Strategic Dynamics in Industry Architectures: The challenges of Knowledge Integration

Submission due date: January 15, 2009

Guest Editors
Stefano Brusoni, Bocconi University Michael G. Jacobides, London Business School Andrea Prencipe, University G. d’Annunzio

Motivation
Industries can no longer be taken for granted. As sectors dis-integrate and re-integrate, converge and transform, the question of how exactly economic activities are structured, and what determines the nature of firms’ and sectors’ boundaries evolution becomes more relevant than ever. Firms are increasingly trying to shape the nature of their environment and the ways in which labor is divided in the sector; they try to shape the “rules and roles” through which labor (and knowledge) is divided – i.e. their “industry architectures”.

In terms of the existing theoretical apparatus, research has offered key building blocks that provide answers to partial questions to understand the evolution of industry architectures. Researchers from the New Institutional / Transaction Cost economics, for instance, have explained how firms may choose their boundaries. Scholars of technological change have considered how organizations and technologies co-evolve over time. Yet, only recently have we started understanding what shapes the nature of the sectors that we study, and in what are the forces that explain why and how sectors swing between integration and disintegration. Likewise, the link between the boundaries of organizations and the knowledge bases in the sector has been shown to be important in the strategy literature, and it is clear that the boundaries of knowledge and the boundaries of organization are not fully mapped onto each other. However, our understanding of how knowledge becomes integrated in a complex web of relationships in a sector is still in its early stages: we have yet to propose the micro-mechanisms that explain how the structures that integrate knowledge emerge, and how they affect the industries’ prospects, or how they change over time.

This special issue intends to extend and consolidate this growing area of interest. The main interest is on contributions which look at the micro-level processes of knowledge integration and coordination, through changes in the division of labor and power. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Are sectors characterized by one or multiple “industry architectures”, i.e. ways to divide labour between firms and coordinate the knowledge production? How do such architectures emerge, stabilize, and change?
  
• How do sectors get reorganized to accommodate for the diffusion of new bodies of scientific and technological knowledge?
  
• How do the dynamics of knowledge integration relate to the challenges of sectoral change? Other than science and technologies, what role is played by the distribution of power, intra- and inter-organizational conflict in shaping the evolution of sectors?
  
• How do firms get organized to integrate knowledge? How do they identify what to integrate? What are the different options available to them?
  
• What does knowledge integration actually mean? Is there any empirically observable or theoretically relevant distinction between the concepts of knowledge integration and recombination?
  
• Whether at the level of the sector or the firm (or both), who determines and drives the processes through which knowledge becomes integrated? How, when and why do these change?

The submission of empirical papers, whether qualitative or quantitative, exploratory or confirmatory is hereby explicitly encouraged. However, conceptual, theoretical, or modeling papers (with reference to the specific phenomena identified above) will also be considered.

Deadlines and Submission Instructions
The deadline for submission of papers is January 15, 2009. Please submit your papers online on the European Management Review website and make sure to follow the Submission Guidelines available at: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/emr/archive/editorials.html

Review Process and Special Issue Conference
Papers will be reviewed following the regular European Management Review double-blind review process. It takes an average of four weeks to obtain the first round of reviews.

­More Information
For additional information, please contact the special issue editors:

• Stefano Brusoni, stefano.brusoni@unibocconi.it
• Michael G Jacobides, mjacobides@london.edu
• Andrea Prencipe, a.prencipe@unich.it