Research papers


My research reflects a long term interest in processes of corporate change: Corporate restructuring and downsizing, total quality management and the high performance workplace, environmental management and climate adaptation…
What drives them, and how do they affect people and the economy?
Pondering in Synge's Chair

Several of the papers listed below come from a collaboration with Rachel Hilliard at the National University of Ireland-Galway, studying the organizational capabilities underlying Irish manufacturers’ adaptation to tighter environmental regulation.

Abstracts and links to papers:


"Identifying and measuring dynamic capability using search routines"
(With Rachel Hilliard)
Strategic Organization, published online February 13, 2018.

Much attention has been paid to the theoretical and empirical difficulties of identifying dynamic capability, given that it is a latent construct that is difficult to observe. There is consensus that dynamic capability should be defined so as to distinguish the capability for change from the change achieved: it is the organisation’s capacity to change its resource base. But operationalising this idea has proven difficult. We propose an empirical representation based on a modest theoretical extension: the accepted definition implies that dynamic capability is constituted in organic engagement with the operating resources it is intended to change. This extension allows us to represent dynamic capability using a widely recognised, observable underpinning of dynamic capability – search routines. Using data on Irish manufacturers’ efforts to adapt to a heightened environmental-regulation regime, we draw from environmental-management research and the evolutionary and behavioural theories of the firm to specify criteria for identifying, categorising and measuring search routines and using this to construct a dynamic capability measure. The contribution is to present a replicable, theory-based protocol for studying dynamic capability and its complex relationship with firm performance and evolutionary fitness.

 "Re-Centering the Labor Process in Social Structure of Accumulation Research"
Working paper: 2017.

 Since its origins in the 1970s and eighties, Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) research has moved away from its early focus on the firm-level dynamics of profit-making, reinvestment, and labor process (in relation with their broader institutional setting). Recent authors have begun to explore ways of renewing that emphasis. This paper contributes to the reinvigoration of this critical dimension of the SSA approach. Re-grounding SSA theory in labor-process analysis can significantly improve our understanding of how SSAs arise, function, fall into crisis, and change. To help accomplish this, important scholarly developments from outside SSA theory are brought to bear, including research on “the transformation of work” and theories of “organizational capability.” The framework developed here makes it easier to ask the right questions and approach satisfactory answers about the nature, timing, and crisis of the current SSA.

"Climate-adaptive technological change in a small region: A resource-based scenario approach" 
Technological Forecasting and Social Change 99, 2015.

Society must find technological pathways capable of mitigating climate change. Small regions – where private and public sector decision makers take actions whose aggregated effects shape those broader pathways – are faced with impacts including not only direct climatological ones, but also related systemic shifts in technologies, markets, and policies. Firms and policymakers can widen the range of adaptation opportunities by exploring regional resources applicable to emergent clusters. Key decision fields are chosen based on existing capabilities internal to the region in relation to the threats and opportunities transmitted by external climate change impacts. Adaptive strategy options at the regional level can be identified and assessed using a scenario-building methodology that incorporates the interactions among multiple variables and decision-makers’ actions over time. Stakeholder input and engagement during the research process can facilitate realism and traction. This methodology is applied to northwestern Pennsylvania, on Lake Erie, projecting a scenario based on a set of complementary, lower-carbon energy and transportation technologies.    
(With Jialu Liu)
Energy Policy 52, 2013.

Chinese solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine producers have quickly expanded output and, in solar PV, exports. This export dominance in solar PV and readiness in wind have been criticized for relying on government subsidies that are said to target exports, not domestic implementation, which is a more broadly accepted policy goal. We explore the extent to which RE policy in China appears to address broader goals in industrial, macroeconomic, energy, and environmental policy versus export promotion per se. Our findings suggest that while both solar and wind policies were initially targeted at exports, in wind turbines this necessitated first supporting rapid domestic implementation to help producers build the requisite technological capabilities. With environmental problems mounting, domestic implementation incentives were later extended to solar PV as well.  This suggests that China's RE technology policy is now multidimensional, and that the success of its integrated supply and demand side renewables support may offer lessons for the U.S.

“Environmental Performance and Practice Across Sectors: Methodology and Preliminary Results”
(With Rachel Hilliard and Valerie Parker)
Journal of Cleaner Production 19:9-10 (June-July), 2011.
This paper introduces a methodology for measuring and modeling manufacturers’ environmental performance and the managerial and technological practices that affect it. Facility level licensing data from the Irish Environmental Protection Agency, in three sectors during 1996-2004, are used to develop indicators that can be analyzed across sectors. The approach addresses the problem that environmental performance and determinants tend to be sector-specific, while modeling and policy interests are more general. Using regulatory data information generated EU-wide, this approach should be capable of cross-country extension. (See myIrish Project page.)
“Search Routines and Dynamic Capability: Adaptation to New Regulation by Smaller Irish Manufacturers”
(With Rachel Hilliard and Valerie Parker)
Working paper: CISC, National University of Ireland-Galway, 2011.
How important is dynamic capability (DC) – processes for organisational adaptation of new resources and operating capabilities when the competitive environment changes? Researchers have studied the role of intentionality (versus tacit or habitual processes), and the difficulty of empirical identification and measurement where DC is often tautologically defined with performance. We argue that concentrating on routines as the unit of analysis can be helpful in addressing both issues.Examining adaptation by Irish manufacturers to sharply increased environmental regulation from the mid-1990s, we develop measures of DC based on informational integration internally and externally to the firm. We find that DC fosters adaptation to change directly, vialearning of new practical routines, and indirectly, via creation of new operating capabilities; and that DC observed behaviorally involves cognitive processes that are deliberative, structured, and articulated – sometimes formally, sometimes not, and rarely involving codification. (See my Irish Project page.)
I met Dave Houston while researching an article on the 1983 employee buyout of Weirton Steel. This contact initiated a journey that led me to a PhD in economics and research on financially driven corporate restructuring in an era of troubled capital accumulation. Dave counseled and practiced a clear-eyed look at the conditions for “acceptable” surplus value extraction when analyzing viable avenues for worker resistance. With a quarter-century’s hindsight, this paper applies that approach to an assessment of what restructuring has meant for the industrial working class in steel and related sectors.
“Exploring a Role for Capability Theory in the SSA Approach”
Working paper: World Association for Political Economy, Paris, May 2009.
This paper explores the potential for integrating the theory of “organizational capabilities” into a Marxian Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) approach. Capability theory deals with “the ability of an organization to perform a coordinated set of tasks, utilizing organizational resources” (Helfat and Peteraf 2003, 999), focusing on path-dependent evolution of the firm’s ability to survive within its competitive environment. Capability theory can deepen an SSA understanding of how the institutional structure of capital accumulation affects and is affected by competitive dynamics at the firm and industry levels. Two illustrative applications are the breakdown of the post-war SSA in the U.S., and the likely pressures of climate change in the construction of a new SSA after the current crisis.
“Organisational Capabilities for Sustainable Production”
(With Rachel Hilliard and Valerie Parker)
Working paper: CISC, National University of Ireland-Galway, 2008.
This study brings together insights from the research literatures on organisational capabilities and learning by doing to examine the response of Irish manufacturers to tightened environmental regulation in the 1990s. Using a fine-grained data set on firms’ technology and management practices, we test whether those practices over time resulted in the creation of learned ‘static’ capabilities, the ability to do certain kinds of things well in a given context. We also examine whether better-performing companies displayed higher levels of ‘dynamic’ capabilities – the capacity to change and adapt through integration of new information internally and from external sources – which we model as fixed during the period studied. Finally, we bring the first two research questions together by exploring whether firms with stronger dynamic capabilities were more likely to develop significant static ones within the time frame of interest. (See my Irish Project page.)
“Toward a Liberal Arts Managerial Economics Pedagogy” (With Stephen Onyeiwu)
Journal of the Academy of Business Education 8, Spring 2007.
We describe our department’s liberal arts managerial economics curriculum, offered as an optional track for undergraduate majors.  Management-related courses have generally remained separate from liberal arts economics curricula, a dichotomy frequently identified as weakening students’ preparation for managerial careers.  Our department’s Managerial Economics track integrates its sequence of courses with the rest of the departmental curriculum: helping students understand a rapidly changing environment rather than teaching narrow skills that quickly become obsolete; creating fluency in the concepts used by managers and management theorists; and preparing students for the ambiguous and integrative nature of managerial problems.
“Service Learning and Teaching About Globalization”
Review of Radical Political Economics 36:3, 2004.
This paper examines service and activist learning (SAL) and teaching about globalization as mutually reinforcing pedagogies.  SAL—which combines community activity with analytical reflection about the social context in which that experience occurs—attracts a broad cross section of students who think it important to try to make the world a better place.  Integrating globalization issues encourages them to place poverty and hunger in the local community—issues typically addressed in SAL—in the context of far-flung policy and business decisions.  Student participants become more effective social change advocates.  At the same time, learning about globalization becomes less abstract.
Strategic Environmental Management (SEM) involves the transformation of products and processes that practicing firms believe an environmentally concerned society will increasingly demand.  SEM implies that efforts to reduce external environmental costs often lead to identification of hitherto-unexplored profit possibilities.  This would be surprising from the standpoint of neoclassical economic theory. Within the framework of evolutionary, capabilities-based theories of the firm, however, this discovery and its exploitation in SEM make perfect sense.  The argument is tested using survey results drawn from the author’s work with member companies in a regional pollution prevention roundtable.
How can financial sector reform be designed specifically so that it enhances the prospects for sustainable development?  This paper begins an analysis of this little-discussed intersection, with a focus on Costa Rica. Policiy must move beyond a standard model of financial liberalization, and encourage market forces to channel capital flows to build productive capabilities based on complementarities between development and environmental quality. Costa Rica’s reform process and unusual depth of experience in doing sustainability make it an ideal place for such financial market innovations to be attempted. A set of market based “green” financial reforms is proposed.
The notion that hostile takeovers play a key role in corporate governance, by bringing purportedly efficient financial market pressures to bear on poorly performing managers, often underlies proposals for financial sector reform. This paper tests an influential explanation of takeovers, the free cash flow theory of debt-financed restructuring, against a comprehensive sample of large U.S. hostile takeovers from the years 1978-89. The tests provide little support for its prediction that takeovers remedy over-retention of corporate resources, relative to investment opportunities. The evidence is more consistent with the idea that the takeover and credit markets underwent a period of speculative overheating.  Thus facilitating hostile takeover activity should not be a goal of financial reform.
“Rocketing Stocks: Will the Market Return to Earth?”
Revised and updated for Real World Macro. Somerville, MA: Dollars and Sense, 1999
From the end of 1990 through 1998, stock market indices recorded gravity-defying increases.  But this stock market boom coincided with GDP growth averaging only 2.5%, stubborn unemployment, and real wages that fell during much of the long expansion. Only at its end did lower- and middle-income workers’ paychecks begin to recover. Corporate profitability rose during these years of cost cutting and downsizing, in many ways the flip side of wage stagnation and economic insecurity for most Americans.  But even rising profits lagged far behind stock price growth.  The 1998 Asian crash suggested the demise of the wide open, low wage, export led global model that was supposed to power corporate profits far into the future.  What was left driving the continued stock upsurge was sheer speculation.
The American corporate sector saw major reform movements during the 1980s. Despite frequent admixture in practice, two distinct movements can be singled out: financial restructuring (generally debt financed, often involving mergers), and total quality management (an approach to productive restructuring).  But the precepts and practices of these movements often clashed. These tensions are explored by reference to theories of the firm associated with each movement. While financial restructuring has been interpreted through the lens of neoclassical agency theory, total quality management has strong links with alternative approaches under the heading “capabilities theory.”
“Financial Structure and Corporate Behavior in Japan and the U.S.: Insulation vs. Integration with Speculative Pressures” International Review of Applied Economics 11:1, 1997
This paper examines the impact of speculative financial markets on corporate behavior under the Japanese and U.S. financial systems. While both countries experienced speculative financial booms during the 1980s, corporate decision making was relatively insulated from such activity in Japan by its bifurcated capital markets: high-turnover stock trading coexists with a segment in which blocks of firms’ equity and debt are held long term by strategic business allies. In the U.S., fluid stock trading leaves firms vulnerable to the impact of speculative price movements, reducing time horizons and imposing financial ratio-based decision criteria. To better insulate U.S. corporate decision making from speculative pressures,  policy makers should vest more power in corporate constituencies other than shareholders—especially employees.
Under true uncertainty, participants’ views of the relevant fundamentals of financial pricing and practices may change rapidly.  Competitive pressures may drive changes that are innovative but highly risky as well.  With the coercive herd behavior that arises from uncertain competition, danger signals are discarded or ignored, and unsustainable financial bubbles occur.  The speculative episodes of the eighties may be seen as the natural market outcomes of long competitive squeezes on the major financial players.  However, the responses often engendered further destabilization rather than “optimal” adjustments by markets and their actors.  During the oilpatch, LDC, merger, and property booms, overheating financial markets became less efficient, rather than more so.
“Do U.S. Financial Markets Allocate Credit Efficiently?  The Case of Corporate Restructuring in the 1980s”
(With James Crotty)
In Gary Dymski et al., eds., Transforming The U.S. Financial System.  Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993
Corporate acquisitions were big business during the 1980s; their financing was an integral part of the revolution which took place in financial markets and practices, and played a central role in creating the leverage mania of the decade. We argue that the 1980s  acquisitions left behind severe “financial pollution,” threatening the health of the suppliers of merger funds– and “corporate anorexia,” sapping the strength of the users of those funds. As the decade evolved, the search for speculative financial gain increasingly replaced production efficiency as the motive force behind the restructuring movement. Contrary to academic conventional wisdom, our deregulated financial markets proved to be shockingly inefficient as credit allocators.

In September [1983], 7,100 workers at National Steel’s plant in Weirton, West Virginia, voted to establish the nation’s largest fully owned Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Most accounts in the media extolled the cooperation between the company, its work force and the local government in successfully rescuing the faltering mill. Unfortunately, the glowing reports of the company’s resurrection were premature. What happened at National’s Weirton division is a typical story about a parent company that eschewed investment in steelmaking in favor of acquisitions. It is also about employees whose only choice was between losing their jobs and becoming nominal owners of a shaky, unprofitable firm facing cutthroat competition in a stagnant market.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)