The origins of crises and the ability of actors to respond to them

We have asked an American business historian and a Greek economist to express their point of view about five frequent questions relating to the current crisis, its place in history and possible learning processes for firms, governments or international organizations. © Éditions ESKA, 2012

Strategic planners in more turbulent times: the changing job characteristics of strategy professionals, 1960-2003

This paper investigates the changing job characteristics of strategic planners in the face of long-run increases in environmental turbulence since the 1960s. We build on contingency theory to examine how growing turbulence may have impacted three aspects of strategic planner jobs: temporal range, processes, and organizational location. Drawing upon job advertisement data between 1960 and 2003, we compare strategic planner jobs over time and relative to a similar managerial function, marketing. We find that the secular increase in environmental turbulence is negatively associated with forecasting (temporal range), economics and analysis (processes) and centralization (organizational location), especially when compared with marketing. These findings broadly support contingency theory in a domain that has so far lacked empirical consensus. We contribute further by introducing a fine-grained methodology that allows a detailed approach to contingency theory studies of managerial roles, and opens a bridge to the Strategy as Practice tradition of research. Our findings also have implications for participation in strategic planning in firms, for the role of analysis in management education, and for research attention to strategic planning as an enduring strategy practice

Extending the internationalization process model: Increases and decreases of MNE commitment in emerging economies

The internationalization process model suggests that firms internationalize by building positions in foreign markets and networks, following iterative cycles of learning and changes in commitment. However, as subsidiaries evolve, commitments may be decreased as well as increased, a phenomenon that has rarely been studied. Moreover, it remains an open question why strategic intentions at the outset of an investment project differ from the actual operations established. We address these questions by extending the model and combining it with Mintzberg and Waters’ framework of strategy formation. Specifically, we suggest that commitment decisions correspond to statements of intended strategy, while network positions correspond to realized strategies. The processes of learning, opportunity creation and trust building triggered by commitment decisions are, however, moderated by institutional influences that lead to divergences between realized and intended strategies. We test propositions derived from this framework on a survey data set of subsidiaries of multinational enterprises in Hungary, Lithuania and Poland, and find that institutional voids and institutional uncertainty affect subsidiary strategy implementation, but in opposing directions. Under high institutional uncertainty, investors prefer low commitment but flexible modes that enable later commitment increases, whereas institutional voids increase up-front information search and adaptation costs that reduce the likelihood of early post-entry adjustments. Our analysis reinforces the need for more differentiated theoretical analyses of how institutions affect business strategies over time