CALL FOR PAPERS for a special issue of Business History European Business Models: Searching for a New Identity?
Publicado el 24-08-2009.
edited by Andrea Colli (Bocconi University), Abe de Jong (Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University), Martin Jes Iversen (Copenhagen Business School)
A revival in the interest in the “European business model” has
generated in the 1990s two separate but complementary streams of
research. The first is linked to the research in the “law and finance”
area, trying to understand the determinants of the high dispersion of
ownership among large firms in developed economies (see e.g. La Porta
et al., 1999; Barca and Becht, 2003), which produced an huge amount of
information about the ownership structures of large companies, both
listed and privately held. Another stream of research concerned the
dynamics in the world’s largest corporations and these studies in the
area of management explicitly referred to the 1970s Harvard Research
Project about strategies and structures of the 100 largest
corporations in the main industrialized countries at that time
(Whittington and Mayer, 2000). At the same time a renewed interest
arose in corporate governance issues, explicitly dealing with the
effects of ownership structures on value creation and distribution,
which has added further evidence to the debate.
As a result of past research a reasonable amount of data and
information is available circumscribed however only to the largest
European countries (France, UK and Germany), with far much less
coverage of the “peripheries”. The nature itself of the research was
to investigate the relationship among strategy, structure, ownership
and performance in a dynamic and comparative perspective. This has
implied a tremendous effort of data collection, homogenization and
analysis in a medium to long period and brought also business
historians to become interested in this kind of research (Schroeter,
ed., 2008). This debate has been particularly vivid given also its
obvious links with other relevant streams of research, as those
related to the “varieties of capitalism” debate and to the “national
business systems” literature.
This call for papers aims at collecting papers dealing with the issue
of the evolution in strategies, organizational and ownership
structures, and performances of European corporations in a dynamic and
comparative perspective. Long? term and country approaches and specific
case studies are welcome, as well as research concentrating on smaller
and peripheral European countries. Research based upon extensive
datasets will be appreciated, together with studies with a
prosopography oriented approach.
Paper proposals (title plus an extensive abstract of 500-700 words)
should be addressed to the editors of the special issue before
September 6, 2009. The editors will select proposals for presentation
during a one-day workshop on October 9, 2009 at Erasmus University
Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The deadline for full papers that can be
considered for publication in Business History is January 31, 2010.
All papers will be subject to the standard double blind refereeing
process.
Andrea Colli
Bocconi University
Milan, Italy
andrea.colli@unibocconi.it
Abe de Jong
Rotterdam School of Management
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
ajong@rsm.nl
Martin Jes Iversen
Copenhagen Business School
Copenhagen, Denmark
mi.lpf@cbs.dk |
