| it appears in traditional books on business and economics. It is the vast, emerging, partially charted territories of knowledge-driven relationships that now tie many companies to scores of other organizations around the world. |
| This is an unusual topicas a focus of scholarly effort, the subject is embryonic. Data are scarce, and many basic concepts are in flux. Only recently have scholars recognized that the complex sphere of alliances around many firms may be a full-fledged form of organization, just as important as the markets and internal activities that have been studied so carefully for decades. From a managerial perspective, too, the topic is a new one. The large-scale "strategic alliance experiment" by U.S. companies is scarcely a decade old. For these reasons, this book and the research behind it are inevitably unorthodox. |
| Early in my research, I realized that no single discipline, including business administration, would provide a complete perspective on the issues. Hence, I have drawn upon and synthesized ideas from scholars in several fields. Some were economists, such as Kenneth Arrow and Kenneth Boulding, who have studied the economics of knowledge; others were sociologists, such as Daniel Bell, who have studied the so-called knowledge explosion. Historians, political scientists, and some organizational theorists have studied how technology is transferred among companies, groups, or nations. Searching further afield, I drew upon ideas developed by the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle and the Hungarian-born chemist and philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi. To make this research accessible to a wide range of readers, I have presented my ideas in a long interpretive essay written in ordinary English. The endnotes, however, show in detail the intellectual genealogy of ideas and findings drawn from other scholars. |
|
