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CALL
FOR PAPERS
Special
Issue:
Achieving Strategic Agility in Hypercompetitive Environments
Guest Editors:
Prof.
Dr. Shlomo
Yedidia Tarba, The Center for Law and Business, Ramat Gan,
and Department of Economics and Management, The Open University, Israel, [log in to unmask]
The competitive
landscape has been shifting in recent years more than ever. Globalization,
rapid technological changes, codification of knowledge, the Internet,
international and domestic mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, talent and employee
mobility, increased rates of knowledge transfer, imitation, changes in customer
tastes, the obsolescence of products and business models – have all
caused a turbulent environment and accelerated changes and disruptions. These
trends are expected to continue in the future, producing ever more rapid and unpredictable
changes. Current concepts such as sustained competitive advantage,
resource-based view, and strategic planning have been deemed vague,
tautological, and inadequate for companies to cope with the rate and complexity
of environmental and market changes (e.g., Kraaijenbrink, Spender and Groen,
2010; Lado, Boyd, Wright and Kroll, 2006).
In a chaotic
environment in which markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, and die one of the
primary determinants of a firm’s success is strategic agility, the ability
to remain flexible in facing new developments, to continuously adjust the
company’s strategic direction, and to develop innovative ways to create
value. There is a tension between formal processes of strategic planning that
require strategic commitments for a course of action and opportunistic
strategic agility. Strategic planning has been criticized for preparing plans
for tomorrow based on yesterday’s actions, concepts, and tools. Although
strategic planning can help in specific situations, it usually creates an
inertia that prevents fast adaptation when circumstances change or market
discontinuities occur. Strategic agility requires inventing new business models
and new categories rather than rearranging old products and categories. To cope
with growing strategic discontinuities and disruptions, scholars have suggested
the creation of strategically agile companies, including new ways for managing
business transformation and renewal, developing dynamic capabilities, creating
imitation abilities, maintain a high level of organizational flexibility,
developing learning and knowledge transfer skills, using adaptive corporate
culture, and more (e.g., Doz and Kosonen, 2010; Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000;
Shenkar, 2010a; Weber, Tarba, and Reichel, 2011).
The goal of this
special issue is to stimulate authors to redefine the spectrum of means and
processes available to create and use strategic agility. The issue challenges
authors to provide the frameworks that managers can use to integrate, develop,
and reconfigure competences and resources required to deal with
hypercompetitive markets. Given markets discontinuities and the rapidly
increasing pace of change, companies need new and agile paradigms.
We invite papers
that focus on strategic agility in both the national and international arenas.
We encourage contributions that address but are not limited to the following
topics:
§
What are the
origins, components, and outcomes of strategic agility?
§
What are the roles
of early warning systems, communication, learning, scanning, knowledge
transfer, training, managerial rotation, and rewarding in the development of
strategically agile companies?
§
What is the
relationship between strategic agility on one hand and organizational
flexibility, modular organizational forms, conflicts and confrontations,
dynamic capabilities (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000), imitation (Shenkar, 2010b),
cultural characteristics (Weber, Tarba, and Reichel, 2011), and other existing
and emerging concepts on the other?
§
What insights can
perspectives from strategy, economics, organizational behavior, international
management, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines provide
into the nature, antecedents, processes, and effects of strategic agility?
§
Do strategic
sensitivity and resource fluidity (Doz and Kosonen, 2008; 2010) create only a
temporary advantage or can they improve performance in both short and the long
term?
§
What is the role of
strategic agility in mergers and acquisitions, given their high failure rate?
For example, what is the importance of strategic agility components at the
pre-merger planning stage (e.g., due diligence, scanning, and screening), the
negotiation stage (Weber, Belkin, and Tarba, 2011), and during post-merger
integration? What is the effect of various practices (communication, training)
within the context of different national cultures (Weber, Rachman-Moore, and
Tarba, 2011), and of integration approaches such as symbiosis (Weber, Tarba,
and
§
What are the
profiles of strategically agile multinational corporations?
§
Do changes in
partners' resources and capabilities cause loss of flexibility to joint
ventures, resulting in a high rate of failure? When and how should new modular
organization forms be applied in the creation of strategic alliances?
§
When should
management embrace intuitive, improvisational, and action-oriented forms of
decision making for the sake of effectiveness?
Please
bear in mind that CMR publishes primarily original articles that are research
based and address issues of current concern to managers.
SUBMISSION
To consider your
manuscript for publication in this special issue, submit your paper by November 10, 2011 to the official
CMR website, indicating the title of the special issue.
All papers should meet the submission requirements of
CMR: http://cmr.berkeley.edu/submission_guidelines.html
.
The papers will be sent
for review following CMR’s standard review process, coordinated by the
guest editors. The final decisions about publications will be made by the CMR
editor.
Please indicate in your
text why and how your paper will appeal not only to scholars but also, and
especially, to managers.
For further information,
please contact the CMR co-guest editor for this special issue,
Dr.
REFERENCES
Doz, Y.L and
Kosonen, M. 2008. The dynamics of strategic agility: Nokia's rollercoaster
experience.
Doz, Y.L and
Kosonen, M. 2010. Embedding strategic agility. Long Range Planning, 43, 370-382.
Eisenhardt, K. M.
and Martin,
Goldman, S. L.,
Nagel, R. N., and Preiss, K. 1995. Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations: Strategies for
Enriching the Customer. van Nostrand Reinhold.
Kraaijenbrink, J.,
Spender, J.-C., and Groen, A. J. 2010. The resource-based view
Lado, A. A., Boyd,
N. G., Wright, P., and Kroll, M. 2006. Paradox and theorizing within the
resource-based view.
Shenkar, O. 2010a.
Copycats: How Smart
Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge. Harvard
Business Press.
Shenkar, O. 2010b.
Imitation is more valuable than innovation. Harvard Business Review (April), 1-3.
Schweizer, L. 2006.
Organizational integration of acquired biotech companies into pharmaceutical
companies: The need for a hybrid approach.
Weber, Y., Belkin,
T., and Tarba, S.Y. 2011. Negotiation, cultural differences, and planning in
mergers and acquisitions. Proceedings
of the
Weber, Y.,
Rachman-Moore, D., and Tarba, S.Y. 2011. Human resource practices during
post-merger conflict and merger performance. International Journal of Cross-Cultural Management.
Forthcoming.
Weber, Y., Tarba,
S.Y., and Reichel, A. 2011. International mergers and acquisitions performance:
Acquirer nationality and integration approaches. International Studies of Management & Organization,
41 (3). Forthcoming.
Weber, Y., Tarba,
S. Y., and