Search results for "Business History"

Cremonini

2020

The Challengers: Kymmene, United Paper Mills, and Metsäliitto

2006

Firms attempt to adapt themselves through their business strategies to the present and forthcoming (institutional and technical) environments. Whether these strategy choices are planned or implemented is the classic question in business history and strategic management. It is generally agreed that the basic aims of a firm is to be profitable (at least over the long term) and to survive. These basic assumptions seems to fit most of the current, publicly owned companies, but when we are dealing with e.g. governmental owned or cooperatives, this seemingly clear picture becomes fuzzy. This article aims to analyse three major Finnish forestry industry companies, namely Kymmene, United Paper Mill…

2017

AbstractOccasionally, organisations are forced to adopt new practices that are inconsistent with the expectations of their stakeholders. An immediate adoption of the practices would risk the organisation’s legitimacy, but as previous research has noted, the perceptions of organisational stakeholders can be managed through symbolic actions. In this article, I examine how actors from four retail organisations symbolically legitimated the adoption of the hypermarket format within their individual contexts by means of internal professional magazines. The analysis suggests that the organisations buttressed their legitimacy by reversing Meyer and Rowan’s idea of loose coupling – adopting the new …

Let the best story win : evaluation of the most cited business history articles

2017

Faced with intensifying competition for scientific impact measured in terms of citation counts, small disciplines are challenged to prove their importance as they lack the critical mass to accumulate large numbers of citations. This paper demonstrates that by emphasizing theoretical and methodological rigor even small disciplines such as business history can be competitive. Yet it still appears that readers of business history articles first and foremost seek interesting and useful subject matter, i.e. ‘best’ stories that can be used as background information and as tools in comparisons. However, articles advancing theory and methodology have increasingly gained interest and citations from …

Business as usual

2016

Who wants to live forever: exploring 30 years of research on business longevity

2015

This article presents a systematic review of the existing literature on business longevity by conducting a bibliometric analysis of 142 papers published in the leading business history and management journals during the last three decades. The results show similarities (e.g. in explanatory models) and differences (e.g. in citation patterns, theories, and methods) between the disciplines, thus indicating that the literature is partially segmented into separate domains that prevent business longevity research from representing a truly unified field of study.

Quantitative methods in business history: An impossible equation?

2010

Abstract In this article we want to evaluate how often quantitative tools and methods were utilized in the two premier journals in business history in the 1990s. Thus we tap into an important methodological discussion among the post-Chandlerian business historians. We found that simpler quantitative tools were employed quite often, but not necessarily going much beyond that.Also, it became apparent that the most cited business history articles were often written by scholars coming from‘outside’ the fluid disciplinary core of business history field.The analyses performed in the article revealed that the level of quantification seemed to have either no discernible impact (Business History Rev…

2019

We investigate how and why the Nokia Corporation failed to develop a successful strategic response to the threats of Apple and Google in the smartphone business and instead worsened its situation t...

Towards Big Data: Digitising Economic and Business History

2020

This chapter describes the experiences in computational and digital history of economic and business historians who for decades have been forerunners in digital history data gathering and computational analysis. It attempts to discuss the major developments within this area internationally and, in some specific cases, in Finland in the fields of digital economic and business history. It concentrates on a number of research projects that the authors have previously been involved in, as well as research outcomes by other economic and business historians within Finland and elsewhere. It is not claimed that the projects discussed are unique or ahead of their time in the field of economic and bu…

In search of an integrated framework of business longevity

2015

Even if the domain of business longevity has been enriched by the multidisciplinary nature of approaches used to investigate the phenomenon, the lack of a unifying perspective has impeded systematic research and caused definitional ambiguity. The main aim of this special issue is to extend existing knowledge on business longevity by integrating theoretical and empirical studies that adopt different approaches and perspectives. This is essential in order to identify the key factors of long-term success and the effects of longevity on firm performance. The multifaceted nature of business longevity research is mirrored in the five articles included in this special issue, that offer different a…