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Resource reconfiguration enables firms to adapt in dynamic environments by supplementing, removing, recombining, or redeploying resources. Whereas prior research has underscored the merits of resource reconfiguration and the modes for implementing it, little is known about the antecedents of this practice. According to prior research, under given industry conditions, resource reconfiguration is prompted by a firm’s corporate strategy and by characteristics of its knowledge assets. We complement this research by identifying learning from performance feedback as a fundamental driver of resource reconfiguration. We claim that performance decline relative to aspiration motivates the firm’s investment in knowledge reconfiguration, and that this investment is reinforced by the munificence of complementary resources in its industry, although uncertainty about the availability of such resources limits that investment. Testing our conjectures with a sample of 248 electronics firms during the period 1993–2001, we reveal a clear distinction between exploitative reconfiguration, which combines existing knowledge elements, and exploratory reconfiguration, which incorporates new knowledge elements. We demonstrate that performance decline relative to aspiration motivates a shift from exploitative reconfiguration to exploratory reconfiguration. Moreover, munificence of complementary resources mitigates the tradeoff between exploratory and exploitative reconfigurations, whereas uncertainty weakens the motivation to engage in both types of reconfiguration, despite the performance gap. Nevertheless, codeployment, which extends the deployment of knowledge assets to additional domains, is more susceptible to uncertainty than redeployment, which withdraws those assets from their original domain and reallocates them to new domains. Our study contributes to emerging research on resource reconfiguration, extends the literature on learning from performance feedback, and advances research on balancing exploration and exploitation.

Strategic management research has shown growing interest in understanding the dynamic resource reconfiguration processes through which firms grow, evolve, and sustain profitability. The goal of our study is to understand how dynamic resource reconfigurations enable firms to pursue growth opportunities. We use the methods of inductive theory building from case studies to elaborate current theoretical understanding about how firms draw on both internal and external resources in the pursuit of growth. We examine the patterns of resource reconfigurations through which Yahoo and Google powered their early growth strategies in their first 10 years of existence. We analyze a total of 192 new product launches in 43 markets by the two firms to capture how they reconfigured resources dynamically. Our analysis reveals that both firms developed highly dynamic strategies exhibiting both surprising similarities and differences. These similarities and differences provided the basis for our theoretical insights about the development of what we term “dynamic resource platforms,” comprising of (a) dynamic resource shifts; (b) targeted resource orchestration; and (c) complementary processes balancing dynamism and capability development. These ideas contribute novel theoretical insights to current strategic management research on dynamic capabilities and on resource reconfiguration and redeployment.

Firms operate in a market for their corporate assets, wherein important assets being bought and sold are business units. This market is therefore a primary mechanism for firm reconfiguration, and offers the opportunity for firms to gain performance advantage as they prepare for and engage in their boundary-changing moves. This paper focuses on resource reconfiguration between firms, and examines internally and externally driven sources of performance heterogeneity in firms’ use of the market for firm reconfiguration. Viewing between-firm resource reconfiguration through three theoretical lenses surfaces several potential avenues for firm differentiation. For one, the necessity of firms’ possessing capabilities to execute both sides of the external resource reconfiguration transaction – acquisition and divestiture capabilities – is revealed. For another, the institutional prerequisites that are needed in the operating environment for a firm to build a sustainable resource reconfiguration strategy are brought to the fore, and are well illustrated by the private equity industry. Lastly, the potential benefits of using the transactional view of firm scope to animate the study of external resource reconfiguration are raised. Taken together, these elements lead to a research agenda around resource reconfiguration across firm boundaries.

Over the past few years, mathematical and computational models of organizations have attracted a great deal of interest in various fields of scientific research (see Lin & Carley, 1993 for review). The mathematical models have focused on the problem of quantifying the structural (mis)match between organizations and their tasks. The notion of structural congruence has been generalized from the problem of optimizing distributed decision-making in structured decision networks (Pete, Pattipati, Levchuk, & Kleinman, 1998) to the multi-objective optimization problem of designing optimal organizational structures to complete a mission, while minimizing a set of criteria (Levchuk, Pattipati, Curry, & Shakeri, 1996, 1997, 1998). As computational models of decision-making in organizations began to emerge (see Carley & Svoboda, 1996; Carley, 1998; Vincke, 1992), the study of social networks (SSN) continued to focus on examining a network structure and its impact on individual, group, and organizational behavior (Wellman & Berkowitz, 1988). Most models, developed under the SSN, combined formal and informal structures when representing organizations as architectures (e.g., see Levitt et al., 1994; Carley & Svoboda, 1996). In addition, a large number of measures of structure and of the individual positions within the structure have been developed (Roberts, 1979; Scott, 1981; Wasserman & Faust, 1994; Wellman, 1991).

The chapter explores if and how online and face-to-face organizational environments can interact, and if and how this interaction could foster managerial practices to sustain personal growth, organizational development, and employee–organization relationships.

Research project is based on an emblematic case study: Fubles.com is a social sport sharing platform with one of the most active sport communities in Europe. This case is representative of a novel initiative, useful in understanding how social media drive organizational results.

Social media activities do not always substitute face-to-face relationships; online connections can enhance relationships, in terms of quantity, quality, and fairness, generating comprehensive reconfiguration of people practices, before and after the game. Thanks to social networks, organizations can support interpersonal contacts, enabling people to organize collective activities both virtually and physically.

The case advocates three levels of possible organizational reconfigurations through social media (individual, collective, and organizational) that can foster the quality of the employee–organization relationship.

Results suggest that social media are sources of new and innovative ways to interact within and across organizations, reinforcing not only the online interactions, but especially traditional face-to-face connections through a process of reconfiguration of people practices.

The dynamic capabilities perspective focuses on the ability of an organization to develop its resource base in order to meet environmental expectations. Therefore, it is closely interrelated to the issue of managing the interaction of exploration and exploitation. The competence of continuously optimizing the interaction of exploration and exploitation has been referred to as organizational ambidexterity. Managing this interaction implies resolving a firm's permanent struggle to overcome the barriers related to the right configuration between exploration and exploitation.

By incorporating the concept of combinative capabilities as balancing routines into the conceptualization of ambidexterity we distinguish structural, interaction, and socialization capabilities that are deployed in overcoming these barriers to resource (re)configuration.

Drawing on knowledge management and barriers to resource configuration we expect that the way organizations deploy combinative capabilities to manage the interaction between exploration and exploitation depends on the observed barriers to resource (re)configuration. By combining the constructs of barriers to resource reconfiguration, ambidexterity, and combinative capabilities we intend to gain more insight in the way organizations manage the actual interaction between exploration and exploitation. Our paper will introduce a set of propositions indicating the relationship between ambidexterity, barriers to resource (re)configuration, and combinative capabilities as balancing routines.

Strategy research has long understood that reconfiguration of the scope of the activities a firm engages in over time is critical to its long-run success, while under-emphasizing differences in redeployment strategy that underlie apparently similar scope and changes in scope. In this paper, we build on the idea that a firm’s number of activities (scope) and change in activities (turnover) arise from two fundamental rates of redeployment: the rate at which activities are added and the rate at which activities are subtracted. In net, the turnover rate reflects how actively a firm reconfigures its resource base by redeploying resources via addition and subtraction of activities. We develop a model that links addition and subtraction with the composition of a firm’s activities and then provide an empirical illustration using data from the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office. As an example of one extension, the model can be generalized to incorporate elements of absorptive capacity. The analysis contributes to our understanding of how firms reconfigure their activities and provide managers with a clearer understanding of tools that guide redeployment of existing resources.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the organizational reconfiguration of offshoring on firms’ strategies. A consequence of offshoring is the need to reintegrate the geographically relocated organizational activities into a coherent organizational architecture. In order to do this, firms need a high degree of architectural knowledge, which is typically gained through learning by doing. We therefore argue that firms with more offshoring experience are more likely to include organizational objectives in their offshoring strategies. We develop and find support for this hypothesis using a mixed-method approach based on a qualitative case study and comprehensive data from the Offshoring Research Network. These findings contribute to research on the organizational design and architecture of offshoring and the dynamics of organizational architectures.

Rural tourism agents and operators occupy a central role in the use and diffusion of certain social representations of rurality through the mobilization and utilization of specific (yet increasingly global) signs and symbols that, in the urban imaginary, characterize typical and traditional rural settings. Rural tourism promotional materials may contribute to the reconfiguration of the countryside more in accordance with an idealized rural than with the reality of local features. This chapter examines how rural areas and rurality are presented and commodified, using an exploratory content analysis of online and offline materials combined with a survey directed at rural tourism entrepreneurs in five municipalities of two different Italian regions – Campania and Tuscany. Evidence strongly suggests a discrepancy between the real and the portrayed rurality, pointing at the emergence or reinforcement of rural reconfiguration processes, shaped by external and often global images and imaginaries.

This paper introduces the volume on Resource Redeployment and Corporate Strategy, which is devoted to exploring a relatively new justification for how multi-business firms create value – having flexibility to internally redistribute non-financial resources across their businesses. We clarify how a theory around resource flexibility differs from other theories of how multi-business firms create value. We then synthesize the collection of papers in this volume and describe how they contribute to this line of inquiry. Finally, we offer our own views on opportunities for elaboration of this theory.