Organizational Attributes and the Distribution of Rewards in a Region: Managerial Firms vs. Knowledge Clusters
Articles
Overview
published in
- ORGANIZATION SCIENCE Journal
publication date
- March 2010
start page
- 573
end page
- 586
issue
- 2
volume
- 21
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 1047-7039
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1526-5455
abstract
-
This paper expands the organization theory and evidence on regional industrial agglomerations. We define regional economic activities according to the attributes of the
organizations that populate a region and investigate how organizational
characteristics
influence macro-outcomes at a regional economic
level. We focus on two dimensions emerging from two widely known
organizational
forms: the managerial corporation and the knowledge
cluster with a marked orientation toward interfirm knowledge
spillovers.
We use an original data set of 146 U.S. cities to
obtain variations in the extent to which they are populated by
managerial
firms or knowledge clusters. By utilizing
city-level measures of managerial salaries, we test how the intensity of
managerial
corporation versus knowledge cluster
characteristics affects the mean and dispersion of the "rewards" of
cities. Our evidence
suggests that higher managerial corporate
characteristics lower the variability of rewards, while they have no
effect on the
mean of rewards. Higher-knowledge cluster
characteristics produce both higher dispersion and higher expected
rewards. We explain
these results by looking at the different learning
mechanisms of the two organizational types. In so doing, we highlight
the
role of intra- and interfirm knowledge processes as
important sources of differences in the rewards of the two models. From
an empirical point of view, results are confirmed
using both patent-based and skill mobility-based measures of knowledge
spillovers.