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In an age where organizational transformation is becoming more important to both the theory and practice of strategic management, the aim of this paper is to provide a model through which organizational transformation and strategic change can be understood in an holistic manner.

In developing a model to explain organizational transformation, the paper draws on two different theoretical traditions. First, the paper draws on theories of political revolutions and, second, the paper draws on interpretative theories, in particular, speech act theory.

The paper argues that in order to provide a realistic understanding of how and why an organization has attempted a transformational strategy it is important to consider four issues: the event which triggered the transformation, the program and process through which transformation was attempted, the outcome of the transformational strategy, and the myths which have been built up around the transformation.

The paper takes a novel approach by drawing on non‐management theories to develop an understanding of management phenomena. In doing this the paper generates an original model useful for the post rational explanation of transformational strategies.

This paper serves to discuss the benefit of applying scenario‐planning techniques to more traditional approaches to strategy development in helping firms deal with uncertainty and evolutionary change in their surrounding environment. Assessing this environment provides insight into the unique changes, the implications these changes have on a firm's strategies, and the creation of special techniques required to understand them. One of these special techniques is scenario planning. Any study of the relationship between strategy, environment and performance must include variables that involve business scope and resource commitments.

A review of the research literature on the use and benefits of both the traditional approaches and the scenario approach to constructing the future strategy of a firm in a changing environment is undertaken.

The results suggest that a better understanding of the performance of firms within a changed environment can be achieved using the combination of a PESTEL analysis, internal resource analysis and the use of scenarios. This reformulation equation creates a model of a possible environment in which the firm must operate and an investigation of the strategic implications of various scenarios to the firm.

This paper is unique in that it marries the traditional approaches to strategy development with the application of scenario planning. It is of benefit to managers and strategic planners by illustrating how a firm may better develop insight into how it should formulate and implement its strategy in order to retain or create a competitive advantage in the changed environment in which it operates.

The purpose of this paper is to show how a multiple criteria decision‐making method, the analytic network process (ANP) is applied to help Taiwanese TV companies to effectively select optimal televised sportscasters for the Olympic Games.

After interviewing 44 practitioners, criteria for the selection of the Olympic Games televised sportscasters were collected. To avoid the complicated computing process from additional pairwise comparisons of the ANP, the 12 critical criteria that were mentioned more than 30 times by theses respondents were retained. After discussions with 18 senior executives these were classified in three perspectives to structure the hierarchy for the selection of the Olympic Games televised sportscasters.

After discussions with the 18 senior executives, it is found that the selection criteria for televised sportscasters are interrelated. Unlike former contributors who ignored the interdependence among factors, a more feasible and accurate approach, the ANP, which captures the dependent relationship, is applied in this paper to handle such problems.

According to the hierarchy base on three perspectives and 12 important criteria, Taiwanese TV companies could select the optimal Olympic Games televised sportscasters more effectively. A practical application of the ANP presented is generic and could be exploited for Taiwanese TV companies.

The Olympic Games are one of the most important and most popular sporting events in the world. This paper contributes to a more effective selection of the optimal Olympic Games televised sportscasters.

This article aims to provide an original explanation of the outcome of contests using a performing‐competing framework.

In developing a conceptual model to explain the outcome of contests the article develops a set of assumptions that are supported by theory before combining them into a model with illustrative examples.

Understanding the outcome of contests is a complex business. Contests are not always won by the best performing team but rather are won by the team with the most appropriate blend of competitiveness and performance.

The article takes a novel approach by combining management theory with sporting examples in order to make a conceptual innovation.

This paper aims to study the stock market reaction to sporting results of European listed football clubs. Specifically, it tries to examine the impact of the sporting results on the stock market valuation in terms of abnormal returns and trading volume around the dates of matches.

This paper undertakes an event study around the dates of 745 matches played by European listed football clubs.

The empirical analysis shows that the sporting results of listed football clubs affect both the abnormal returns and the trading volume around the dates of matches. The movement (positive or negative) and the time when the impact occurs (before or after the match) differ according to the nature of the result (defeat, draw or win) and the match venue (home or away). Findings in this study imply that the success of investments in listed football clubs requires a regular follow‐up of their sporting performances.

This paper is one of the first to take into consideration the nature of sporting results (defeat, draw or win) according to the match venue (home or away) in order to study the market reaction in terms of both abnormal returns and trading volume. Unlike some previous studies, it is not limited to studying a single specific context but considers listed football clubs from all over Europe.

Businesses are always seeking resilient strategies so they can weather unpredictable competitive environments. One source of unpredictability is the unsustainability of commerce's environmental, economic or social impacts and the limitations this places on businesses. Another is poor resilience causing erroneous and unexpected outputs. Companies prospering long-term must have both resilience and sustainability, existing in a symbiotic state. The purpose of this paper is to explore the two concepts and their relationship, their combined benefits and propose an approach for supporting decision makers to proactively build both characteristics.

The paper looks at businesses as complex adaptive systems, how their resilience and sustainability can be defined and how these might be exhibited. It then explores how they can be combined in practice.

The two qualities are related but have different purposes, moreover resilience has two major forms related to timescales. Both kinds of resilience are identified as key for delivering sustainability, yet the reverse is also found to be true. Both are needed to deliver either and to let businesses flourish.

Although the ideal state of resilient sustainability is difficult to define or achieve, pragmatic ways exist to deliver the right direction of change in organisational decisions. A novel approach to this is explored based on transition engineering and robustness engineering.

This paper links resilience and sustainability explicitly and develops a holistic pragmatic approach for working through their implications in strategic decision making.

To consider the extent to which regimes of performance measurement in the public sector are fit for purpose, and the likely outcomes for public services and public sector workers of such performance measurement systems.

The article considers four key issues: the context and content of performance measurement in the public sector, the specific examples of health care and higher education, the limitations of performance measurement systems, and the likely outcomes of performance measurement systems.

Current systems of performance measurement in the public sector are unlikely to have a significant influence on improving services. The most likely outcomes of these systems is further commodification of services and deprofessionalisation of public sector workers.

The article builds on established literature and offers a systematic metaphor‐driven critique of performance management in the public sector, and discusses the implications of this.

The aim of this paper is to assess both the philosophical underpinnings and contributions to knowledge made by research in the field of strategy in the five years between 2002 and 2006.

The paper begins with a review of the literature on the philosophy, purpose, process and outcome of management research which leads to the development of a conceptual model. Following this, almost 4,000 articles from 23 journals are assessed on the basis of their philosophical underpinnings and contribution to knowledge. Findings are reported and implications are discussed.

Most strategy research, especially in higher ranked journals, comes from a positivist perspective. Across all journals, most contributions to knowledge are in the form of stretching theory. There is a limited amount of reflective work in the strategy literature.

Given the form and content of strategy research, it is increasingly unlikely that research will make the crossover from the academic to the practitioner world.

This paper provides a better understanding of the process through which academic management research can be carried out and the barriers to this process. The paper provides a number of important insights into the nature of strategy research.

The aim of this paper is to propose a model for understanding a complex management issue – the customer loyalty in a public sports service.

Customer loyalty is discussed through the methodology of system dynamics. The proposed model considers the dynamic, non‐linear, asymmetric, and reciprocal relationships between its elements, and permits the analysis of the evolution of the system under hypothesized conditions.

The model reproduces historical data of abandonment and consumers' attitude toward the service (ATS). The achieved simulations showed how the future entry of new competitors can severely threaten public service performance. Furthermore, it was also found that the consumers' ATS was not a very good predictor of the consumers' behavior.

System dynamics methodology can also be applied to understand the loyalty in the remaining services offered by the public institution. Other services, such as fitness, aerobics, martial arts, can be analyzed by considering their respective different competitive environments.

The new competitive environment can dramatically affect the number of consumers per year if a public institution does not differentiate its service. In addition, the entry of new competitors will affect the evolution of the system, as the customer satisfaction rates will be modified.

Understanding customer loyalty is one of the most important concerns for academics and practitioners in the areas of management and marketing. The system dynamics approach is an under‐utilized methodology in the field of sports management, which overcomes simplistic linear approaches. The paper shows how system dynamics can provide attractive insights into the field of sports management.

Ideas from microeconomics, market‐positioning theory and resource‐based theory have been brought together to develop a framework for discussing firm competitiveness and survival.

Propositions about the nature of scale economies, time, resource imitability and customer‐perceived benefits are used to provide a basis for the analysis of firms and their markets. The structures of markets and the impact of innovation and environment on these structures are discussed.

A number of hypotheses are advanced. When movements in consumer perceptions and technology are slow and predictable, leading firms may have developed enough resource capital to remain dominant. When they are not, opportunities for market leadership changes occur.

A conclusion is that strategic management should involve the study of firms in the context of their market situation. Market‐based case studies should seek to understand how markets evolve over time by tracking changes in key variables.

The paper outlines factors that firms’ managers need to take into account in order to evaluate their relationships with their competitors. How these relationships impact on industry structure and the long‐term equilibrium that would result if these relationships remain unchanged is discussed.

A contribution to thinking about research and practical strategic management longitudinally is proposed. The approach emphasises the importance of relationships between firms and the factors that may dynamically change those relationships.