developer community. Still, issues such as how to raise financial capital or otherwise fund the development work, or how to optimize the return on investment when video games are released on digital platforms are issues that indie developers need to cope with. The study is theoretically framedas a case of an innovation-led sector of the economy, yet being anchored in the Swedish welfare state model, wherein e.g., free tertiary education and social insurances and health case at low cost are provided and supportive of enterprising. This book will be valuable reading for academics working in the fields of knowledge management, innovation, and the creative economy.