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This study aims to investigate the influence of social capital on firms’ business strategies, focusing on Miles and Snow (1978) dichotomy between “prospector” and “defender” strategies.

The authors perform multivariate regression analyses using a sample of US firms spanning the period from 1995 to 2021. The authors use a two-stage least squares model to alleviate endogeneity concerns and perform several cross-sectional tests and path analyses.

The authors find a significant and positive association between social capital and defender-type business strategies. Results from cross-sectional analyses reveal that this relationship is more pronounced in highly competitive product markets and among firms led by highly qualified CEOs. In addition, the authors find that CEO compensation mediates the effect of social capital on business strategy. Overall, the results suggest that low social capital regions foster prospector strategies due to managers’ self-maximizing incentives. Finally, the authors find that business strategy acts as a mediating factor, connecting social capital to firms’ financial reporting outcomes.

In light of recent public concerns over declining social capital in major economies and the growing globalization and multiculturism in societies, the findings are of interest to policymakers and the wider society by highlighting the far-reaching implications of social capital on businesses and the capital market.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study documents the first empirical evidence on the association between a society’s social capital and firms’ business strategies. The study contributes to the research on the determinants of a firm’s business strategy and extends the literature on the relationship between social capital and firm behavior.

This research examines the long-held belief in the adaption-related literature that a firm’s ability to adapt organizational structure to changing environments is related to superior performance. We create and test a construct that reflects an organization’s ability to change structure, which we call Supply Chain Structural Adaptability (SCSA), rather than relying on proxies (e.g. structural form or organizational modularity) used in prior studies.

Quantitative data was collected from 218 firms to test our conceptual model.

We find that SCSA has a mixed effect on profitable growth under various environmental conditions.

We find evidence that refutes two widely held assumptions in organization research, namely, that structural form serves as a reasonable proxy for structural adaptability and that the benefits of adaptive capabilities always increase as environmental dynamism increases.

The study analysed the aerospace industry, a traditionally important sector for the topic of risk management, from three complementary perspectives: the supply chain risks present in the sector, the mitigation strategies adopted to face them, and the characteristics (dimensions) observed in the SCRM process of aerospace companies.

The research employed a quali–quantitative method: a survey was carried out, followed by interviews with professionals from companies belonging to different tiers of aerospace supply chains. Interviews helped to interpret the survey data and understand in more detail risk management in aerospace companies.

The study presents a panorama of the aerospace industry in terms of risk management. The sector’s turbulent environment is described as well as the strategies to prevent, minimise or postpone the impact of supply chain risks. In particular, ten dimensions that have been identified in the SCRM process of aerospace firms are discussed. These characteristics influence the objectives of this process and are related to resources, roles and responsibilities, incentives, development of competences and skills, scope (internal and external) and approaches to integrate decisions and actions in the context of the supply chain.

Articles that address the SCRM process usually focus on the process steps, whereas this study investigated dimensions that transcend these steps but whose discussion in the literature is still fragmented. It also analysed a reference sector for the topic from a broader perspective than others available in the literature (supply chain risks, mitigation strategies and characteristics of the SCRM process). Supply chain members with relationships with each other were investigated, a desirable approach for SCRM but still under-explored. The study also answers calls for industry-specific studies and research on emerging countries.