The Strategic Management Special Interest Group (SIG) is devoted to promoting state of the art strategic thinking. We encourage dialogue along several interrelated lines of inquiry crucial for increasing scholarly and managerial understanding regarding strategic choice, competitive advantage, adaptation, and long-term performance and survival. We are committed to each year bring together scholars from all around the world to engage in the development and exchange of high-quality research ideas with the potential to fertilize and drive the future directions of scholarly and practitioner strategic thinking alike.
SIG OFFICERS:
Tomi Laamanen (University of St.Gallen, Switzerland) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Past Chair
Henk Volberda (Erasmus University, Netherlands) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Past Chair
Anabel Fernández-Mesa (University of Valencia, Spain) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. SIG Co-Chair
Audrey Rouzies (Toulouse School of Management, France) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. SIG Co-Chair
Patrick Reinmoeller (Cranfield University. UK) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. SIG Programme Co-Chair
Daniel Alonso Martínez (University of León, Spain) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. SIG Programme Co-Chair
Ana Garcia-Granero (University of Valencia, Spain) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Communication and Social Events Co-Chair
Evangelia Siachou (Hellenic American University, Greece) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Communication and Social Events Co-Chair
Nuno Oliveira (Tilburg University, Netherlands) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. SIG Programme Co-Chair of kick off activities
Kathrin Sele (Aalto University School of Business, Finland) This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. SIG Programme Co-Chair of kick off activities
GT 13_00 Strategic Management General Track
Strategic management is about setting the direction of a corporation and steering it through challenges in its environment. The discipline “deals with (a) major intended and emergent initiatives (b) taken by general managers on behalf of owners (c) that utilize resources (d) to enhance performance (e) of firms (f) in their external environments.” (Nag, Hambrick, Chen, 2007). The purpose of this Strategic Management General track is to foster research in areas not covered by the other more focused tracks.
STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT SIG STANDING TRACKS
ST 13_01 The Strategic Practices of Mergers & Acquisitions
The M&A track will be celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2018!
The track’s aim continues to be to provide a forum for interdisciplinary discussion to further an enhanced analysis of the underlying dynamics shaping Mergers & Acquisitions (‘M&A’). It includes all elements of the M&A process, such as acquisition decision-making, target search and selection, due diligence, negotiation, implementation, maintenance, divestitures that have a performance outcome(s). As an interdisciplinary track, strategic, organizational, cultural or human relations, financial and economic perspectives are welcome, particularly when combined to shed light on some of the conundrums in this area of research. We are eclectic in methodology and so encourage submissions that are qualitative, quantitative and mixed method. Conceptual papers are also welcome.
ST 13_02 Business Ecosystems: Strategies and structures
The ecosystem concept, borrowed from ecological theory, offers the opportunity to explore the strategic dynamics of relationships between organisations and their competitive, institutional and social environment. It has contributed to a better understanding of competitive threats and collaborative opportunities, and the birth, survival or death of organisations. Research has explored the development of new technological platforms, product and process innovation, entrepreneurial activity and, building on cluster and network theory, the health of regional economies. However, the development of practical guidance for industry in terms of appropriate strategic behaviour within ecosystems is at its early stages and further research is welcomed.
ST 13_03 Strategic Processes and Practice
In the SPP track we aim at bringing together organizational and micro levels of analysis to advance our understanding of strategy in the making (Chia & Holt, 2009). We specifically intend this year to explore the role of everyday practitioners and actions in the (continuous) emergence of strategy. Although the Strategy-as-Practice perspective opened avenue in studying strategy with a practice lens (Whittington, 2003), we still know very little of the emergent side of strategy. Despite various calls for delving more into the very essence of strategic processes and emergence, this kind a research remains scarce (Carter, Clegg, & Kornberger, 2008). We therefore invite contributions that better inform and theorize processes and practices with a focus on the emergent side of strategy.
ST 13_04 Microfoundations of Strategy: Dynamic Capabilities and Knowledge Mechanisms
Microfoundations have become an important topic in strategy research, linking explanatory mechanisms at the micro-level to macro-level organizational processes and outcomes. To enhance our understanding of the microfoundations of strategy, we seek research on dynamic capabilities that promote entrepreneurship, change, and innovation (e.g., cognitive managerial capabilities; sensing, seizing and transforming) and knowledge mechanisms that help balance between internal knowledge accumulation and external knowledge absorption (e.g., absorptive capacity; organizational learning). How do microfoundations shape, mediate between and provide explanatory mechanisms for aggregate strategy phenomena (e.g., strategic decision making)? We encourage both empirical and conceptual contributions.
ST 13_05 Behavioural Strategy
Behavioral Strategy has developed into an important new sub domain of strategic management research. By combining psychological research with the strategy domain, Behavioral Strategy aims at grounding strategic management on more realistic assumptions regarding human judgment and interaction. It thus transfers psychological research to an organizational context asking questions like "How can an improved psychological architecture of the firm lead to competitive advantage?
ST 13_06 Collaborative Strategies: Coopetition, Networks and Alliances
Firms adopt collaborative strategies with pure partners i.e. Alliances and/or with competitors i.e. Coopetition strategies in multiple contexts such as Networks or Clusters to innovate, to deal with uncertainty or to expect higher levels of performance. The management of these collaborative strategies became a critical issue for management scholars and practitioners. This issue can be explored through different levels of analysis – inter-organizational level, firm-level, intra-organizational level or inter-individual level. Researches could investigate collaboration in high-tech industries but also on more traditional ones. Studies of multinational companies, associations, public companies, SMEs etc. are also welcome.
ST 13_07 Strategic Ambidexterity: The paradox of exploitation and exploration
Research on strategic ambidexterity should provide a starting point for practitioners to adapt to the disruptive change induced by the fourth industrial revolution. By studying the contradictions between exploitation and exploration researchers could help them prepare. For example, Mom, van den Bosch, and Volberda (2007) found that top-down knowledge inflows are associated to exploitation; horizontal and bottom-up inflows are related to exploration. Others pointed out the trade-offs that are inherently present when organizations pursue both types of activities (Hortovanyi and Szabo, 2006). We call for papers that address the organizational challenge of industry 4.0 into the debate on strategic ambidexterity.
ST 13_08 Competition: Interfaces and Impact
The study of competition is at the core of strategic management scholarship but it also, more broadly, an interdisciplinary research topic. Studies of competition draw from and intersect various fields—from microeconomics to psychology, sociology, law and marketing. Competition is also a phenomenon of interest to a broad range of practitioners, from executives and middle managers to competition authorities and politicians.
This EURAM track call for research examines both various disciplinary interfaces of competition research as well as the numerous impacts that competition has on different actors in market-based societies.
ST 03_05 / ST 06_02 / ST 13_09 Business Model Innovation (BMI) (co-sponsored by Entrepreneurship SIG-03, Innovation SIG-06 and Strategic Management SIG-13)
The phenomenon of business model innovation is of holistic nature, difficult to delimit, and its theorising is contingent on the business model concept (Foss and Saebi, 2016). Yet, despite the overall substantive research effort undertaken to understand the business model (Massa, Tucci and Afuah, 2017), resultant literature still fails to agree on a common interpretation of the concept. The ambivalent nature of the business model poses, in consequence, a substantive challenge for developing a theory on business model innovation (Spieth, Schneckenberg and Ricart, 2014). However, theory development on emerging phenomena involves prolonged periods of logical inconsistency and contradiction, and which relies on abstracting from various sources of evidence captured in actual business practice (Weick, 1995: 389). Likewise, the business model topic attracts continued interest in business research and practice (Demil et al., 2015) In sum, business model innovation attracts a continued interest in both business research and practice, and it offers a wide range of avenues for further investigations on its various dimensions.
STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT SIG TRACKS
T 13_11 Strategic Responsiveness and Adaptive Organizations
Firms must engage in responsive actions adapting business operations over time providing a better fit with changing conditions to survive and persevere. Corporate longevity depends on abilities to sense new business developments and respond to them in proactive, timely and guided ways, which entails sharing of updated information between employees with deep insights and executive decision-makers concerned with the long-term strategic direction. However, we do not really know much about how these intricate processes are enacted in effective organizations. This uncovers an apparent need to theorize about, analyze, identify, and model effective dynamic response systems in contemporary organizations.
