Mehmet Erçek | Istanbul Technical University (original) (raw)

Papers by Mehmet Erçek

In the course of last 20 years, with, the information revolution, sustained global economic reces... more In the course of last 20 years, with, the information revolution, sustained global economic recession, repeated global crises and corporate scandals, rapid changes have occurred in relations and factors of production. Major advancements in technology as well as intensifying corporate greed disrupted ethical climate of work, making social structure and normative nature of human collectives fundamentally weaker. In this paper, we argue that normative means of control are becoming less and less prevalent today, and organizations are becoming socially disabled and coercively controlled places. Everyday work and workplaces themselves have never been monolithic. However, this trend may lead to a new and extremely heterogeneous workplace where all employee bonds are broken, leading to very low levels of commitment and very high levels of turnover intention, threatening the existence and the survival of organizations. Can an organization still show some performance in the marketplace, or ev...

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014

ABSTRACT Vatandaş kuruluş kavramı, toplumsal açıdan değişen değer ve standartların bir sonucu ola... more ABSTRACT Vatandaş kuruluş kavramı, toplumsal açıdan değişen değer ve standartların bir sonucu olarak kuruluşların topluma karşı olan sorumluluklarını gösterebilmek amacıyla, 1990’ların başından itibaren işletme yönetimi alanında yeni bir düşünce olarak kullanılmaya başlandı Kuruluşlar, kendilerine bağlı kişilerin ahlaki seviyelerine paralel olarak farklı ahlaki seviyeler gösterdiklerinden ve toplum için farklı tipte vatandaş örneği olabileceklerinden, bu alanda ampirik incelemeler yapma gereksinimi bulunmaktadır. Bu gereksinimin bir sonucu olarak ortaya çıkan bu araştırmada Turkiye’de faaliyet gösteren işletmelerin vatandaş kuruluş olma davranışları sorgulanarak, vatandaş kuruluş davranışlarını etkileyen insan kaynağına yönelik örgütsel kültür değerleri incelenmekte ve vatandaş kuruluş davranışlarının “davranışsal performans” olarak adlandırılan “örgütsel bağlılık” ve “çalışan memnuniyeti” seviyelerini ne yönde ve nasıl etkilediği saptanmaya çalışılmaktadır.

Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics

This study aims to extend the cooperative lifecycle theory, which builds on consecutive degenerat... more This study aims to extend the cooperative lifecycle theory, which builds on consecutive degeneration and regeneration of ideal cooperative values such as democracy, self‐help, and solidarity by offering a new regenerative mechanism. In this respect, the study imports multilevel imprinting theory from the organizational ecology domain to explicate the punctuated evolutionary pattern of Turkish agricultural credit cooperatives, which displayed significantly different characteristics from Raiffeisen cooperatives that cooperative discourse in Türkiye used for a long as a benchmark. The archival research undertaken in the study asserts that the imprints of Ottoman Memleket Sandiks (OMS) have stamped agricultural credit cooperatives of the Republican era long after their erosion. The resurrection of imprints was enabled by Ziraat Bank, which acted as an intermediary organization and took over the remnants of OMSs. Our analyses also suggest that the State's polity and policy transforma...

Pressacademia, Mar 30, 2020

Purpose-This study aims to solve a historical puzzle in Turkish cooperative history and illuminat... more Purpose-This study aims to solve a historical puzzle in Turkish cooperative history and illuminate the failure of a discursive medium, the journal of Türk Kooperatifçisi, to realize its ambitious goals of disseminating liberal ideas into the field of agricultural cooperatives. Given the strong state influence on Turkish cooperatives for over a century, this article strives to articulate when and how the anti-etatist cooperative discourse experienced an absolute defeat in the face of state hegemony. Methodology-This historical case study carries out hermeneutical discourse analysis on the archival data collected from the National Library of Turkey. Drawing on the first Turkish cooperative periodical, namely the Türk Kooperatifçisi, the researchers have read 214 articles, amounting to 966 pages. After a systematic interpretation of the collected data, the researchers have further situated archival evidence onto a plot and accordingly constructed a historical narrative, thereby illuminating the underlying reasons for the short life span (1930-1933) of a liberal cooperative periodical in early Republican Turkey. Findings-The findings of this study suggest that towards the end of the 1920s, the sharp turn in the economic policy of Turkey triggered a series of events, leading the agricultural cooperatives to become state apparatuses. Correspondingly, the liberal frame regressed in the face of the etatist frame and became defeated in the discursive arena. Conclusion-The contest between frames both shapes and becomes shaped by the ideological shift in the Turkish state polity. However, this macro-level change yielded in the Turkish agricultural-cooperative field an open forum where opposing discourses challenge for the settlement of expedient cooperatives.

Technology Analysis & Strategic Management

Expert Systems with Applications

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2017

The study aims to unravel the emergence of Turkish cooperatives as a distinct organizational form... more The study aims to unravel the emergence of Turkish cooperatives as a distinct organizational form during the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican period by adopting a constitutive approach. Building further on the frameworks of agentic capacities and institutional work, the study intends to represent two powerful but distinct actors’ role in formulating, defining and legitimating cooperatives as novel organizational forms. To this end, a historical narrative is constituted composed of two consecutive time brackets after a systematic bibliometric search and hermeneutical analytic procedure. The narrative suggests that both entrepreneurs, namely Mithat Pasha and Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Ataturk), displayed characteristics of autonomous reflexives, enabling them to question existing institutional templates and be creative in finding novel solutions. Furthermore, both entrepreneurs engaged in a number of institutional works like defining, bricolage, educating and valorizing, to establish cooperatives as disti...

Intelligent and Fuzzy Techniques for Emerging Conditions and Digital Transformation, 2021

The business model (BM) provides a strategic tool to achieve goals for the companies. In recent y... more The business model (BM) provides a strategic tool to achieve goals for the companies. In recent years, it has been used frequently both in business areas and in literature. BM comprises three main blocks that are activity, value, and finance. For non-profit organizations, the criterion of impact is added to the model to express social and environmental issues. In this study, Spherical Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (SF-AHP) is applied to evaluate the public transportation business model taking into account internal and external perspectives with political, economical, social, technological, legal, and environmental analysis (P.E.S.T.L.E), and also impact factor. The proposed model is developed by three levels with criteria and sub-criteria according to the literature and evaluated by national and international transportation experts. Results show that the internal environment is more important with 0.605 weight than the external one in the first stage. For the second stage, activi...

Yönetim ve Organizasyon Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2019

One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolv... more One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolve around as to whether organizational theory and history can be reconciled in such a way that one does not prevail over the other. Although recent suggestions display a potential to guide business history scholars, further elaboration on the relationship between history and organization theory is required due to the increasing expectations for theoretical contribution by toptier journals. In this study, we try to reveal the potential contributions of the hermeneutical research method to the above-mentioned debate by unfolding the ontological, epistemological, and methodological similarities between history as a distinct discipline and hermeneutical philosophy. Moreover, with the aim of contributing to the relevant literature, our study lays out the issues that need special consideration while applying the hermeneutical method in business history research.

Yönetim ve Organizasyon Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2019

One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolv... more One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolve around as to whether organizational theory and history can be reconciled in such a way that one does not prevail over the other. Although recent suggestions display a potential to guide business history scholars, further elaboration on the relationship between history and organization theory is required due to the increasing expectations for theoretical contribution by toptier journals. In this study, we try to reveal the potential contributions of the hermeneutical research method to the above-mentioned debate by unfolding the ontological, epistemological, and methodological similarities between history as a distinct discipline and hermeneutical philosophy. Moreover, with the aim of contributing to the relevant literature, our study lays out the issues that need special consideration while applying the hermeneutical method in business history research.

Sustainability, 2021

Building on the debate about global convergence or divergence of practices, this study aims to qu... more Building on the debate about global convergence or divergence of practices, this study aims to query the viability of a new strategic action tool specifically geared to the interests of public bus transportation authorities (PBTA) around the globe and explore the degree of homogeneity in their responses as well as the possible drivers of them. To answer its research question, the study first offers a generic business model design for a PBTA, which integrates an extended version of the business model canvas with external environmental factors in order to enhance its sustainability. Subsequently, the importance attributions of international transportation experts to different model components are evaluated by using the Spherical Fuzzy AHP method. The model is developed in three hierarchical layers and evaluated by experts from four continents: America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The results indicate that the expert opinions tend to converge more on the internal components of the mod...

Research Anthology on Small Business Strategies for Success and Survival, 2021

This study attempts to analyze the dynamic impact of the entrepreneurial network at early stages ... more This study attempts to analyze the dynamic impact of the entrepreneurial network at early stages of high technology start-ups, namely conception, gestation and infancy phases, located at a university based incubator. Empirical results show that, in different stages of a new enterprise, the use of formal or informal components of entrepreneurial network imposes distinctive impacts on performance of the start-ups. Prior ties that helped start-ups to acquire critical resources and capabilities proved to be dysfunctional in the latter stages. Conversely, weak or insignificant ties that were created in earlier periods provided start-ups with critical resources or capabilities for growth and survival. Consequently, results revealed that the formal efforts of incubator to facilitate such networks, such as mentoring activities, organized events and provision of access to local and international organizations, positively influenced start-up survival and growth.

Business History, 2020

This study demonstrates the emergence, subsequent diffusion, and early demise of Ottoman agricult... more This study demonstrates the emergence, subsequent diffusion, and early demise of Ottoman agricultural credit cooperatives, called Memleket Sandiks (OMSs), as they represent unique hybrid forms that blend state, community, and market logics in a single organizational configuration. The study narrates how changes in the Ottoman Empire's institutional order during the Tanzimat era enabled conditions that led to the emergence of OMSs. Subsequently, the practices of the form transformed, especially after the Russian-Ottoman War, concomitant with further changes in Ottoman society's institutional order. Although OMSs initially enjoyed legitimacy granted by the Ottoman State, the shift towards dominating state logic in the Hamidian era led to the erosion of practices animated by market and community logics. The form was discontinued as the increasingly autocratic state levied taxes and preyed upon the accumulated surplus, which disabled agglomerative capacity of sandiks and diminished the solidarity among cooperative members.

European Journal of Innovation Management, 2019

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) a... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) and innovation decisions at the firm level by offering sequentially ordered sense-making mechanisms that enable the formation of firm-specific knowledge repositories and knowledge-processing capabilities. Design/methodology/approach This study engages in an extensive scale development effort to collect representative data about the NBS in the Pakistani setting, complemented by relevant validity and reliability tests. The overall theoretical model was tested on 214 firms by means of a structural equation modeling approach, using partial least-squares algorithms. Findings The results statistically supported the role of firm-level knowledge repositories (intellectual capital) and knowledge exploration and exploitation capabilities (absorptive capacity) as sequential mediators in the association of NBS and firm-level innovation. Besides, bridging networks of lateral ties among Pakistani busin...

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2019

The emergence of cooperatives as distinct economic forms has been associated with either social m... more The emergence of cooperatives as distinct economic forms has been associated with either social movements or with entrepreneurial works of local elites. The aim of this study is to unveil how coope...

Journal of Business Economics and Management, 2014

This study aims to explain how globally circulating management innovations are adopted by the fir... more This study aims to explain how globally circulating management innovations are adopted by the firms operating in less advanced settings based on an integrative framework. The framework incorporates certain characteristics of national business systems, particular inter-organizational ties developed with transnational or local carriers, and the potential absorptive capacity of the local organizations. By this way, it includes the effects of temporal interactions between different adoption decisions. The components of the framework are operationalized and tested within the Turkish setting by using the adoption data of three different management innovations: TQM, six sigma and lean production. The data is collected from a sample of 375 large-sized firms using a telephone-based interview protocol. While the findings provide satisfactory support for the framework as a whole, they also call attention to the relative differences in the explanatory power of each factor in accounting for the ...

In the course of last 20 years, with, the information revolution, sustained global economic reces... more In the course of last 20 years, with, the information revolution, sustained global economic recession, repeated global crises and corporate scandals, rapid changes have occurred in relations and factors of production. Major advancements in technology as well as intensifying corporate greed disrupted ethical climate of work, making social structure and normative nature of human collectives fundamentally weaker. In this paper, we argue that normative means of control are becoming less and less prevalent today, and organizations are becoming socially disabled and coercively controlled places. Everyday work and workplaces themselves have never been monolithic. However, this trend may lead to a new and extremely heterogeneous workplace where all employee bonds are broken, leading to very low levels of commitment and very high levels of turnover intention, threatening the existence and the survival of organizations. Can an organization still show some performance in the marketplace, or ev...

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014

ABSTRACT Vatandaş kuruluş kavramı, toplumsal açıdan değişen değer ve standartların bir sonucu ola... more ABSTRACT Vatandaş kuruluş kavramı, toplumsal açıdan değişen değer ve standartların bir sonucu olarak kuruluşların topluma karşı olan sorumluluklarını gösterebilmek amacıyla, 1990’ların başından itibaren işletme yönetimi alanında yeni bir düşünce olarak kullanılmaya başlandı Kuruluşlar, kendilerine bağlı kişilerin ahlaki seviyelerine paralel olarak farklı ahlaki seviyeler gösterdiklerinden ve toplum için farklı tipte vatandaş örneği olabileceklerinden, bu alanda ampirik incelemeler yapma gereksinimi bulunmaktadır. Bu gereksinimin bir sonucu olarak ortaya çıkan bu araştırmada Turkiye’de faaliyet gösteren işletmelerin vatandaş kuruluş olma davranışları sorgulanarak, vatandaş kuruluş davranışlarını etkileyen insan kaynağına yönelik örgütsel kültür değerleri incelenmekte ve vatandaş kuruluş davranışlarının “davranışsal performans” olarak adlandırılan “örgütsel bağlılık” ve “çalışan memnuniyeti” seviyelerini ne yönde ve nasıl etkilediği saptanmaya çalışılmaktadır.

Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics

This study aims to extend the cooperative lifecycle theory, which builds on consecutive degenerat... more This study aims to extend the cooperative lifecycle theory, which builds on consecutive degeneration and regeneration of ideal cooperative values such as democracy, self‐help, and solidarity by offering a new regenerative mechanism. In this respect, the study imports multilevel imprinting theory from the organizational ecology domain to explicate the punctuated evolutionary pattern of Turkish agricultural credit cooperatives, which displayed significantly different characteristics from Raiffeisen cooperatives that cooperative discourse in Türkiye used for a long as a benchmark. The archival research undertaken in the study asserts that the imprints of Ottoman Memleket Sandiks (OMS) have stamped agricultural credit cooperatives of the Republican era long after their erosion. The resurrection of imprints was enabled by Ziraat Bank, which acted as an intermediary organization and took over the remnants of OMSs. Our analyses also suggest that the State's polity and policy transforma...

Pressacademia, Mar 30, 2020

Purpose-This study aims to solve a historical puzzle in Turkish cooperative history and illuminat... more Purpose-This study aims to solve a historical puzzle in Turkish cooperative history and illuminate the failure of a discursive medium, the journal of Türk Kooperatifçisi, to realize its ambitious goals of disseminating liberal ideas into the field of agricultural cooperatives. Given the strong state influence on Turkish cooperatives for over a century, this article strives to articulate when and how the anti-etatist cooperative discourse experienced an absolute defeat in the face of state hegemony. Methodology-This historical case study carries out hermeneutical discourse analysis on the archival data collected from the National Library of Turkey. Drawing on the first Turkish cooperative periodical, namely the Türk Kooperatifçisi, the researchers have read 214 articles, amounting to 966 pages. After a systematic interpretation of the collected data, the researchers have further situated archival evidence onto a plot and accordingly constructed a historical narrative, thereby illuminating the underlying reasons for the short life span (1930-1933) of a liberal cooperative periodical in early Republican Turkey. Findings-The findings of this study suggest that towards the end of the 1920s, the sharp turn in the economic policy of Turkey triggered a series of events, leading the agricultural cooperatives to become state apparatuses. Correspondingly, the liberal frame regressed in the face of the etatist frame and became defeated in the discursive arena. Conclusion-The contest between frames both shapes and becomes shaped by the ideological shift in the Turkish state polity. However, this macro-level change yielded in the Turkish agricultural-cooperative field an open forum where opposing discourses challenge for the settlement of expedient cooperatives.

Technology Analysis & Strategic Management

Expert Systems with Applications

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2017

The study aims to unravel the emergence of Turkish cooperatives as a distinct organizational form... more The study aims to unravel the emergence of Turkish cooperatives as a distinct organizational form during the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican period by adopting a constitutive approach. Building further on the frameworks of agentic capacities and institutional work, the study intends to represent two powerful but distinct actors’ role in formulating, defining and legitimating cooperatives as novel organizational forms. To this end, a historical narrative is constituted composed of two consecutive time brackets after a systematic bibliometric search and hermeneutical analytic procedure. The narrative suggests that both entrepreneurs, namely Mithat Pasha and Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Ataturk), displayed characteristics of autonomous reflexives, enabling them to question existing institutional templates and be creative in finding novel solutions. Furthermore, both entrepreneurs engaged in a number of institutional works like defining, bricolage, educating and valorizing, to establish cooperatives as disti...

Intelligent and Fuzzy Techniques for Emerging Conditions and Digital Transformation, 2021

The business model (BM) provides a strategic tool to achieve goals for the companies. In recent y... more The business model (BM) provides a strategic tool to achieve goals for the companies. In recent years, it has been used frequently both in business areas and in literature. BM comprises three main blocks that are activity, value, and finance. For non-profit organizations, the criterion of impact is added to the model to express social and environmental issues. In this study, Spherical Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (SF-AHP) is applied to evaluate the public transportation business model taking into account internal and external perspectives with political, economical, social, technological, legal, and environmental analysis (P.E.S.T.L.E), and also impact factor. The proposed model is developed by three levels with criteria and sub-criteria according to the literature and evaluated by national and international transportation experts. Results show that the internal environment is more important with 0.605 weight than the external one in the first stage. For the second stage, activi...

Yönetim ve Organizasyon Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2019

One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolv... more One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolve around as to whether organizational theory and history can be reconciled in such a way that one does not prevail over the other. Although recent suggestions display a potential to guide business history scholars, further elaboration on the relationship between history and organization theory is required due to the increasing expectations for theoretical contribution by toptier journals. In this study, we try to reveal the potential contributions of the hermeneutical research method to the above-mentioned debate by unfolding the ontological, epistemological, and methodological similarities between history as a distinct discipline and hermeneutical philosophy. Moreover, with the aim of contributing to the relevant literature, our study lays out the issues that need special consideration while applying the hermeneutical method in business history research.

Yönetim ve Organizasyon Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2019

One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolv... more One of the hottest debates in the past two decades in the business history domain seems to revolve around as to whether organizational theory and history can be reconciled in such a way that one does not prevail over the other. Although recent suggestions display a potential to guide business history scholars, further elaboration on the relationship between history and organization theory is required due to the increasing expectations for theoretical contribution by toptier journals. In this study, we try to reveal the potential contributions of the hermeneutical research method to the above-mentioned debate by unfolding the ontological, epistemological, and methodological similarities between history as a distinct discipline and hermeneutical philosophy. Moreover, with the aim of contributing to the relevant literature, our study lays out the issues that need special consideration while applying the hermeneutical method in business history research.

Sustainability, 2021

Building on the debate about global convergence or divergence of practices, this study aims to qu... more Building on the debate about global convergence or divergence of practices, this study aims to query the viability of a new strategic action tool specifically geared to the interests of public bus transportation authorities (PBTA) around the globe and explore the degree of homogeneity in their responses as well as the possible drivers of them. To answer its research question, the study first offers a generic business model design for a PBTA, which integrates an extended version of the business model canvas with external environmental factors in order to enhance its sustainability. Subsequently, the importance attributions of international transportation experts to different model components are evaluated by using the Spherical Fuzzy AHP method. The model is developed in three hierarchical layers and evaluated by experts from four continents: America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The results indicate that the expert opinions tend to converge more on the internal components of the mod...

Research Anthology on Small Business Strategies for Success and Survival, 2021

This study attempts to analyze the dynamic impact of the entrepreneurial network at early stages ... more This study attempts to analyze the dynamic impact of the entrepreneurial network at early stages of high technology start-ups, namely conception, gestation and infancy phases, located at a university based incubator. Empirical results show that, in different stages of a new enterprise, the use of formal or informal components of entrepreneurial network imposes distinctive impacts on performance of the start-ups. Prior ties that helped start-ups to acquire critical resources and capabilities proved to be dysfunctional in the latter stages. Conversely, weak or insignificant ties that were created in earlier periods provided start-ups with critical resources or capabilities for growth and survival. Consequently, results revealed that the formal efforts of incubator to facilitate such networks, such as mentoring activities, organized events and provision of access to local and international organizations, positively influenced start-up survival and growth.

Business History, 2020

This study demonstrates the emergence, subsequent diffusion, and early demise of Ottoman agricult... more This study demonstrates the emergence, subsequent diffusion, and early demise of Ottoman agricultural credit cooperatives, called Memleket Sandiks (OMSs), as they represent unique hybrid forms that blend state, community, and market logics in a single organizational configuration. The study narrates how changes in the Ottoman Empire's institutional order during the Tanzimat era enabled conditions that led to the emergence of OMSs. Subsequently, the practices of the form transformed, especially after the Russian-Ottoman War, concomitant with further changes in Ottoman society's institutional order. Although OMSs initially enjoyed legitimacy granted by the Ottoman State, the shift towards dominating state logic in the Hamidian era led to the erosion of practices animated by market and community logics. The form was discontinued as the increasingly autocratic state levied taxes and preyed upon the accumulated surplus, which disabled agglomerative capacity of sandiks and diminished the solidarity among cooperative members.

European Journal of Innovation Management, 2019

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) a... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) and innovation decisions at the firm level by offering sequentially ordered sense-making mechanisms that enable the formation of firm-specific knowledge repositories and knowledge-processing capabilities. Design/methodology/approach This study engages in an extensive scale development effort to collect representative data about the NBS in the Pakistani setting, complemented by relevant validity and reliability tests. The overall theoretical model was tested on 214 firms by means of a structural equation modeling approach, using partial least-squares algorithms. Findings The results statistically supported the role of firm-level knowledge repositories (intellectual capital) and knowledge exploration and exploitation capabilities (absorptive capacity) as sequential mediators in the association of NBS and firm-level innovation. Besides, bridging networks of lateral ties among Pakistani busin...

Academy of Management Proceedings, 2019

The emergence of cooperatives as distinct economic forms has been associated with either social m... more The emergence of cooperatives as distinct economic forms has been associated with either social movements or with entrepreneurial works of local elites. The aim of this study is to unveil how coope...

Journal of Business Economics and Management, 2014

This study aims to explain how globally circulating management innovations are adopted by the fir... more This study aims to explain how globally circulating management innovations are adopted by the firms operating in less advanced settings based on an integrative framework. The framework incorporates certain characteristics of national business systems, particular inter-organizational ties developed with transnational or local carriers, and the potential absorptive capacity of the local organizations. By this way, it includes the effects of temporal interactions between different adoption decisions. The components of the framework are operationalized and tested within the Turkish setting by using the adoption data of three different management innovations: TQM, six sigma and lean production. The data is collected from a sample of 375 large-sized firms using a telephone-based interview protocol. While the findings provide satisfactory support for the framework as a whole, they also call attention to the relative differences in the explanatory power of each factor in accounting for the ...