Advances in Strategic Management – serie

This volume is part of a series which seeks to act as a vehicle for the communication of research in strategic management. It contains papers presenting theoretical and/or empirical analysis of strategic problems, comparative and analytical case studies of issues and application of concepts.

The emphasis in this work is on memory in organizations, organizational improvisation, strategies of learning, the nuances of learning and integrating strategy and organizational learning. The volume includes a chapter on social learning and transaction cost economics.

During the past two decades, students of strategy have promiscuously borrowed ideas from the disciplines of economics, sociology, and psychology. The result has been an abundance of models ranging from the structure-conduct-performance model to evolutionary economics, from ecological models of strategy to network models of strategy, and cognitive perspectives on strategy to learning models of strategy. The contributions to Volume 15 are organized into five themes: Economics, Institutions, Networks, Technology, and Computation. Together, the contributions show how contemporary strategic management research draws upon root disciplines by interconnecting disciplines or fields within a particular discipline, or by focusing tightly on a particular subfield. All three approaches are essential to a vibrant strategic management - close attention to developments within subfields comprising root disciplines and integration of these developments within strategic management scholarship are essential. Without the former, strategic management risks antiquation; without the latter it risks disintegration. Volume 15 inspires strategy researchers to be rigorous in both disciplinary grounding and integration as well as wary of new ideas speeding their way into the core of study.

Any system for giving good advice has to maintain a tension between telling the truth and not being heard, on the one hand, and telling what can be heard but is not true, on the other. In such a system, the role of academic researchers is not so much to give advice as it is to generate knowledge and to provide critical commentary on advice that is given. Along the way, an academic tries to counteract the natural tendency of advice givers to become more attentive to the hearing of their clients than to the knowledge underlying what they say. This book is in that tradition. It honors the noble tradition of giving advice on strategic management and organizational learning by exploring some elements of fundamental knowledge that might inform such advice.

The last several years has witnessed a growing interaction between economists and sociologists engaged in the study of organizations' strategies. Economists and sociologists can gain real insight from these interactions. To date, however, these interactions have been to ad hoc and unfocused to bear any real fruit. This volume moves the discussion to the next level by focusing the discussion, and taking a step toward systematizing some of the relationships between economic and sociological approaches to strategic management. To accomplish this, the volume reprints four 'matched pairs' of influential articles on firms' strategies in economic sociology and strategic management and use these articles to frame a conversation between the articles' pioneering authors and other prominent researchers in strategic management and sociology working on closely-related research problems. Each pair of articles followed by provocative essays - inspired by the pairing - written by the articles' original authors. Two contextualizing commentaries penned by influential strategy and organizations researchers - one grounded in strategic management and one in economic sociology - extend each conversation. A reflective reply from the articles' authors concludes the conversation - for now. A framing introduction and concluding epilogue, written by volume editors Joel Baum and Frank Dobbin, set the stage both for the volume and for future conversations between the disciplines in strategic management.

The last several years has witnessed a growing interaction between economists and sociologists engaged in the study of organizations' strategies. Economists and sociologists can gain real insight from these interactions. To date, however, these interactions have been to ad hoc and unfocused to bear any real fruit. This volume moves the discussion to the next level by focusing the discussion, and taking a step toward systematizing some of the relationships between economic and sociological approaches to strategic management. To accomplish this, the volume reprints four 'matched pairs' of influential articles on firms' strategies in economic sociology and strategic management and use these articles to frame a conversation between the articles' pioneering authors and other prominent researchers in strategic management and sociology working on closely-related research problems. Each pair of articles followed by provocative essays - inspired by the pairing - written by the articles' original authors. Two contextualizing commentaries penned by influential strategy and organizations researchers - one grounded in strategic management and one in economic sociology - extend each conversation. A reflective reply from the articles' authors concludes the conversation - for now. A framing introduction and concluding epilogue, written by volume editors Joel Baum and Frank Dobbin, set the stage both for the volume and for future conversations between the disciplines in strategic management.

A conspicuous feature of the modern economy is the multitude of multiunit systems that operate in several markets - an organizational form that arguably rivals the "M-form" as the 20th century's most successful. Research traditions studying multiunit systems include the multimarket perspective, which has used commitment and mutual forbearance theory, and the multiunit perspective, which has used learning and knowledge transfer theory. These perspectives are interdisciplinary, but to date there has been little direct interaction among them. This text aims to bring these areas together, discussing such things as: examining how variation in firm capabilities affects the co-ordination of branches and thus their forbearance or transfer of routines; bridging theories of market conduct and internal behaviour to explore how knowledge about markets and competitor behaviour is transferred among organizational units; making a theory of contingent multiunit or single-unit competitive advantage that can account for the coexistence of these organizational forms in many markets; and examining the effects of firm contacts in alliances or technological fields on their competitive behaviours.

These papers explore the contemporary strategic management field. They examine how firms behave, why they are different, what limits their scope and what determines success and failure in international competition.

As we move into the 21st century, the world seems a smaller place - transportation costs continue to fall, fiber optic networks speed information around the planet, and corporations operate on a global scale. One might reasonably ask whether location really matters anymore. Despite these trends - perhaps because of them - the last few years have witnessed a rapid rise in interest in "place" and "space" across the social sciences. While the importance of distance declines, strategic interest in location appears greater than ever. This volume draws together researchers from a variety of disciplines - economics, geography, marketing, organizational behavior, sociology, and urban planning - working at the forefront of this wave to explore some of the important ways in which location matters for firms in the 21st century.

The field of Strategic Management has explored a range of new questions regarding technical change, firm capabilities, and executive decision-making, producing insights into the development of firms and unfolding of competition over time. These insights point to the importance of industry context and technical change, but little research deals systematically with the interaction between such contingencies and strategic choice. This volume explores the relationship between business strategy and the industry lifecycle competitive interaction. The contributors to this volume ask, "What kinds of firm capabilities are required to compete effectively in the various stages of the industry lifecycle?". Rather than focusing on generalized principles of interaction, they ask, "How do firms build these capabilities, and where to they come from?". Their answers expand our understanding of the relationships between industry evolution, technical change, and business strategy, as well as industry life cycle itself.

Enduring scholarly interest in the process of strategy making stems from an abiding assumption that some ways of strategizing are more efficacious than others, and thus lead to higher firm performance in the long run; higher than luck alone would bring. Expressions of interest in and endorsements of the strategy process are abundant in the academic literature. For senior managers and leaders, the question of how to make effective strategies stands usually at the top of their agenda. Not surprisingly then, the quest to uncover stable principles of good strategy making has attracted much support and interest over the years. Researchers who responded to the strategy process challenge have known many moments of exhilaration and disillusion. Scholarly insights took long to accumulate, perhaps too long to serve as the sole basis for helping the eager practitioner in search of simpler but applicable advice. As a result, a significant and often highly visible part of the field is characterized by a controversial normative orientation. But beneath this dramatic and unstable facade lies a gradual, patient, and seemingly more stable, hard-at-work, academic enterprise. Scholarly strategy process research apparently goes on, perhaps more than ever, suggesting that there is something fundamental and deeply interesting and profound about how strategies are made, where they originate in organizations, and how the process of strategy making impacts the performance of organizations. This volume is the culmination of our three year effort to explore and uncover this relatively hidden or at least less visible side of the strategy process field. Taken together, the sixteen chapters represent current scholarly strategy process research.

Volume 23 of the "Advances in Strategic Management" series focuses on ecology and strategy, providing an excellent point of reference for scholars, students and practitioners of business. The nine-part volume addresses diverse fields such as the U.S. motion picture, British motorcycle, and optical disk drive industries. The authors included represent institutions of higher learning from around the world, giving this latest edition international appeal. There is international representation. It addresses the human ecology of organizations, the relationship between the employee and the company. It includes papers regarding the US Motion Picture, British Motorcycle, and Optical Disk Drive industries.

Real options theory has attracted significant interest in the field of strategic management. Advocates of the approach emphasize that importing concepts from financial economics holds out the potential of yielding new insights on strategic decision-making under uncertainty as well as boundary-of-the-firm issues that are the focus of competitive and corporate strategy. While considerable progress has been made in conceptualizing different types of real options for various strategic investments, considerably less has been done to empirically validate the core propositions of real options theory. As a result there is much debate about the merits and promise of real options in strategy.In light of the recent interest in real options as well as these trends in the field, this volume examines the ways in which real options theory can contribute to strategic management. This volume offers conceptual pieces that trace out pathways for the theory to move forward and presents new research on the implications of real options for strategic investment, organization, and firm performance. The compendium synthesizes and critiques the research on real options as well as offers a catalyst for further research on this theory in the strategy field. It seeks to examine the ways in which real options theory can contribute to strategic management. It includes conceptual pieces that unearth some of the key stumbling blocks and trace out pathways for real options theory to move forward. It presents theoretical and empirical analyses of real options in different strategic contexts.

Research at the intersection of social networks and strategic management identifies a range of performance-enhancing network position advantages - access to partners, information, innovation, and resources - that are distributed differentially across network positions. While research indicates how network positions can be used to advantage, it says little about how these positions are established, sustained, and destroyed, and so we know little about the role of actors' strategic goals and self-interests in shaping network structures."Volume 25 of Advances in Strategic Management" aims to inspire a shift from discussions of network effects to network processes. Each chapter contributes to the crafting of a more dynamic view that increases our understanding of the origins, evolution and decay of network structures, positions and their associated advantages.

This volume is designed to renew, stimulate and facilitate discussion about project-based organizations (PBOs) and how they increasingly pervade business dimensions, from R&D and new product development, to the production of complex capital goods and implementation of organizational change across very different industries such as management consulting, engineering or entertainment. Contributors analyze PBOs as firms, units or networks of firms set up to complete a specific assignment, as well as address the evolution from traditional operations-driven project management, to the strategic role of projects in delivering innovation and organizational change, and the implications for research and teaching. The volume brings together scholars with a diverse theoretical background and using a wealth of methodological approaches in studying PBOs. It focuses on theoretical frameworks for understanding PBOs through different lenses, looks at learning at the individual, team and organizational levels in temporary organizational structures, investigates current issues related to projects and networks, and identifies new areas for future research.

Business historians and economic historians frequently contribute to our understanding of strategic management, and strategy scholars often rely on a deep understanding of historical context to make sense of classic strategy issues. Historically, the two sets of scholars have not always communicated with each other as effectively as one might hope. They also have different approaches to methodology and assessment of validity of results, which adds to this 'two solitudes'. In this volume, strategy scholars, business historians, and economic historians are brought together to develop a volume that explores the complementarities of approaches.

The research featured in this volume is devoted to understanding the competitive and collaborative challenges that firms face as they manage interactions with different actors in dynamic environments, in what are coming to be referred to as business or innovation 'ecosystems'. Rapid technological change, globalization, and recent financial turbulence have brought us to a point where managers are painfully aware that 'no man [or firm] is an island.' Success in business, in both the profit and non-profit sectors, increasingly relies upon collaboration with upstream suppliers, alliance partners, and downstream complementors. This volume presents new findings of how innovation and value are created in collaborative networks, specifically 'ecosystem analysis' and the unique roles of individual actors within this system

Strategy and finance are closely interrelated in the practice of management. With the increased informational demands resulting from regulatory changes such as Sarbanes Oxley and Regulation Fair Disclosure, the boundary between the roles of CEO and CFO has become blurred. Moreover, the global financial crisis has made the interdependence between corporate financial policies and firms' strategies painfully salient. In academic research however, the two fields have by and large developed independently of each other. Advances in Strategic Management 31 (Finance and Strategy) fills this gap with rigorous research papers that bridge the strategy and finance fields by building on them. It encompasses a range of combinations among the two main subdivisions of strategy research - corporate strategy and business (competitive) strategy - and the two main subdivisions of finance research - corporate finance and capital markets. It includes theoretical and empirical contributions, and spans different underlying disciplines and research methodologies, consistent with the variety that exists amongst these two fields.

The "cognitive foundations" of strategy have received increased attention in recent years. The last decade has witnessed a dramatic rise in empirical studies that seek to document the role of cognition in strategic outcomes, and in theoretical work that seeks to systematize this relationship. Drawing on psychological foundations in general, and on cognitive representation, framing, and categories in particular, this research has made significant progress, yet remains in a pre-paradigmatic phase where polysemy and terminological variety are still the norm.This volume has two goals. First, it intends to attract a representative sample of the most significant empirical and theoretical developments in the field of cognition and strategy. Second, it intends to take stock of these developments by proposing a preliminary synthesis of the disparate advances in this field.

In this volume, leading scholars from North America, Europe, and Asia come together to explore new dimensions of the business models topic paying particular attention to the modelling dimension - what this means, how modelling should be approached, how business models are manipulated, how they become iconic, and why they are embedded in heuristics. These ideas are a new departure for the literature that allows more solid theorizing about the role of business models in conceptions of strategy and strategizing. It also allows the demand side perspective (customers and their engagement) to become clearer, so linking academic writing more clearly to events in the digital economy. Our volume also examines business models and change. It explores how the business model perspective increases our understanding of micro and macro change processes - in particular, the critical question of how to achieve scale and scope, and the difference between social and other business models, how business models vary over the industry cycle and how different levels of management contribute to business model innovation.

Strategy Beyond Markets examines how the strategies employed by firms affect long run value. Scholars in this field focus their attention on firm interactions with entities other than the firm's primary market stakeholders. These stakeholders include international NGOs, environmental groups, local communities, regulators, politicians and the courts. This book is organized around three themes: Public politics, private politics, and integrated political strategy. In public politics, firms use sophisticated instruments (e.g., campaign funding, committee participation) to influence local, national, and international political environments. In private politics, firms work closely with NGOs and other special interest groups to preempt unfavorable policy, react swiftly to crises, and proactively develop socially responsible strategies. Additionally, firms that are heavily influenced by politics are more likely to craft integrated political strategy as part of a more comprehensive plan. This special issue comprises papers from preeminent scholars including David Baron, Jean-Philippe Bonardi, Daniel Diermeier, Thomas Lyon, John Maxwell, Ken Shotts, and Dennis Yao.

It has been long understood that value creation by corporate strategists is determined by their ability to effectively deploy resources across multiple business units. Recently, scholarly attention has been dominated by studies of "synergy", or sharing resources across businesses. However, a second type of resource deployment, "resource redeployability" or "resource configuration", where resources are withdrawn from one business unit and reallocated to another may not only effect firm value creation, but also firm and industry evolution.This volume advances the resource deployment and synergy debate, and how they differentially affect value and firm decision-making. It clarifies the theoretical determinants and effects of each, revisiting prior work that investigates the benefits of synergy-based strategy, and assessing the benefits of an increased focus on redeployability.

Changes in both technology and global political economy have vastly accelerated the pace of globalization in the last 40 years, eroding barriers that limited firms’ geographic scope, and unleashing a seemingly unlimited set of new threats, challenges, and opportunities to create value globally. Globalization presents managers with an environment to create value that is more complex, risky, and also more promising than ever before. Despite recent advances in our understanding of how locations impact the creation and appropriation of value by firms, the speed of these changes has often surpassed the speed of research on the connections between geography and firms. This volume draws together researchers working at the forefront of this area in a variety of disciplines—economics, geography, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and strategy—in order to explore the many ways that locations matter for firms. In 11 varied papers, the authors draw on newly available data, recently developed theory, and diverse methodology to understand the relationships between firm boundaries, firm activities, and geographic borders.

Technology-based industries have come to account for ever-greater shares of economic activity during the last 30 years. Recently, rapid, digitally-enabled technological change has generated new opportunities for value creation, enabled new ways of capturing value, and stimulated the emergence of new organizational forms such as platforms and ecosystems. Together with the development of supporting institutions, including incubators, accelerators, and increasingly creative ways of funding new ventures, this has led to an explosion of interest in entrepreneurial activity across industries and sectors.  Scholars, policymakers and practitioners recognize the importance of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for competitive advantage, comparative advantage, and society’s economic well-being. There is tremendous academic and practical interest not only in how new ventures assemble resources necessary to deliver value, but also on how incumbent organizations may adapt to harness technological innovation, and on how industries evolve in the face of this pervasive technological change.  Despite recent advances in our understanding of how innovation and entrepreneurship impact the creation and appropriation of value, numerous questions remain unanswered. This volume draws together scholars working at the forefront of entrepreneurship-, strategy-, and innovation-related domains to explore these questions. The volume makes particular contributions to the entrepreneurship, innovation, and platform literatures.

Scholarly interest in the areas of sustainability, stakeholder relations and corporate social responsibility (CSR) has increased considerably in recent years. In this volume, we take a step back to consider the fundamental questions that underlie and tie research across these areas together. The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical perspectives grounded in strategy, economics and sociology, employ various methodological approaches, and offer new arguments on the connections that exist between firms’ decisions relating to sustainability, CSR, and the governance of their stakeholder relations. The chapters in this volume highlight that business decisions relating to sustainability and CSR are ultimately decisions about the governance of stakeholder relations, and suggest that future work in these areas should consider more closely both the firms and their stakeholders as strategic actors driving firm decisions.

This volume of Advances in Strategic Management explores emerging trends and contemporary research in the field of organization design. It reflects a renewed focus on the universal problems of organizing—the division of labor and the integration of effort. At the same time, it incorporates new ideas on designs for cooperation in organizations.The studies published here employ a wide variety of theories and research designs to contribute to this renewal of organization design research, considering collaborative ways of working, organizational learning, and strategic innovation.

Behavioral strategy has evolved as a field the last decades both intellectually and institutionally. This volume brings together scholars from several generations that have led anddefined the behavioral approaches in strategy to reflect on the past, present,and future of behavioral strategy. Thus, rather than seeking empiricalcontributions that would fill in research gaps and expand research in specificdomains, we endeavored to: a) represent the diversity of perspectives thatinform behavioral research in strategic management; b) open up a space forreflection and provocation by scholars who are widely recognized as thoughtleaders both in their respective strands of behavioral strategy research, andin the field as a whole; and c) offer a set of perspectives and directions forthe field of behavioral strategy at a pivotal moment in its evolution.

Tzabbar and Cirillo bring together an interdisciplinary team of experts to develop new theoretical and empirical directions to the study of employee mobility.Employee mobility has significant implications for the ability of organizations to transform their capabilities and increase their competitive advantage. Research from different disciplines have examined the strategic implications of the internal employee mobility (i.e., lateral vs. promotion) and of the external employee mobility (i.e., within and between industries; move to rivals and employee entrepreneurship). However, a unifying conceptual structure within and across different disciplines will enhance our ability to gain comparative insights regarding the varying effects of the various mechanisms associated with each type of mobility.

This book contains an Open Access chapterScholarship in management and strategy is paying increasing attention to the domain of aesthetics. Companies routinely make aesthetic choices and there is growing recognition that aesthetic considerations are fundamental for successful performance in competitive markets. Stylistically sophisticated products may appeal to demanding customers, yielding higher profit margins. Style and beauty can also be applied toward enriching organizational cultures, informing leadership visions or motivating employees to defy conventions in designing new products. Aesthetics and Style in Strategy constitutes the first systematic survey of the interface between the aesthetic and strategic domains. Motivated by the rise of aestheticism in contemporary culture, it lays the foundations for an “aesthetic” turn in strategy, which interrogates the use of aesthetic features as a source of competitive advantage and provides examples of connecting design and engineering, style and technology. The “aesthetic turn” is not simply about creating value, but about sharing value among employees and infusing organizational activities with a purpose that transcends principles of efficiency. Volume 42 of Advances in Strategic Management documents the variety of ways in which the useful and the beautiful can be brought together, making a valuable contribution to the sustainability of business in the 21st century.