Directions for a troubled discipline:strategy research, teaching and practice introduction to the dialog

This Dialog responds to a growing debate about the relevance of business schools generally and the value of strategy theory and research for strategic management practice. The authors propose that academic theory and management practice can be better connected through management education. The academy researches practice, derives theory, and returns it to practice through the development of teaching materials and the teaching of current and future practitioners. The three articles in this Dialog examine how different approaches to strategy research inform strategy teaching and its application to practice. Joseph Bower explains the rise of business policy and the process research approach that informed that teaching tradition at Harvard Business School. Robert Grant responds by emphasizing the economic theory underpinnings of strategic management research and its impact on teaching. Paula Jarzabkowski and Richard Whittington conclude by proposing a strategyas-practice perspective and suggesting ways to better incorporate strategy-as-practice research into strategy teaching

Strategic positioning:an integrated decision process for manufacturers

Purpose – This paper describes research that has sought to create a formal and rational process that guides manufacturers through the strategic positioning decision. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is based on a series of case studies to develop and test the decision process. Findings – A decision process that leads the practitioner through an analytical process to decide which manufacturing activities they should carryout themselves. Practical implications – Strategic positioning is concerned with choosing those production related activities that an organisations should carry out internally, and those that should be external and under the ownership and control of suppliers, partners, distributors and customers. Originality/value – This concept extends traditional decision paradigms, such as those associated with “make versus buy” and “outsourcing”, by looking at the interactions between manufacturing operations and the wider supply chain networks associated with the organisation

About Semantic Enrichment of Strategic Data Models as Part of Enterprise Models

Abstract. The paper presents the outcomes of a practical experiment aimed at the identification of the various types of annotations that can be attached to enterprise strategic data models. The work is part of a more extensive experimentation on different enterprise models perspectives developed inside the ”Semantic Enrichment of Models and Architecture & Platforms ” task group of the FP6 IST-508-011 NoE INTEROP, whose goal is to evaluate the appropriateness (and the possible incompleteness) of existing semantic enrichment concepts, techniques, services and tools. Besides the need for multiple ontologies, the experiment enlighten a rather new perspective with respect to the literature on semantic annotation, related to the fact that mathematical objects have to be taken into consideration.