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CITO: Towards a Firm for Our Time with JC Spender
The seminar took place virtually on Friday March 5th, 2021
Abstract
The widely accepted understanding of the firm is deeply flawed and is a serious impediment to policy-making. Indeed there seems to have been little advance in theory since 1937, when the youthful Ronald Coase tweaked economists, charging they could not explain why firms existed, let alone how they worked. Notions of managers making decisions 'scientifically' is not only narrow, it ends up erasing their practice's essential nature and socioeconomic significance. Spender revisits the nature of the firm and argues that managing might be more helpfully understood as entrepreneurship, a value-creating activity often supported by science's facts and reasoning but never 'dominated' by them. The human condition is one of uncertainty, of not-knowing and therefore questing for knowledge; Homo Inquirentes rather than Homo Sapiens. Taking this as the starting point, Spender goes on to explore the implications for the private sector firm and for managing.
About the speaker:
JC Spender is Research Professor at Kozminski University, Warsaw and Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University, New Jersey and Fordham University, New York. He served in RN submarines and worked with Rolls-Royce on nuclear propulsion, IBM on financial computing, and as an investment banker before earning a PhD at the Manchester Business School (UK). Retired in 2003 as Dean of the School of Business & Technology at FIT/SUNY (New York).
He has published 8 books, and over 100 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book is titled Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise (Oxford UP 2014) and is about managing a business's creative responses to uncertainty (‘business model innovation’). He also writes about the theory and ethics of the firm, business strategy, and the history of management education. He is Commissioning Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements in Business Strategy. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics by the Lund University School of Economics & Management. https://jcspender.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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By Camilla NoonanThe seminar took place virtually on Friday March 5th, 2021
Abstract
The widely accepted understanding of the firm is deeply flawed and is a serious impediment to policy-making. Indeed there seems to have been little advance in theory since 1937, when the youthful Ronald Coase tweaked economists, charging they could not explain why firms existed, let alone how they worked. Notions of managers making decisions 'scientifically' is not only narrow, it ends up erasing their practice's essential nature and socioeconomic significance. Spender revisits the nature of the firm and argues that managing might be more helpfully understood as entrepreneurship, a value-creating activity often supported by science's facts and reasoning but never 'dominated' by them. The human condition is one of uncertainty, of not-knowing and therefore questing for knowledge; Homo Inquirentes rather than Homo Sapiens. Taking this as the starting point, Spender goes on to explore the implications for the private sector firm and for managing.
About the speaker:
JC Spender is Research Professor at Kozminski University, Warsaw and Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University, New Jersey and Fordham University, New York. He served in RN submarines and worked with Rolls-Royce on nuclear propulsion, IBM on financial computing, and as an investment banker before earning a PhD at the Manchester Business School (UK). Retired in 2003 as Dean of the School of Business & Technology at FIT/SUNY (New York).
He has published 8 books, and over 100 journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book is titled Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise (Oxford UP 2014) and is about managing a business's creative responses to uncertainty (‘business model innovation’). He also writes about the theory and ethics of the firm, business strategy, and the history of management education. He is Commissioning Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements in Business Strategy. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics by the Lund University School of Economics & Management. https://jcspender.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.