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The formation of the first chartered companies during the seventeenth century created organizations of unprecedented scope, size and complexity. While numerous studies have explored the economic and organizational activities of these multinational enterprises, this paper argues that they transformed the geography of knowledge management as well. Existing theory has assumed that the expanding scale trade and organization allowed greater volumes raw data to be transferred back to "centers of calculation" in corporate headquarters where it was analyzed and synthesized into economically valuable information. I argue that because tacit knowledge travelled poorly through long distance networks, knowledge aggregation was best conducted abroad. Rather than collecting and analyzing data at the European headquarters, data was instead analyzed and codified abroad. Building on case studies from the early modern world, this paper offers a new insight into the transformative impacts of large scale commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Dutch East India Company expanded its presence in Asia during the seventeenth century, discovery of new products and medical materials was central to its continued success and survival. This new product innovation was difficult to manage directly however because the routine- driven, efficiency-focused organization was ill-suited to research and discovery required for bioprospecting and innovation. Instead, the Company tacitly allowed its employees in Asia to conduct this research on their own. Scientists became free riders, exploiting their administrative authority and corporate resources to further their private research projects. This symbiotic public-private partnership enabled employees to use Company resources to undertake large-scale economic and scientific surveys of its Asian domains. These decentralized, entrepreneurial projects cut across the boundaries of caste, language, religion and theoretical orientation to assemble a new, systematic view of Asian knowledge. While not centrally planned (nor always officially condoned) these surveying efforts had all of the hallmarks a systematic colonial project to map out the sources of value in a foreign colony, and demonstrate the ways in which Dutch commercial ventures expanded their missions as they solidified their control in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the different logics of strategic alliance formation in the Japanese electronics industry between 1985 and 1998. With data on 137 Japanese electronics/electrical machinery makers, we use discrete event history analysis to address a series of hypotheses drawn largely from embeddedness theory on how the firms' horizontal and vertical keiretsu business group affiliations and prior alliance networks supported and constrained partner choice in new R&D (innovation) and nonR&D (implementation) domestic alliances. We find that in the first half of our series (1985-91; the "preburst" period) keiretsu served as infrastructure or platform for new strategic alliances that had both innovation and implementation goals. In the second half of our series (1992-98, the "postbubble" period) the keiretsu effects on innovation alliance formation were gone, but the groups' role in nonR&D or implementation alliances, the purpose of which was often cost reduction, had expanded. Our results suggest that Japanese electronics firms over this interval of time adapted rationally to the heightened uncertainty and stringency of the Japanese domestic economic environment by searching outside their preexisting networks for innovation alliances while at the same time exploiting those networks for implementation alliances addressed to cost-reduction and other operational aims. The study speaks to embeddedness theory in showing that economic actors are not deterministically constrained by business group or other preexisting network ties but may in rational fashion exploit or abandon those ties with an eye to advancing corporate and alliance goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes and tests a new model for intergroup communication that offers a solution to the problem of coordinating the activities of specialist workers within and between firms. Previous research has described the emergence of technical jargons and codes which makes communications between specialists more efficient. However, as these languages become more tuned to the demands of a specific environment through the creation of specific vocabularies and shorthands, it becomes increasingly difficult for agents outside the group to communicate with those within it. Within an organization, the emergence of languages demands a tradeoff between specialization and coordination. This paper identifies a novel solution to these coordination problems. In many cases, I argue, coordination relies on the exchange of information on a very small set of topics rather than the full integration of two or more groups' knowledge. Drawing on natural experiments derived from historical case studies, I demonstrate that under these circumstances, coordination can be achieved through the spontaneous and unmanaged development of a new mode of communication: a trade language or pidgin - an ad hoc, functionally limited language that enables the exchange of only information on a very small set of topics. While limited in scope, these functionally simplified languages are relatively easy for all parties to learn and serve the important function of allowing facile coordination between different groups. Building on historical examples, I demonstrate the existence of such languages through case studies, empirical data, and experimental games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]