Founders sell WhatsApp to Facebook: Motives not clear

The founders of Whatsapp were very clear that did not not what to sell advertisement through the messaging app.  (See their 2012 statement.They did not even want to collect data on their users.  So why did they sell themselves to Facebook, which is all about collecting more data on us to sell it to advertisers?  Here is a clue in their blog.  Maybe they were tired of having to manage a business rather than just design a product.

Joel Mokyr Sees no End to Innovation

Mokyr points out the modern GDP measures are not accounting for improvements in quality of products and life.
He sees no end to innovation. Basic science needs to be funded by governments because private individuals and corporations cannot appropriate the returns from these investments. He sees culture that encourages natural skepticism of students as a key ingredient for furthering innovation of a country.

Improving Your Case Method Skills: Two Methodological Pieces by Michael Scriven

The philosopher and polymath Michael Scriven has written extensively on the logic of explanations. Here are two of his most valuable pieces. The first one is how one can make good inferences from single case studies and the second one one explanations in history.

1. Scriven, M. (1974). Maximizing the Power of Causal Investigations: The Modus Operandi Method. In W. J. Popham (Ed.), Evaluation in education: Current applications: 68-84: McCutchan Pub Corp. Download

2. Scriven, M. (1966). Causes, Connections, and Conditions in History. Philosophical Analysis and History. W. H. Dray, Harper & Row: 238-264.  Download

 

Scaffolding in Economics, Management, and the Design of Technologies

This chapter reviews the ideas that have been developed to describe the emergence and change of structures in three fields: Economics, Management, and Design of Technologies. The chapter focuses on one empirical setting, the economy, and more specifically how firms, industries, and technologies change over time. Today’s industrialized economies are very different from the economies before the industrial revolution. The chapter presents key theoretical ideas from evolutionary economics, management, and technology that try to explain why and how economy has been so dramatically transformed over the past 400 years. You can download a draft of chapter here or find the book in your library or buy it at Amazon.com or MIT Press.

Two Diagrams that show why PC makers have trouble

Click on “more” to see chart that combines PC and tablet sales.

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Excerpts from Arthur Stinchcombe’s on “Theoretical Methods in Social History”

Ten years ago I read Stinchcombe’s “Theoretical Methods in Social History”. I recently reread the parts that I had highlighted and I thought it useful to share some key passages.[1]

One does not apply theory to history; rather ones uses history to develop theory. [2]
——
It is rather that the fashion in quantitative history has come to be that one must agree to be voluntarily ignorant of the any evidence other than numbers. [3]

As the argument develops, it will become clear why I am unenthusiastic about most quantitative history. Let me state the argument in capsule form.
For a number, say a count, to be theoretically interesting, it has to be a count of a comparable instance. What instances comparable for a scientist is that those instances have identical causal impact. Thus a count is more illuminating, the more theory and the more detailed examination of the facts went into making the instances counted comparable. But this ordinarily means that making a count should be the last stage of a scientific enterprise, a stage reached only after an extensive development of theory on what makes instances comparable. Is the proletarian in the Vyborg district of Petersburg or in the Baltic Sea Fleet equivalent in impact on the Russian Revolution to a proletarian in Moscow? Trotsky convinces me he was not (and if the proletarian was a she, in either place, she was not equivalent to a male proletarian either). Consequently, a count of proletarians in Russia in 1917 is fact of relatively little interest. [4]

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Letters from China: “Breathtaking Beijing”

In early June, I visited Beijing for the first time. The Chinese capital is breathtaking in every sense of the word. The city has gone through an amazing development and is more glitzy than many American and European large cities. It definitely feels more modern and dynamic than Philadelphia, whose neighborhoods I explored while living there for most of 2012.

As a teenager in the early 1980s, I visited a number of communist countries: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia. So I find it easy to imagine what Beijing would have looked like before 1978. In mere 30 years, a run-down and crumbling place was transformed into a modern city, which is far better developed than any city I have seen during my visits to formerly communist Ukraine in 2004 and 2009. Also in relation to Rio De Janeiro, Beijing seems newer, and lot cleaner especially compared to the outskirts of Rio.

 

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Guy Kawasaki on Lessons he Learned from Steve Jobs

Lessons of Steve Jobs from Guy Kawasaki

PM: Guy also shows how to put together a great simple slide presentation.

My Editorial Statement for Management & Organization Review

MOR is the official journal of International Association for Chinese Management Research. While the journal is focused on China, comparative studies of China and other countries are highly appropriate for the journal.

I am interested in detailed studies of how technologies, organizations, industries and supporting institutions evolve over time. Methodologically, I hope to attract comparative case studies that are rich in descriptive data that is both quantitative and qualitative.  I also hope to attract historical case studies.  Papers that feature particularly innovative companies or organizational and institutional structures are of particular interest.

Examples of papers that illustrate work of interest to this editorial area can be found here.

Collection of Research Methods articles in SO!

SO! has pulled together the collection of articles on research methods that the journal published over the years. I for one will come back to these articles. I suspect many doctoral students will find them useful.

Ann Langley: Over the years, Strategic Organization has published a number of very useful and insightful articles on research methods for studying strategy and organization. This section of the website groups together a collection of the most interesting articles of this type. Both quantitative and qualitative researchers will find ideas for novel approaches and pointers for enhancing the quality of their research among these contributions.

SO! Collection on Research Methods