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IMP literature has developed the conceptualisation of a business landscape comprised of varying combinations of more or less interdependent activities, resources and actors, the form of which are defined by the interactive processes in which they are involved. However, the conceptualisation of the interactively defined business actor presents challenges to the understanding of the nature of business and the process of management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss what it is to be a manager in the complex interactive business landscape and the capabilities needed by business managers.

Few, if any, IMP studies have systematically addressed the concept of the business actor directly and the authors do not have a well-developed framework for analysing actors from the perspectives of interaction and networks. This paper analyses the evolving semantics of the concepts of the interactive business actor within some of the literature associated with the IMP research tradition, using the software Leximancer.

The paper integrates the analysis into a preliminary framework for describing the characteristics of the interactive business actor. The paper concludes by using this framework to suggest some of the capabilities that are required by the interactive business actor.

The analysis points to the ways that ideas of the business actor and business acting have developed in the literature. The analysis highlights some of the ways in which the development of these concepts is incomplete and points to potentially fruitful ways in which conceptual and empirical research could proceed.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of testing a new approach to strategic sustainability and resilience – Sustainable Resilient Strategic Decision-Support (SuReSDS™).

The approach was developed and tested using action-research case studies at industrial companies. It successfully allowed the participants to capture different types of value affected by their choices, optimise each strategy’s resilience against different future scenarios and compare the results to find a “best” option.

SuReSDS™ enabled a novel integration of environmental and social sustainability into strategy by considering significant risks or opportunities for an enhanced group of stakeholders. It assisted users to identify and manage risks from different kinds of sustainability-related uncertainty by applying resilience techniques. Users incorporated insights into real-world strategies.

Since the case studies and test organisations are limited in number, generalisation from the results is difficult and requires further research.

The approach enables companies to utilise in-house and external experts more effectively to develop sustainable and resilient strategies.

The research described develops theories linking sustainability and resilience for organisations, particularly for strategy, to provide a new consistent, rigorous and flexible approach for applying these theories. The approach has been tested successfully and benefited real-world strategy decisions.

This article focuses on one key aspect of industrial buying behaviour, namely the buying process itself. Using a common questionnaire, a large sample of respondents in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US were interviewed by mail from two sectors, the paper and pulp and chemical and allied products industries. The similarity of results between the different industries and the countries — as well as similarities between this and previous surveys in the UK and US — allows generalisations to be made about the respective involvement of corporate departments in the purchase process for equipment, materials and components.

Delays during construction are one of the common scenarios in the construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to identify the primary causes of delays in the construction phase of building construction projects in China.

Questionnaire survey approach was adopted across the four typical cities in China, namely, Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen. In total, 115 sets of valid responded questionnaires were collected and analyzed.

The results show that the causes of variations, delays in progress payments, exceptionally low bids and subcontractors’ poor performance and communication issues were the most important causes of delays in China.

This research is the first questionnaire survey on the causes of delays in the construction phase of building construction projects in China. The comparative analysis shows two unique causes of delays in the Chinese construction industry, such as “difficulty in claiming indemnity” and “unreasonable upfront capital demanded by client.” It also reveals different ranked causes of delays as per distinguished political and economic situations in China. The research findings can be referred by construction projects in other countries that are funded or partnered with China.

In management research, little is known about how ethno-racial minority leaders interact with similar employees in supervisor–subordinate relationships. This study aims to examine and provide a deeper understanding of individuals’ negative reactions to similar others, thus highlighting the double-edged nature of demographic similarity which has historically predicted positive affective reactions.

Using a survey design, the authors collected data from supervisor-subordinate dyads from multiple companies from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, USA. They used ordinary least squares regression and conditional process analysis to test the hypotheses, including a two-stage moderation and moderated mediation.

Incorporating social context, i.e. minority status, as a moderator, the results show that ethno-racial minority leaders supervising ethno-racially similar subordinates were more vulnerable to relationship conflict than non-minority dyads. This, in turn, is linked to a reduction in the leaders’ feelings of trust toward their ethno-racially similar subordinate.

This study draws on social identity theory and status characteristics theory to explain the contradictory processes and outcomes associated with dyadic ethno-racial similarity and suggests the conditions under which dyad racial similarity is connected with unfavorable outcomes. This framework helps to broaden the boundary conditions of relational demography to provide a more nuanced explanation of when and why minority leaders in demographically similar hierarchical dyads experience more relationship conflict, which ultimately diminishes trust.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Construction strategies for competitive bidding and operations are used to avoid the consequences of poor schedule performance such as delay penalties. Flexible strategies in the form of options can increase project value if uncertain conditions cannot be adequately forecast before operations begin. However, project management purposefully manipulates the project performance that drives the use of options and thereby the value added by options. Therefore project management quality may influence option values. Seeks to address this question.

This research investigates the interaction of project management and option value by operationalizing a common use of real options in construction and valuing the option with different levels of project management quality. A simple but realistic dynamic simulation model of a project is described and exercised to reveal some impacts of project management on option value.

The results support a hypothesis that increased project management quality decreases option value and that real options in managing construction projects can be explained with real options theory. The model structure suggests causal explanations that are consistent with real options theory.

The results suggest that practising managers can significantly increase project value by structuring managerial flexibility and thereby improving their evaluation, development, and use of flexibility. However, ignoring the multiple means of managing uncertainty that are often available can distort valuation. Results also suggest that researchers of strategic flexibility in projects should consider multiple forms of uncertainty in modeling options. Increasing the number of available options or the effectiveness of options in a multiple‐option environment can decrease individual option values.