Abstract
The production of the 1993 article awarded the JIBS Decade Award was written during a time when ideas regarding knowledge and the international expansion of the firm confronted a hostile audience. The sources of these ideas were directly related in Winter's and Roger's prior work, but also to a broader literature on ‘category errors’ and technology transfer. The theory of the firm as a social community is a distinctly sociological theory and, though sharing many key ideas with the resource-based view that developed at the same time, is deeply opposed to engineering conceptions of firms as Lego-modular pieces that can be easily shifted, bought, and sold. We describe our individual biographies and the subsequent intellectual development of the concepts in our article.
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Notes
See Zander (1991).
Udo, in his fieldwork on the management of international R&D found many examples of national engineering cultures. Sometimes the introduction of hardware like CAD/CAM systems was the only way to standardize action: a French engineer could accept adapting to a ‘stupid machine’, but would never conform to a ‘Swedish’ way of engineering.
Steve Kobrin related to us in a message sent after the publication of the article that the Soviets in fact produced a camera, the Kiev, that advertised its manufacture used the old Zeiss machinery.
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Appendix A: Quotes from the review process
Appendix A: Quotes from the review process
To the editor: ‘We can't see anything in them [the reviews] which should prevent publication, though we have incorporated by and large all comments other than those just objecting to the story.’
To the editor: ‘Reviewer 1 took the high ground, citing everything but the Bible to us.’
To the editor: ‘The last reviewer made many good points. Frankly we want to write this paper as an essay, not hypothesis one, two, etc. It is hard to interpret the comments on jargon; there has to be some common vocabulary specific to our field and the cited words strike us to be precisely this vocabulary.’
To reviewer 2: ‘Thank you for your supportive comments. It is very unusual that a reviewer states a disagreement, while fully supporting the efforts of an article.’
To reviewer 4: ‘We are aware that we have written this paper in a different style than the usual article, and we would like to stay with it. We have tried to present the intellectual heritage, if you will, of the field so that we might all have a chance to reflect on it and move forward. For this reason we have included the quotes, and whereas you may be right that they are disturbing, they should also mean something to all of us educated in this line of thinking. Curiously enough, from the selfish perspective of the authors, this practice will make the article less accessible to people outside the field. But we are trying here to address the central readership of JIBS.’
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Kogut, B., Zander, U. A memoir and reflection: knowledge and an evolutionary theory of the multinational firm 10 years later. J Int Bus Stud 34, 505–515 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400066
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400066