Foundations of Organization
Lecture 12: Organizations as bundles of resources, competences and routines
Markus Becker & Nils Stieglitz
STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION DESIGN
Program today
• • • • • • • Recap The firm as a bundle of resources Resources: Routines, skills, and competences Organizational routines defined Contribution of routines to understanding organizations Roles of routines in organizations Take Away Points
STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION DESIGN
Re-cap behavioral theory
• Very influential theory of organizations • Focus on decision-making • Actors are seen as bounded rational and both actors and organizations have ways of coping with such limitations • For instance, they satisfice rather than optimize • Decision-making is seen as a sequential process • Decision-making is seen as driven by aspiration-levels • Feedback between outcomes of action (learning) and aspiration-levels is an important focus of the theory
STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION DESIGN
How can the Behavioral Theory help us understand organizations?
What concepts does the Behavioral Theory provide for analyzing coordination problems? How does the Behavioral Theory help you address such problems? What concepts does the Behavioral Theory provide for analyzing cooperation problems? How does the Behavioral Theory help you address such problems?
STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION DESIGN
The firm as a bundle of resources
• a firm is essentially a pool of resources, the utilization of which is organized in an administrative framework (Penrose 1959) • Strictly speaking, it is never resources themselves that are the ‘inputs’ in the production process, but only the services that the resources can render. The services yielded by resources are a function of the way in which they are used exactly the same resource when used for different purposes or in different ways and in combination with different types or amounts of other resources provides a different service ... (Penrose, 1959)
STRATEGIC...