The strategy and change interface: Understanding 'Enabling" processes and cognitions

The aim of this special issue is to better understand the strategy and change interface, in particular, the (sub)processes and cognitions that enable strategies to be successfully implemented and organisations effectively changed. The ten papers selected for this special issue reflect a range of scholarly traditions and, thus, as our review and integration of the relevant literatures, and our introductions to the ten papers demonstrate, they shed light on the strategy and change interface in starkly different ways. Collectively, the papers give us more insight into the recursive activities, and structural, organizational learning and cognitive mechanisms that are encouraged or deliberately established at organizations to allow their people to successfully implement a strategy and effect change, including achieve greater levels of horizontal alignment. Moreover, they demonstrate the benefits associated with establishing platforms and/or routines designed to overcome decision-makers’ cognitive shortcomings while implementing a strategy or making timely adjustments to it. We conclude out editorial by identifying some yet unanswered questions

Investing in resources to create customer value: the organisational, strategic and performance implications.

This qualitative, case-based study examined how managers conceptualise customer value and translate customer learning into customer value creating processes. The study considered a sample of high and low performing firms operating in non-dynamic and dynamic market environments to investigate market and firm-level effects. It was found regardless of whether a firm operates in a non-dynamic or dynamic market environment, managers approach customer value as a time dependent and tridimensionally construct. In order to operationalise customer value, managers need to constantly consider: 1. The attributes or benefits that are embedded in or customers can associate with the firm’s products and services, 2. The consequences achieved by customers when using or being provided with the firm’s products and services, and 3. The goals and purposes which are achieved by customers after they use or received the firm’s products and services. In other words, in order to create optimal levels of customer value, managers must be able to map the configuration of activities that need to be undertaken at the firm to the configuration of commercial and assurance-based benefits customers want to have delivered to them through the firm’s products and services at different points in time. They must then be able to map these activities and benefits to the combination of resources that can realise them. This includes the combination of dynamic capabilities which the firm uses to develop products and services that can help customers cope with change and have their idiosyncratic problems addressed. However, it was found that firms that operate in dynamic market environments tend to invest in and develop more structured and ordered approaches to customer learning than the firms that operate in non-dynamic market environments. They also rely more on bottom-up/top down decision-making processes to develop the firm’s customer value delivery strategy than firms that operate in non-dynamic market environments. Firms that operate in non-dynamic market environments tend to use top-down decisionmaking processes and are more likely to lever off their strategic planning processes to develop their customer value delivery strategy than firms that operate in dynamic market environments. Consistent with these findings and the RBV literature, it was found that the high performing firms were better at creating value for their target customers across three customer value dimensions. Their managers were also better at identifying when it was in everyone’s best interests to differentiate between customer groups, and integrate and link critical customer learning and decision-making processes. This includes processes that promote strategic and operational forms of customer learning, and continual customer value learning and performance tracking. In summary, the study demonstrated that heterogeneous firm performance can be explained by the way managers at different firms are able to conceptualise customer value, how they develop their customer value delivery strategies, and their differing abilities to integrate key customer value learning and decision-making processes. Moreover, it demonstrated that a firm is more likely to sustain a competitive advantage and be persistently high performing if it develops a core customer value learning and customer value delivery competency.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Business School, 200

Capitalism as discourse: How can strategic management scholars contribute new insights and refocus debate?

Surprisingly, the strategic management literature has had little to say of an explicit nature on the topic of capitalism. However, the discourse on capitalism is vast in economics and many would say the writings of some economists on the topic of capitalism have been inordinately influential. Bearing this in mind, the differences between three world renowned economists on the topic of capitalism are examined with the intention of identifying where scope exists for strategic management to contribute to the discourse on capitalism. The paper concludes that strategic management is well placed to develop its own organization-centric discourse on the subject. Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2017

Capitalism as discourse: How can strategic management scholars contribute new insights and refocus debate?

Surprisingly, the strategic management literature has had little to say of an explicit nature on the topic of capitalism. However, the discourse on capitalism is vast in economics and many would say the writings of some economists on the topic of capitalism have been inordinately influential. Bearing this in mind, the differences between three world renowned economists on the topic of capitalism are examined with the intention of identifying where scope exists for strategic management to contribute to the discourse on capitalism. The paper concludes that strategic management is well placed to develop its own organization-centric discourse on the subject. Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2017

Theory into practice the resource value chain and the objective of the optimally configured firm

Drawing on resource-based theory, we develop a resource value chain framework. We then demonstrate how this framework can be used to solve the firm’s various strategic and resource configuration problems. Since it is assumed that managers must constantly consider which new resources their firm needs to acquire, and which of its resources it needs to reinvest in or divest, our resource value chain will be of most use when innovating, embarking upon a major internal change or transformation initiative, or when altering the firm’s boundaries through acquisition or devolution. It can also be used to explain why a firm may have adopted a particular mode of organisation, hierarchy or reward system, and if value has indeed accrued to the firm

Exploiting the Potential of Institution-level Capabilities: The Case of Humanitarian Supply Chains

39 page(s

Developing a resource-based explanation for the existence of the firm in strategic management

http://meeting.aomonline.org/2006