impressions
- architect’s humanity
- productive collaboration
- scholar’s persistence
- deep originality
with warm humor
1972
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the arc of Max’s work
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architecture, managing, city planning, technology transfer
teaching - 1979 INSEAD & ESCP
anthropology, international cultures, organizations
1984 China-EC Management Program - CEIBS
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1994 Euro-Arab Management School, Grenada
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ESADE
I-Space Institute, complexity & Atlas/LHC
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Fiefs & Clans - versus - Markets & Bureaucracies
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Boisot, M. (1986). Markets and Hierarchies in a Cultural Perspective.
Organization Studies, 7(2), 135-168
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Boisot, M., & Child, J. (1988). The Iron Law of Fiefs: Bureaucratic Failure
and the Problem of Governance in the Chinese Economic Reforms.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 33, 507-527.
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Boisot, M., & Child, J. (1996). From Fiefs to Clans and Network Capitalism:
Explaining China's Emerging Economic Order. Administrative Science
Quarterly, 41(4), 600-628.
What’s going on here?
1. sharp (empirical China-based) critique of Williamson’s Markets &
Hierarchies (1975)
2. proposing a heterogeneous C(ulture)-space - information-based theory of
human organization
4 modes of human knowing - 4 modes of organizing
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C-space
• time-full cycle of knowing and organizing
for further learning
versus
• time-free naiveté of micro-economists’
rational-man theorizing that denies
learning
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(formerly known as C-Space)
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Boisot, M. (1982). The Codification and Diffusion of Knowledge
in the Transactional Strategy of Firms. Keio Economic Studies,
19(1).
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Boisot, M. (1983). Convergence Revisited: The Codification and
Diffusion of Knowledge in a British and a Japanese Firm. Journal
of Management Studies, 20(2), 159-190.
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Boisot, M. (1995). Information Space: A Framework for Learning
in Organizations, Institutions and Culture. London: Routledge.
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Boisot, M. (1998). Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive
Advantage in the Information Economy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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Boisot, M., MacMillan, I. C., & Han, K. S. (Eds.). (2007).
Explorations in Information Space: Knowledge, Agents, and
Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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what was so deeply original ?
aside from the novelty of his 3-dimensional (architect’s) model
testing deductions
from theory
organicism,
self-organizing,
& emergence
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French ‘engineer-economists’ impact on
Écoles Polytechnique, Mines, Ponts &
Chaussées - and ESCP
mathematicization of social-empirical
phenomena - time & space bounded
work (conservation of energy)
non-equilibrium dynamism
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subjectivity,
hermeneutics,
agency
& narrative
empirical
generalization
- induction
mechanical organizing
no variety of knowing
decontextualized, dehumanizing
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the scholar’s legacy -
better questions !
• several categories of human learning & collaborating
• poverty of research that ignores humanly-lived space and time
• human dynamics of emerging order versus directing
and so to heterogeneity, non-linearity, or ‘long-tail’ phenomena
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chaos theory, adaption, budgets & waste
time & space bounded
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Hmm ... can we go back to slide 6 ? …
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