Publications

In Türkiye, communication science falls under the category of social sciences and is regarded as an interdisciplinary scientific field focused on empirical research. The field is influenced by communication science developments of the West in terms of developing theories and methodology, and it faces challenges when it comes to the systematisation of theories and research methods created by different research traditions; their critical evaluation, development, and the failure to put theories to practical use. In order to ascertain the present condition of the field, this article explores the institutionalisation of communication science at universities and its potential tendencies as an academic field of study, its research trends, and the characteristics of communication science studies.

This paper elaborates on how design rules emerge and evolve as firms' micro-level choices of product and organization architectures coevolve with changes in product markets and an industry's competitive and cooperative dynamics. We suggest that the design rules a firm adopts will vary according to firms' strategic choices of product and organization architectures that they believe are or may become feasible in a given industry. Building on the mirroring hypothesis that product designs a firm adopts will influence the organization designs it uses, we develop a model that identifies key relationships that influence firms' strategic choices of product and organization architectures and associated design rules. We then elaborate on key interactions between firm-level architectural choices and the architecture-enabled competitive and cooperative dynamics that obtain in an industry. Our model identifies strategically important aspects of open- and closed-system architectures and modular and nonmodular architectures that impact industry structures, interfirm interactions, and resulting industry dynamics. Drawing on these analyses, we suggest how firms' strategic choices of architectures are influenced by their assessments of (i) the potential for capturing value through both gains from specialization and gains from trade that firms believe will be enabled by their architectural choices and (ii) both ex ante and ex post transaction costs implied by their architecture decisions. We conclude by suggesting how the perspective on firm's strategic architectural decisions we develop here enables new approaches to understanding evolutions of both product markets and industry structures for serving product markets.

Joint production is a term with a long history in economics, encompassing a variety of ubiquitous production types that usually generate both main products as well as desirable and undesirable byproducts. However, studies in economic history show that important phenomena subsumed under this term were largely ignored by the theories of general economics and of business economics in the twentieth century. Our systematic, narrative literature review based on the Web of Science analyses the extent to which this and other terms corresponding to such phenomena have been taken up by researchers since then. Whereas the number of papers on undesirable outputs has soared, especially in the past decade, the economic literature regarding joint production and harmless byproducts is much smaller and hardly growing. This is in stark contrast to their relevance in practice, recorded in the non-economic literature. Harmful byproducts result from coupled production, as a rule. However, this important manifestation of joint production is usually not distinguished from other specific types. In German-language literature, coupled production is defined as a kind of (truly) joint production in which an intended product cannot be manufactured without an additional type of output under consideration. Our review reveals a lack of clarity, precision, and consistency in the use of established terms and concepts in English-language literature, that may lead to insufficient external validity of widely accepted models. Moreover, one gets the impression that academic disciplines concerned with business or general economics focus too much on problems that are currently of economic interest, while neglecting other issues that may be marginal today but are likely to be of critical importance in the near future.

This study examines the adoption of MBA programs by higher education institutions in Germany. Using arguments from neo-institutional theory and imprinting theory, we propose that private ownership, mimetic processes, and founding period are likely to impact MBA adoption. In an empirical analysis of 86 German universities over the period 1999-2015, we show that private universities are more likely to offer MBA programs. For public universities, we find that prior adoption by other universities and an early foundation period (prior to World War II) positively influence MBA adoption. Interaction analyses show that the positive impact of prior adoption by other universities is attenuated by organizational status and augmented by the regional density of academic institutions. Our findings thus elucidate the major role of institutional factors for the diffusion of MBA programs among German universities.