Search results

The purpose of this paper is to develop an original six-phase model describing entrepreneurial learning in the transition of place-based enterprises toward a sustainable exploitation of natural common resources (commons).

The six-phase model proposed by this study explains the learning processes involving place-based enterprises through two important existing theories: adaptive co-management and Lachmann’s evolutionary, embedded theory of entrepreneurship. The proposed model integrates these two theories on the basis of a longitudinal case study on the fishing enterprises in an Italian marine protected area (MPA).

In the case study, the success factors identified by the adaptive co-management literature proved important in enabling an embedded entrepreneurial learning process consistent with Lachmann’s view. The case analysis allowed the authors to cluster these learning processes around six phases. Further, even if traditional fishing is not knowledge-intensive, this case shows the transition to a sustainable business model required intense efforts of educated institutional work and scientific research. Interestingly, the key learning processes were enabled by the emergence of a larger, networked social entity (a network form of organization) including the community of fishermen, the MPA management and a network of scientists studying the marine area ecosystem.

This study is explorative and relies on a single case study. Despite this limitation, it opens up new research paths in the fields of entrepreneurship, institutional work, network organizations and adaptive management of the commons.

This study is strongly interdisciplinary; it proposes an original model based on a theoretical view that is highly innovative for organization and management studies; and addresses a relevant but overlooked issue with important societal implications.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the changes organizations can adopt to move beyond budgeting. We show how these changes can be understood as modes of adaptive performance management that explains the ways in which organizations move beyond budgeting to become more adaptive. The proposed modes are then used to derive propositions for future research.

Methodology/approach: We follow a conceptual approach through an analysis of the beyond budgeting principles using the management and systems literatures on radical decentralization. We theorize how organizations can enhance their adaptability to environmental uncertainty through changes to their management structure and control processes.

Findings: We show that organizations can move beyond budgeting by decentralizing within or beyond their management structure and modifying or removing their budget-based control processes. We propose that beyond budgeting can be conceptualized as four modes of adaptive performance management: better budgeting, advanced budgeting, restricted budgeting, and nonbudgeting.

Research limitations/implications: The four modes of adaptive performance management can be used in future research to consider how changes to management structures and budget-based control processes can enhance the organizational adaptability needed to manage environmental uncertainty.

Practical implications: We show that while the nonbudgeting mode may be most suited to organizations facing high levels of environmental uncertainty, organizations facing low–to-moderate levels of environmental uncertainty can achieve sufficient levels of adaptability with less extensive changes to management structure and budget-based control processes.

Originality/value: The four modes of adaptive performance management reflect different approaches for dealing with environmental uncertainty. Positioning nonbudgeting as one mode and identifying alternate modes of adaptive performance management provides a basis for comparing and understanding the changes organizations make to move beyond budgeting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility of developing an adaptive strategy to address the impact of climate change in the context of flooding.

The paper analyses flood risk and highlights the need for an adaptive strategic plan for flood risk management under the impact of climate change. It introduces a framework for the development of an adaptive strategic plan. The paper identifies organizational issues (at the local government scale) associated with having an adaptive strategic plan and developing a methodology to address these issues. It also identifies the need for a strategic decision support system (SDSS) and conceptualizing the system in order to support adaptive planning principle.

This study identifies lack of adaptability as a gap in traditional strategic planning for addressing flood risk associated with climate change. An adaptive strategic plan has adequate flexibility, promptness and responsiveness to adapt itself to new realities as they emerge and can sustain itself and remain relevant in a changing environment. The study introduces a SDSS that is necessary to support the adaptive element of an adaptive strategic plan.

This study distinguishes between a strategy for adaptation and an adaptive strategy. Most research on the topic of adaptation to climate change have been focused on developing strategies that offer adaptive solutions to pressing problems such as flooding. For instance, they may recommend more investment on non‐structural methods for flood mitigation, as they are more adaptive than alternative structural methods and therefore more sustainable under climate change. An issue that has attracted less attention is the fact that the strategic plans themselves (or in a sense the decision‐making framework) need to be equally adaptive. Some of public institutions do not have adequate flexibility and promptness to change and rectify high‐level strategic plans. The study identifies the lack of an SDSS, which allows new scientific findings to be converted to new policies in a short period of time, as a reason for absence of promptness, responsiveness and flexibility in such organizations. This study makes an attempt to address this issue by suggesting a frame work that will enable a government institution to become more responsive to change.

This study investigates the roles of market, technology, and management system-related adaptive capability variables on a firm’s manufacturing adaptive capability. In addition, the study examines the effects of a firm’s manufacturing adaptive capability on its effectiveness. Further, this study tests the moderating role of organizational redundancy on the relationship between the market, technology, and management system-related adaptive capabilities and the overall manufacturing adaptive capability of a firm.

This study utilizes questionnaire-based research to test the suggested hypotheses by gathering related data from 59 manufacturing firms.

This study determined that a firm’s technology and management system-related adaptive capability positively relates to firm's manufacturing adaptive capability. Further, market adaptive capability influences manufacturing adaptive capability via the levels of technology and management system-related adaptive capabilities. Manufacturing adaptive capability is also found to be positively associated with organizational effectiveness, and resource redundancy positively moderates the relationship between management systems adaptive capability and manufacturing adaptive capability. Conversely, resource redundancy negatively moderates the relationship between technology adaptive capability and manufacturing adaptive capability. Finally, this study demonstrates that information redundancy does not moderate the desired relationship between all the adaptive capability-related variables for firms.

This study has some limitations inherent in survey design, mainly for both convenient sampling and country context.

This study suggests that management should improve firm’s manufacturing adaptive capability to enhance firm's overall effectiveness. For that purpose, managers should consider the interrelationships between the market and a firm’s technology, management system, and manufacturing-related adaptive capabilities. Management should also consider the importance of using resource-related redundancy to leverage the relationship between a firm’s management adaptive capability and manufacturing adaptive capability. At the same time, management should be aware of certain reverse effects of resource redundancy on both technology adaptive capability and the manufacturing adaptive capability linkage of a firm.

This study expands the understanding of the adaptive capability of firms by examining how manufacturing adaptive capability can be further enhanced. The study also offers a model for the potential relationships that develop between different aspects of organizational adaptive capability by applying the contingency role of organizational redundancy variables.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the inherent adaptive capacities of multilevel flood management institutions in England that are necessary to espouse the concept of Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA).

This paper is based on an extensive assessment of flood management literature including European and English flood management policies, strategies, regulations and reports. First, an assessment protocol was developed from systematic literature search and, second, multilevel flood management policies and organizations were evaluated. A qualitative scoring method was applied at the assessment stage.

The protocol included 18 major assessment criteria under seven EbA principles. Application of the protocol showed that English national flood policies showed comparatively greater adaptive capacities than European- and local-level policies and local organizations. Specialized flood management policies such as Catchment Flood Management Policies at the local level and European Policies such as flood directives are among the lowest-scoring policy institutions. It was also identified that there is an emerging trend of stakeholder participation, catchment-based approach and knowledge-based adaptation planning at the national level which potentially can be the entry points of wider-scale EbA implementation. This paper recommends proactive roles of local executive organizations through improving institutional communication, consideration of catchment-scale planning with clear adaptation goals and valuing local knowledge base.

The research is important to identify the institutional aspects of adaptive capacity that require attention for promoting alternative adaptation measures such as EbA.

This study aims to investigate the multiple influence paths or underlying mechanisms of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) on adaptive innovation from the perspectives of organizational learning and resource management, drawing on complex adaptive system theory.

With a questionnaire survey of 317 senior and middle managers from different firms in China, structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized conceptual model, and bootstrapping method was employed to examine the multiple mediating effects.

Results indicate that EL has a significant and positive effect on adaptive innovation. This relationship is partially mediated through exploitative learning, exploratory learning, resource bricolage and boundary-spanning integration, respectively. The impact of EL on adaptive innovation is also sequentially transmitted through exploitative learning and resource bricolage or exploratory learning and boundary-spanning integration.

Adaptive innovation has become a firm competition strategy to cope with dynamic changes in current uncertain environment where EL can play its effectiveness to engage firms in such innovation activities. However, the question of why and how EL drives adaptive innovation has yet to be discussed. This study highlights the innovation effectiveness of EL and the triggering process of adaptive innovation, and contributes to several countermeasures for firms to implement leadership and innovation practices responding to uncertain environment.

This study aims to investigate marketing capabilities that represent the marketing mix from an adaptive perspective: brand management, customer relationship management, price management and multi-channel management. Also, this study identifies how adaptive marketing capabilities (AMCs) enrich superior innovativeness and speed-to-market regarding innovation orientation and marketing orientation as the two critical functions.

A questionnaire-based research was performed to test the proposed hypotheses. The data were collected from predominately marketing or research and development managers/senior specialists in 247 firms.

Strategic orientations that cover market and innovation orientation facilitate a firm’s AMCs, positively affecting its innovativeness and speed-to-market. Also, AMCs mediate the relationship between strategic orientations, and innovativeness, and speed-to-market. Further, this study confirms the complementary association of AMC-related variables in enhancing firm innovativeness and speed-to-market.

This study is subject to the limitations inherent in survey design, particularly convenient sampling and single informants.

This study broadens understanding of dynamic capabilities theory by examining how marketing capabilities can be enhanced and examined from an adaptive perspective for firms. This study also presents a model for the potential relationships among strategic orientations, AMCs, innovativeness and speed-to-market.

It is well recognized that emotions support adaptation to environmental demands by guiding cognitions and behavior in line with one’s implicit and explicit goals. This is true in the work context, as in other areas of life. Traditionally, however, research into emotion regulation within the work context has been centered on the problematic aspects of feeling and displaying emotion at work. In order to meet organizational goals, felt emotions need to be subdued or modified, and inauthentic emotions displayed. In this way, conceptualizations of work-related emotion regulation have disconnected emotion from its most basic and adaptive signal function. This disconnection has led to a dilemma regarding the real- and the fake-self and been associated with a range of negative consequences for employee health and well-being. Understanding how emotions can be regulated to help employees meet personal goals for growth and development has also been overlooked. In this chapter, we challenge this existing paradigm, and instead argue that examining emotion regulation in terms of its adaptive functions will help to unify disparate findings from within the emotion regulation literature and progress research in the field of emotion and emotion regulation at work.

The purpose of this paper is to deepen the understanding of adaptive governance, which is advocated for as a manner to deal with dramatic changes in society and/or environment. To re-think the possible contributions of organizations and organization theory, to adaptive governance.

Based on social systems theory this study makes a distinction between “governance organizations” and “governance communities.” Organizations are conceptualized as the decision machines which organize and (co-)steer governance. Communities are seen as the social environments against which the governance system orients its operations. This study considers the adaptive mechanisms of organizations and reflect on the roles of organizations to enhance adaptive governance in communities and societies.

Diverse types of organizations can link or couple in different ways to communities in their social environment. Such links can enhance the coordinative capacity of the governance system and can also spur innovation to enable adaptation. Yet, linking with communities can also slow down responses to change and complexify the processes of deliberation in governance. Not all adaptive mechanisms available to organizations can be used in communicating with communities or can be institutionalized, but the continuous innovation in the field of organizations can inspire continuous testing of small-scale adaptive mechanisms at higher levels. Society can thus enhance its adaptive capacity by managing the role of organizations.

The harnessing of insights in organization theory and systems theory for improving understanding of adaptive governance. The finding that both experiment and coordination at societal level are needed, toward adaptive governance, and that organizations can contribute to both.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize how information technology (IT) enables supply chain (SC) network capabilities, which is to capitalize on SC’s existing set of resources and, at the same time, manage new combinations of SC resources to meet future market needs. The paper also develops SCM framework associated with IT-enabled SC network capabilities.

Through a case study of a leading Taiwanese petrochemical corporation, qualitative data were gathered on the IT-related SC management practices, in terms of network resource mobilizing and adaptive co-management arrangements to enable SC network capability. This research is based primarily on the interviews of the case company, supplemented by archived documents, published books, and in-depth observations.

Based on the evidence from the case, this study inductively develops a model that includes the operating processes with IT-enabled activities to achieve ambidextrous SC network capability, and the relevant framework functions in network resources and co-management activities include information co-governance, information interoperability, community engagement strategy, cyber-physical dexterity, and control enactment, which lead the SC alliances improvements for dynamic environmental changes.

Practitioners may derive strategies and tactics from the current findings to help them implement innovative information technologies and setup SC framework, during SC network capability development, to achieve SC’s sustainable competence in a dynamic market.

Researchers and practitioners may obtain a more complete view of IT-enabled SC network capability development. The proposed model reveals that developing IT-enabled SC network capabilities is a dynamic process whereby an organization’s major SC managerial activities are divided into specific network resource mobilizing and adaptive co-management arrangements.