Search results for "Business history"

Arkistojen käyttö aineiston arvonmäärityksen perusteena : Elinkeinoelämän keskusarkiston aineistotiedustelut moniäänisen arkistoasiakkuuden kuvana ja…

2014

Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan arkistoaineistojen tutkimuskäytön suhdetta arkistoaineiston arvonmääritykseen. Kuinka arkistot määrittävät säilytettävän aineiston arvon ja kuinka käyttäjien tarpeet heijastuvat arkistoaineiston arvonmääritykseen? Arvonmääritystä tarkastellaan ennen kaikkea arkistoja hyödyntävän historiantutkimuksen näkökulmasta. Tutkielma jakaantuu temaattisesti kahteen toisiinsa limittyvään kokonaisuuteen. Ensimmäisessä osassa pureudutaan arvonmääritystä jäsentäviin normeihin ja käytäntöihin, toisessa osassa avataan arkistoaineiston käyttöä Elinkeinoelämän keskusarkistossa. Tutkielman perushypoteesi on, että arkiston käyttö vaikuttaa aineiston arvonmääritykseen ja vastaavasti ai…

Institutional perspectives on retailing : rethinking the adoption of large-scale retailing in Finland

2018

This dissertation focuses on the adoption of the hypermarket in Finnish retailing and examines how major retail organizations experienced the transition from established practices into new logic of retail business, the large-scale retail trade. The research builds on DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) analytical categorization of institutional isomorphic mechanisms, but utilizes more recent theorizations and insights of organizational institutionalism in the detailed theoretical framing. My research questions were as follows. How did Finnish retail organizations initially regard the hypermarket format? How did their stances change over time? To answer these questions, I examined the adoption of t…

The Strategic Cognition View of Issue Salience and the Evolution of a Political Issue : Landis & Gyr, the Hungarian Uprising and East-West Trade, 195…

2017

Why do firms facing similar stakeholder issues respond quite differently? The recently introduced strategic cognition view of issue salience and firm responsiveness (hereinafter: issue salience model) seeks to tackle this core question of stakeholder theory. I extend the nascent theorizing with a historical case study in order to rethink the model’s firm-centric perspective. The firm under examination in this historical case study is the Swiss multinational Landis & Gyr (LG) during the Cold War period. Like many other Swiss exportoriented companies in the 1950s and early 1960s, LG was challenged by Swiss pressure groups, which were highly effective at putting an issue on the public agenda: …

Strategy and business history rejoined : How and why strategic management concepts took over business history

2022

Scholars at the intersection of business history and strategic management have argued for the relevance and importance of historical methods in the study of strategic management of organizations. We flip this argument and ask about the role of strategic management concepts in the study of business history. We analyze volumes of Business History and Business History Review and a representative sample of business history books using a comprehensive set of keywords, each related to a specific sub-discourse in strategic management. Our results show that as scientific communities, business history and strategic management have become increasingly similar in their conceptual overlap. This study c…

Taloushistorian paluu ja liiketoimintahistorian nousu

2017

Peer interaction and pioneering organizational form adoption : A tale of the first two for-profit stock exchanges

2021

Building on a historical case study on the first two stock exchanges to adopt the now globally dominant for-profit organizational form, the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 1993 and the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1995, we argue that interaction among socially proximate peers contributes to pioneering organizational form adoption within an industry, particularly when such forms are introduced by established organizations. Peer interaction can induce a search for technically efficient organizational forms through the sharing of collective experiences, the establishment of collective assumptions, and a joint search for solutions. Together, these factors contribute to the legitimization of novel or…

The curse of agility : The Nokia Corporation and the loss of market dominance in mobile phones, 2003–2013

2021

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 through several badly timed decisions. We identify key choices in technology and organisational design that jointly constituted sufficient cause for the abandonment of the mobile phone business. By focusing on choices instead of attributes (e.g. fear or hubris), we make progress in strategic failure research and simultaneously emphasise the strength of oral history methods and the philosophy of history as fruitful starting points for such an inquiry. peerReviewed

Managing the paradox of unwanted efficiency : The symbolic legitimation of the hypermarket format in Finland, 1960–1975

2018

Occasionally, 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 practice…

Ideology in Vicarious Learning-Related Communication

2021

Organizations often learn vicariously by observing what other organizations do. Our study examines vicarious learning–related communication through which individuals share their observations with other organizational members. Most students and members of present-day organizations would expect that this communication is driven by a prodevelopment logic—that communication serves the purpose of organizational improvement and competitiveness. Our unique historical evidence on learning-related communication over multiple decades shows that the subjective and collective attitude toward prodevelopment communication may be ideologically conditioned. Prodevelopment communication is the norm in capit…