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Dear colleagues,

Due to many requests the deadline for submission of the papers for a special
issue on "Strategic Agility" at California Management Review is extended
till February 29, 2012. Please see more details below.

 

 

Prof. Yaakov Weber
1. Chair, Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
School of Business Administration
College of Management
Rabin Blvd. 7
Rishon Lezion, Israel.
 
2. President, EMRBI
EuroMed Research Business Institute
www.emrbi.com

 

----Apologies for cross-posting----

 

California Management Review

Editor: Prof. David Vogel

 

CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue

Achieving Strategic Agility in Hypercompetitive Environments


 

Guest Editors: 

Prof. Yaakov Weber, Chair, Strategy and Entrepreneurship Department, School
of Business Administration, College of Management, Israel

Dr. Shlomo Yedidia, School of Business Administration, College of
Management, Israel

 

The competitive landscape has been shifting in recent years more than ever.
Globalization, rapid technological changes, codification of knowledge, the
Internet, 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, optimizing human resource scalability, and more (e.g., Doz and
Kosonen, 2010; Dyer and Ericksen, 2005; Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000;
Shenkar, 2010a; Weber, Tarba, and Reichel, 2011; Wilson and Doz, 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), human resource management (Shafer, Dyer, Kilty, Amos, and
Ericksen, 2001) and other existing and emerging concepts? 

§  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 Rozen Bachar, 2011) and
hybrid integration (Schweizer, 2005) on strategic agility? 

§  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 February 29, 2012 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>
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, 

Prof. Yaakov Weber [log in to unmask] .

 

 

REFERENCES

Doz, Y.L and Kosonen, M. 2008. The dynamics of strategic agility: Nokia's
rollercoaster experience. California Management Review, 50 (3), 95-118.

Doz, Y.L and Kosonen, M. 2010. Embedding strategic agility. Long Range
Planning, 43, 370-382. 

Dyer, L. and Ericksen, J. (2005). In pursuit of marketplace agility:
Applying precepts of self-organizing systems to optimize human resource
scalability. Human Resource Management, 44 (2), 183–188.

 

Eisenhardt, K. M. and Martin, J. A. 2000. Dynamic capabilities: What are
they?  Strategic Management Journal, 21, 1105-1121.

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: A review and assessment of its critiques. Journal of Management, 36
(1), 349-372.

Lado, A. A., Boyd, N. G., Wright, P., and Kroll, M. 2006. Paradox and
theorizing within the resource-based view. Academy of Management Review, 31
(1), 115-131.

Shafer, R. A., Dyer, L., Kilty, J., Amos, J., and Ericksen, J. (2001).
Crafting a human resource strategy to foster organizational agility: A case
study. Human Resource Management, 40 (3), 197–211.

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. Academy of
Management Journal, 48 (6), 1051–1074.

Weber, Y., Belkin, T., and Tarba, S.Y. 2011. Negotiation, cultural
differences, and planning in mergers and acquisitions. Proceedings of the
EuroMed Academy of Management 2010 Annual Conference, 1249-1257. Nicosia,
Cyprus, November 2010.

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), 9 - 24. 

Weber, Y., Tarba, S. Y., and Rozen Bachar, Z. 2011. Mergers and acquisitions
performance paradox: The mediating role of integration approach. European
Journal of International Management. 5 (4), 373 - 393. 

Wilson, K. and Doz, Y. L. 2011. Agile innovation. California Management
Review, 53 (2), 6 - 26.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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