A Process Approach to Corporate Coherence

We address the notion of 'corporate coherence', recently made prominent by Teece, Rumelt, Dosi and Winter (1994). We argue that the literature is confused on the meaning of the notion (and similar notions) in a number of dimensions. Drawing on insights from market-process theories, we put forward a dynamic understanding of corporate coherence as involving the corporate capacity to strike a favorable balance between the production and the exploitation of new knowledge. This argument is elaborated drawing on Austrian, evolutionary and postMarshallian economics