On the other hand, if the knowledge is largely codifiable and embodied in the firm itself, then external flexibility may be less costly without being any less efficient, at least in the short run.

(Many, for instance, will believe the cluster of concepts dealing with interference, agency, and consent form such an internally codifiable system, however messily it might interface with other moral considerations.) I myself think it motley all the way down; but again, this is only an issue of how widely the particularist wants to cast her net.

I believe that our society generally should attempt to reach a legally codifiable consensus on the essentially biological issue of defining death but leave to personal preference and individual freedom the private and value-laden decision of when life-sustaining treatment may be withdrawn.

Conversely, when a process is more easily codifiable, the contractual agreement with a local offshore provider is confirmed as the preferred mode of governance.

When asked about the standards related to concrete practices, they suggested that there was some room for standards but that for the most part their practices were not easily codifiable in the same manner as audit procedures.

The balance of tacit knowledge and analysis relying on codifiable data can be viewed as a continuum - from the totally intuitive to the totally analytic - embodying each decision (Simon, 1987).

Bell (1979: 26) defined "knowledge" as "[an] organized set of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or experimental result, that is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form." Classifying knowledge in terms of whether it is explicit or tacit, on the one hand, and whether it is located in a particular social system or in an individual, on the other hand, Spender (1993) identified four types of knowledge: (a) scientific knowledge, which is universally verifiable; (b) communal knowledge, which is taken for granted, tacit and is specific to a particular social system; (c) conscious knowledge, which is person specific, codifiable and verifiable; and (d) automatic knowledge, which is noncodifiable, taken for granted, and person specific.

One question could be to verify if these firms seek different types of targets for explicit knowledge which is codifiable (or explainable), as opposed to implicit knowledge which is tacit and non-codifiable.

Explicitness was measured as a two item construct asking the respondents on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree) if the innovation technology/process know-how was easily codifiable (in blueprints, instructions formulas etc.), and if the innovation technology/process know-how was more explicit (i.e.

Two items were used for "Innovation explicitness" and measured on a 7-point scale: i) the innovation technology/process know-how is more explicit than tacit, ii) the innovation technology/process know-how is easily codifiable. An average of the items created the variable (Cronbach's alpha = 0.66).

In particular, technological knowledge which is teachable but not codifiable (Kogut and Zander 1993) could be effectively appropriated through a jointly owned arrangement, since this provides the opportunity to work alongside a local firm's employees in a common organizational framework.

Leamer and Storper (2001) examine the relationship between linguistic distance and inter-partner trust in terms of codifiable and uncodifiable information.

One distinction that is linked to different types of international HR channels is between "codifiable" and "tacit" knowledge (Adenfelt and Lagerstrom 2006; Kogut and Zander 2003; Minbaeva 2007).

The first type is the organization's ability or technical expertise (i.e., codifiable knowledge), which can be separated from the organization.

Resources that are relatively simple and codifiable transfer most easily.