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The purpose of this paper is to revisit and rationally reconstruct the role of planning, strategic management, and strategic balance, in a context of managing change. The general problem dealt with is: “When is it possible to design and manage a balanced strategic change process under conditions of rapid high‐frequency change?”

The paper revisits the development of strategic management and contains a rational reconstruction of core assumptions relevant to managing change. In the first section, the historical origin of strategic managements approach to change is rationally reconstructed. The next sections analyze and interpret core assumptions underlying the strategic management approach to planning and change. The next section explicate the conceptual strategic hierarchy showing that developments in strategy make theories of planning and control more abstract and complex, but nevertheless preserve the idea of planning and control as a demand for strategic balance. The last section inserts this discussion into a change management framework pointing to a practical paradox emerging and addressing a possible solution.

It is argued that a practical paradox emerges between the time horizon inscribed in concepts of strategic management and planning and the empirical demands to it under the pressures of high frequency change.

The paper directs attention to a new perspective on managing change as an experienced change/stability ratio, which may help dissolving the practical paradox managers faces in keeping up with strategy.

The corporate board of directors is a body entrusted with power to make economic decisions affecting the well‐being of investors' capital, employees' security, communities' economic health, and executives’ power and perquisites. The power of the board of directors is often forgotten in this complex society. Managers, the government, and special interest groups seem to impose upon the corporation situations that are never addressed by the board of directors. Yet it is the board that has the ultimate internal authority within the corporation. Corporate charters granted by the various states specifically assign to the board of directors the responsibility of management, or the delegation of that management. The directors act as trustees for the shareholders, selecting the management structure of the firm, and delegating to that management structure those administrative matters the board itself chooses. The degree of delegation is a decision of each board, with most boards delegating away the major portion of their decision‐making authority.

This chapter provides a presentation about Chapter 1 of The Balance of the National Economy, 1923–24, edited by Pavel Illich Popov. The Balance was issued in June 1926 by the Central Statistical Administration (CSU or TsSU) of the USSR, which Popov had headed from July 1918 to January 1926. In the first part of our chapter, we show how Popov’s work on the balance of the national economy was rooted in the specific scientific and political culture of zemstvo statisticians inherited from the Tsar. Statistical inquiry was considered an objective scientific process based on international standards. Furthermore, like zemstvo statisticians, CSU statisticians developed great autonomous political power. The balance of the national economy was built according to these principles, which met harsh criticism from revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. In the second part, we analyze the contents of Popov’s Chapter 1, especially the theoretical foundations of the balance and its connection with Soviet planning. In the third part, we discuss the balance’s significance in the years 1926–1929, years which ended the NEP and launched the first Five-Year Plan, so as to understand how CSU’s balance didn’t become a standard Soviet statistical instrument and was discarded as a “bourgeois” device.

A project contractor can promote the success of a delivery project by planning the project well and following a project management methodology (PMM). However, various changes typically take place, requiring changes to the project plan and actions that deviate from the firm’s established PMM. The purpose of this paper is to explore different types of changes and change management activities over the lifecycle of delivery projects.

A qualitative single case study design was used. In total, 17 semi-structured interviews were carried out during a delivery project in a medium-sized engineering company that delivers complex systems to industrial customers.

Both plan-related changes and deviations from the PMM were mapped throughout the project lifecycle. Various internal and external sources of change were identified. An illustrative example of the interconnectedness of the changes reveals the potential escalation of changes over the project lifecycle. Managers and project personnel engage in different change management activities and improvisation to create alternative paths, re-plan, catch up, and optimize project performance after changes.

The empirical study is limited to a single case study setting and a single industry. The findings draw attention to the interconnectedness and potential escalation effect of changes over the lifecycle of the project, and the need for integrated change management and improvisation actions.

Efficient change management and improvisation at the early phase of a delivery project can potentially mitigate negative change incidents in later project phases. Changes are not only the project manager’s concern; project personnel’s skilled change responses are also helpful. The findings emphasize the importance of the project customer as a source of changes in delivery projects, meaning that customer relationship management throughout the project lifecycle is needed for successful change management.

The study offers increased understanding of changes and change management throughout the project lifecycle. The results show evidence of plan-related and methodology-related changes and their interconnections, thereby proposing a lifecycle view of integrated change management and improvisation in projects.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how mandatory sustainability accounts can be designed to maximise the likelihood of moving society towards sustainability.

The authors use institutional theory to show that organisations are constrained by institutions. Sustainability accounts can drive change by providing information that changes the institutional mix of pressures on organisations.

Mandatory disclosure is most likely to drive change when: indicators are appropriate for information intermediaries or other intended users; information is provided at the appropriate level of aggregation; data are comparable to external benchmarks and/or other corporations; there exists a linkage to network of other relevant information; and sufficient popular and political support exists.

Social changes will only come about if users receive information relevant to their goals and are able to translate it into political action. Corporate-level reporting may not be the best mechanism for this, because many users are interested in issues-based information. In many instances, due to the ability to facilitate greater comparability, a database mechanism is likely to be more helpful. Social and environmental accounting research should consider adopting more site-based reporting, ascertain what sustainability information governments already collect, determine what information NGOs need for campaigning purposes, and theorise how to create and link a nexus of accounts.

While many studies have called for improved practice and lamented the impotence of reporting, few studies have explored this link from a theoretical perspective.

Virtually all businesses must perform financial planning and budgeting. The paper presents a normative design framework for developing a management information system to support these activities. The design sustains planning processes across organizational levels. The system may be evoked with either a modeling or budgeting orientation which supports bottom‐up, top‐down, or in‐side‐out planning. An analysis function forges alink between top‐down and bottom‐up planning. This linkage provides flexibility in developing alternative business plans. The normative design provides a standard for creating and evaluating alternative system designs, to determine the most appropriate system for a particular business situation.

Drawing on a EU-funded research project on urbanisation in China and Europe (URBACHINA), the purpose of this inquiry is to explore the potential of foresight – through visionary scenarios and related participatory processes – in promoting learning and sustainable futures in China’s centrally planned context. Our research explores the use of backcasting, of Donella Meadows’ “levers” and Paul Raskin’s “proximate-ultimate drivers” and of archetypal worldviews to further our understanding of how we think about the future, and of the tension between transition scenarios and transformative, paradigmatic or deep change.

A review of recent foresight studies and literature provides an overview of the latest approaches: in particular the methods, scope, process, level of participation, themes discussed and wild cards considered. Building on this, the inquiry designs and implements a participatory, normative and qualitative scenario building to explore sustainable urban futures for China, adapting the elements of Joseph Voros’ basic foresight process to include a total of nine steps, with five workshops, two international surveys, an adapted backcasting step and internal consistency mechanisms.

The combination of a participatory iterative process with normative approaches to envisioning, helped question assumptions and deeply ingrained development models, as well as the narrow space for “alternatives” resulting from China’s centralised, top-down planning and decision-making. The experience confirms the power of scenario/storyline building in helping reflect and question strategic policy choices and enrich urban policy debates. The process successfully proposed a number of steps that ensured triangulation of the envisioning outcomes and additional learning also through backcasting. Finally, the research shows a clear link between the development of scenarios space, the debate on transition and transformative futures and archetypal worldviews, which were shown to be stable even after decades.

The URBACHINA approach to the specific challenge of sustainable urbanisation in China applies a strong normative component combined to more locally accepted exploratory methods and introduces a participatory approach to all key stages of scenario building. This represents an innovative contribution to the country’s foresight practice and the results help Chinese decision makers to reflect on the wider sustainability implications of their urban strategy. The inquiry deepens our understanding of the use of proximate and ultimate drivers of change and of the tension between transition and transformation pathways to our future.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the institutional and social forces that influence collaborative data sharing practices in cross-sector interorganizational networks. The analysis focusses on the data sharing practices between professionals in the transportation and public health sectors, areas prioritized for collaborative action to improve public health.

A mixed methods design is utilized. Electronic surveys were sent to 57 public health and 157 transportation professionals in a large major metropolitan area in the USA (response rate 39.7 percent). Focus groups were held with 12 organizational leaders representing professionals in both sectors.

The application of the institutional-social capital framework suggests that professional specialization and organizational forces make it challenging for professionals to develop the cross-sector relationships necessary for cross-sector collaborative data sharing.

The findings suggest that developing the social relationships necessary for cross-sector collaboration may be resource intensive. Investments are necessary at the organizational level to overcome the professional divides that limit the development of cross-sector relationships critical for collaborative data sharing. The results are limited to the data sharing practices of professionals in one metropolitan area.

Despite mandates and calls for increased cross-sector collaboration to improve public health, such efforts often fail to produce true collaboration. The study’s value is that it adds to the theoretical conceptualization of collaboration and provides a deeper understanding as to why collaborative action remains difficult to achieve. Future study of collaboration must consider the interaction between professional specialization and the social relationships necessary for success.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use, applicability and relevance of strategic planning as a process and tool when applied to exploring food security challenges, in the context of existing research on food security and food waste in the food supply chain. The issues associated with robust and resilient food supply chains within a circular economy are increasingly being seen as supportive of creating enhanced levels of food security but the authors argue that this is only sustainable when strategically planned as part of a cross-enterprise, information-rich and complex supply chain. The relevance of the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental (PESTLE) strategic planning tool is explored to establish whether it can play a role tacking the complexity of food insecurity (i.e. a lack of food security).

This is a viewpoint piece therefore as a result, thought, normative literature and supposition are used as a means to ground and orientate the views of the authors.

The authors identify and conclude that strategic planning tools like PESTLE across enterprises may not be relevant in supporting the reduction of food insecurity. This conclusion is predicated on the heightened level of complexity surrounding the pursuit of food security and the simplistic categorisation of PESTLE factors in a linear fashion that underpin this tool. Rather, the authors’ call for the use of strategic planning tools that are able to capture a large number of inter-related factors holistically.

This insight to the inter-related factors that contribute to food insecurity will allow policy developers, decision makers and others to develop their understanding of how strategic planning can support increased levels of food security within a circular economy and across cross-enterprises.

The authors contribute to the literature through a new insight of how normative strategic planning tools need to evolve in a complex, inter-connected world of international business and geo-politics. In doing so, it is expected that this research will motivate others to develop their line of enquiry around uncovering and exploring those inter-relationships connecting PESTLE factors.

This chapter provides an ethnographic look at higher education strategic planning through the lens of Williams College’s 2018–2020 effort to develop a 20-year plan for the institution. The critical analysis of Williams’ multi-community engagement contributes to studies of higher education and to literature in the sociocultural anthropological field of “policy as a practice of power” by applying core tenets of the field to strategic planning analysis. Drawing on 12 months of participation-observation and documentary research, the investigation brings into focus Williams’ heterarchical leadership structure and the negotiation practices that contributed to establish the legitimacy and appropriation of William’s strategic plan values. The chapter also shifts toward a contextualized perspective of strategic planning, highlighting campus community divides and the practices that contributed to bridge these fault lines and foster trust during the Fall 2019 campus-wide outreach process. Through the chapter, the analysis re-interprets beliefs of strategic planning and implementation as a top-down, normative imposition, and brings an ethnographic lens to reveal practices of negotiation, convergence, and value appropriation.