Workshop on European Business Models


Speaker


Abstract

A revival in the interest in the “European business model” has generated in the 1990s two separate but complementary streams of research. The first is linked to the research in the “law and finance” area, trying to understand the determinants of the high dispersion of ownership among large firms in developed economies (see e.g. La Porta et al., 1999; Barca and Becht, 2003), which produced an huge amount of information about the ownership structures of large companies, both listed and privately held. Another stream of research concerned the dynamics in the world’s largest corporations and these studies in the area of management explicitly referred to the 1970s Harvard Research Project about strategies and structures of the 100 largest corporations in the main industrialized countries at that time (Whittington and Mayer, 2000). At the same time a renewed interest arose in corporate governance issues, explicitly dealing with the effects of ownership structures on value creation and distribution, which has added further evidence to the debate.
 
As a result of past research a reasonable amount of data and information is available circumscribed however only to the largest European countries (France, UK and Germany), with far much less coverage of the “peripheries”. The nature itself of the research was to investigate the relationship among strategy, structure, ownership and performance in a dynamic and comparative perspective. This has implied a tremendous effort of data collection, homogenization and analysis in a medium to long period and brought also business historians to become interested in this kind of research (Schroeter, ed., 2008). This debate has been particularly vivid given also its obvious links with other relevant streams of research, as those related to the “varieties of capitalism” debate and to the “national business systems” literature.
 

The presentations are:

  • Andrea Colli and Veronica Binda (both Bocconi University): Strategic responses to economic integration in Mediterranean sauce – comparing Italy and Spain
  • Gerarda Westerhuis (Utrecht University), John Wilson (University of Liverpool), Mitch Larson (University of Central Lancaster) and Gerhard Schnyder (King’s College London): Strategic responses to economic integration – the case of European banking, 1973-2000
  • Martin Jes Iversen (Copenhagen Business School): Economic integration in Danish business history, 1850-2000
  • David Higgins and Steven Toms (both University of York): Explaining corporate success: Britain’s best performing firms, 1950-1984
  • Olaf Ehrhardt and Eric Nowak (both University of Lugano): The evolution of German industrial legends – the case of Baden-Württemberg
  • Carlos Bastien and Pedro Neves (both Technical University of Lisbon): The Portuguese corporation, 1960-2007 (How institutional breaks changed the strategy of the large corporations)
  • Abe de Jong (RSM), Keetie Sluyterman (Utrecht University) and Gerarda Westerhuis (Utrecht University): The Netherlands: strategic and structural responses to international dynamics in the open Dutch economy, 1957-2007
Registration
To register for this conference, please send an e-mail to ajong@rsm.nl.