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All leaders must position their firms for future success. However, not all firms should search for information and craft their strategies in the same way. This paper aims to provide a framework, which suggests that firms should adopt different postures depending on extent of environmental uncertainty and whether leaders are optimistic or pessimistic about their firms’ abilities and futures.

This framework was designed by two strategy professors based on both strategy theory and their experience working with and observing firms over many years.

The framework’s four postures – versatile (high uncertainty, positive sentiment), inquisitive (high uncertainty, negative sentiment), focused (low uncertainty, positive sentiment), and vigilant (low uncertainty, negative sentiment) – call for different behavior as firms seek to understand environmental trends and take strategic actions. The dangers of each posture are briefly discussed.

This paper provides a simple framework to help executives better understand how their firms should search for and implement strategic actions for future success.

In 1985, I was moving along a more or less definable disciplinary path, writing qualitative sociology guided by my understanding of leading symbolic interactionist texts, productively disturbed by affection for Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Although there were prior lines of influence, my writing then was focused especially on various “social constructionist” projects, first with Peter Conrad (Conrad & Schneider, 1992 [1980]; Schneider & Conrad, 1983) and then with Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (Kitsuse & Schneider, 1984, 1989). I also read closely and had many conversations with Anselm Strauss about how to do what he and Barney Glaser called “grounded theory” and with Howard Becker about “doing sociology.” Not only did I feel that I was getting better at doing ethnography or field work and “writing it up,” as we put it in Sociology, I felt I was engaged in an epistemologically superior practice relative to the more quantitative and structurally oriented work that was then and still is defined as “mainstream” (a land from which I had emigrated, gradually, after the Ph.D.).

Norman Denzin organized the Urbana SSSI Stone Symposium, where I first met Patricia. He and I share the dual identities of sociologist and communication scholar. Given all he has published as well as the publishing opportunities he has provided others, Norman has done more for interpretive social sciences and symbolic interaction than anyone I know. He has been instrumental in my career, especially when I was a young scholar. The first person to identify my work as schizophrenic, Norman said I made a plea for interpretive, imaginative inquiry, and then turned hard science against it. This was a transforming moment, a moment in which I stopped judging my creative work by the standards of traditional science and instead focused on articulating what my work contributed to understanding emotionality and meaning in our lives. As a colleague and friend, Norman's role in my life is personal and political.

This case details the rise of a hard-disk storage manufacturer in the mid-1980s and the company's demise after executives manipulated the financial information.

In the Introduction to this Festschrift honoring Norman K. Denzin, the author chronicles Denzin's contributions to the academy over the last 55 years. In so doing, he provides personal reflections on numerous interactions with Denzin, particularly as it relates to mentorship and the forging of community within qualitative inquiry. Also included are brief overviews of all of the articles that comprise the Festschrift.

In this story, I provide a personal history of Norman Denzin's profound influence on the development of interpretive qualitative inquiry, and on me, over the past 30 years. Norman saw the need to move qualitative inquiry from the field to the text to the reader in order to meet the needs of a new and broadening global generation of qualitative researchers, writers, and performance artists who did not want merely to describe the world but rather to interpret, critique, and change it. Through new journals, handbooks, and international/cross-disciplinary conferences, Norman provided the leadership and kindness that inspired the development of a new global community of qualitative researchers committed to social justice and to showing how to feel the sufferings of others.

This interpretive biography of Norman K. Denzin traces some of the important turns and moments of his intellectual development and prodigious publication. One focus includes his editorial role for the first 52 volumes of Studies in Symbolic Interaction (1978–2020), and how his vision for an inclusive community of qualitative researchers and interpretive scholars emerged and changed.

Collaboration has been referred to as the driving force behind effective supply chain management and may be the ultimate core capability. However, there is a fairly widespread belief that few firms have truly capitalized on its potential. A study was undertaken to assess the current level of supply chain collaboration and identify best practice.

Supply chain executives provided insights into collaboration. Survey data, personal interviews, and a review of the collaboration literature were used to develop a conceptual model profiling behavior, culture, and relational interactions associated with successful collaboration.

Positive collaboration‐related outcomes include enhancements to efficiency, effectiveness, and market positions for the respondents' firms.

The small sample size represents a limitation, but is balanced by the quality of the respondent base and their expertise/experience. Another limitation involves securing input from only one party to the collaborative relationships. Developing a longitudinal study would help determine how collaboration‐related factors and relationships change over time.

Several respondents mentioned a “blurring of lines” between organizations contrasted to an “us vs them” approach. This was expressed in a number of different ways – treating the arrangements as if they both were part of the same operation, treating them as co‐owned, and employing a new focus on the best common solution. Many of the respondents indicating rewards are not distributed evenly still admitted they get enough “out of” the collaborative arrangements to make it worthwhile.

Real‐world practical experiences are recounted involving many of today's top companies.

This chapter is a tribute to GOAT (Greatest of All Time) scholar/teacher/mentor, Norman K. Denzin. Honoring Denzin's use of song lyrics (2018a, 2015, 2011, 2008), I use a fishing theme. Why fishing? When asked to write a Festschrift, I immediately remembered Denzin's essay, Searching for Yellowstone (2003a). Though Denzin mentions fishing in an earlier work (1999a, p. 153), I identified with his story of his grandfather's love of fishing (p. 307). Later, I came to understand, through his stories and life experiences how something that was once unpleasant – fishing – became a sport that he loves. Denzin often employs song lyrics to show how theory and the site of memory influence poststructural, qualitative inquiry. His exceptional use of critical cultural and social theories, and exemplary performative autoethnographic teaching, writing and mentorship has influenced students and scholars since 1966 – the year I was born. Reflecting on Norman K. Denzin's body of work – emphasizing teaching and mentorship from 1998 to present – through fishing, seems fitting.