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The purpose of this paper is to explore and illustrate how organizations may use online communities strategically to adapt to a changing business environment, specifically from a dynamic capabilities perspective.

The paper presents empirical evidence from three cases.

Online communities may help organizations to adapt to a changing business environment by allowing them to sense opportunities and threats, seize opportunities and reconfigure organizational assets.

The paper contributes to both the strategy and the information systems literatures by providing empirical insights into the strategic use of online communities.

The results of the paper are relevant for managers, helping them to understand the strategic role online communities (may) play and illustrating ways to use them accordingly.

The paper addresses a previously defined gap in the literature and provides novel empirical evidence. As online communities become integral parts of digital strategy and open innovation initiatives, the paper is both timely and relevant.

This paper aims to identify and conceptualize a set of relational capabilities that school libraries in the Alentejo region of Portugal develop for acquiring new knowledge that exists externally in the wider community.

A qualitative research design operationalized via case studies was followed for the empirical analysis. Empirical findings are based on the analysis of the 84 narrative reports submitted by school libraries as part of a national performance evaluation exercise that took place between 2010 and 2012. Data analysis followed the techniques of inductive data categorization, within case-analysis, and cross-case analysis.

The exploration of the relational capabilities that school libraries in the Alentejo region of Portugal develop for acquiring new knowledge that exists externally in the community resulted in the identification of relationships that school libraries in the region have established to acquire new knowledge: connecting with and supporting organizations committed to civic engagement; facilitating discussions about challenging issues through strategic partnerships; convening community conversations to identify shared concerns and solutions; and embracing local culture to foster endogenous development.

The ability to seek and recognize the value of new and external knowledge, assimilate it and apply it to organizational ends has been traditionally linked to the concept of absorptive capacity. While absorptive capacity literature in business settings is prolific, literature that focuses on school libraries’ ability to identify and explore external knowledge and applying it to improve their performance is scarce. Focusing on the specific context of the Alentejo region of Portugal as an archetypical rural area, this paper identifies how knowledge existing externally in the community is absorbed by rural school libraries through specific relational capabilities that reflect school libraries’ community orientation and engagement in participatory processes that develop social resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how, and by whom, institutional logics are determined in the action of sustainable organisation. The authors analyse a supply chain network structure to understand how multiple stakeholders' perceptions of sustainability emerge into a dominant logic and diffuse across an organisational field.

Stakeholder network theory provides novel insights into emerging logics within a chocolate supply chain network. Semi-structured interviews with 35 decision-makers were analysed alongside 269 company documents to capture variations in emergent logics. The network was mapped to include 63 nodes and 366 edges to analyse power structure and mechanisms.

The socio-economic organising principles of sustainable organisation, their sources of power and their logics are identified. Economic and social logics are revealed, yet the dominance of economic logics creates risks to their coexistence. Logics are largely shaped in pre-competitive activities, and resource fitness to collaborative clusters limits access for non-commercial actors.

Powerful firms use network structures and collaborative and concurrent inter-organisational relationships to define and diffuse their conceptualisation of sustainability and restrict competing logics.

This novel study contributes to sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) through presenting the socio-economic logic as a new conceptual framework to understand the action of sustainable organisation. The identification of sophisticated mechanisms of power and hegemonic control in the network opens new research agendas.

Doing business in depleted contexts requires the adoption of an unconventional strategic orientation based on the involvement of the local community and driven by the attainment of economic, environmental and social goals. Previous studies have explored the specific nature of community enterprises (CEs); notwithstanding, little attention has been paid to the understanding of the strategic posture adopted by community entrepreneurs to overcome difficulties and make the business up. In this vein, the study aims to investigate how CEs operating in depleted contexts manage to survive, by successfully achieving multiple – conflicting – goals.

The authors adopted the Humane Entrepreneurship (HumEnt) framework as a form of institutional entrepreneurship where resources are leveraged to evolve the institutional context. This research adopts the case study strategy, focusing on Italian rural CEs.

The HumEnt approach, which takes into account both economic and non-economic and altruistic values of entrepreneurs, turned as better suited – compared to other approaches – to explain why people try to make business in such high-risk contexts. Second, the holistic approach of the HumEnt framework allowed catching up the particular mechanism that has enabled the CEs to obtain positive achievement.

The adoption of the HumEnt perspective enabled us to understand better the way CEs may survive and even grow where other initiatives have failed.

This study aims to promote strategic maritime management as a new emerging discipline to foster research in strategic maritime issues.

An existing academic discipline maturity model is adapted by including four phases of dynamic evolutionary paths to evaluate the phase of maturity of a research discipline. The model is validated by means of two matured disciplines: strategic management and maritime economics.

It is found that the current research of strategic maritime management is at a phase of emergence of discipline and ready to move to the maturity phase. It is also found that the evolution of the path of strategic maritime management resembles the early evolution path of strategic management but lags 30 years behind. Future research directions of strategic maritime management can be referred to the research streams in the maturity phase of strategic management.

The adapted academic discipline maturity model brings in the longitudinal and dynamic perspectives of the evolution of an academic discipline, which helps maritime strategists identify gaps and opportunities and evaluate the appropriateness of applying a strategic management paradigm to a specific research topic.

The adapted academic discipline maturity model brings in the longitudinal and dynamic perspective of the evolution of an academic discipline, which helps maritime strategists define the gaps and opportunities in strategic maritime management research.

Implementations of inter-organizational networks are common, following a growing diversity of cooperative modes between the independent companies associated in these networks.

Their scientific analysis has recently intensified, attention to network structures obviously including the study of the way their performance can be measured. Although academic research has mostly dealt with the performance of the network’s members, the concern of this article is rather with the performance of the global network.

Among the numerous forms of existing inter-organizational networks, maritime port communities are complex organizations which have to deal with operational synchronization, strategic cohesiveness and global performance measurement problems.

This article therefore mainly describes a port performance measurement system (PPMS): built in a predominantly empirical research context, the performance model and the associated measurement indicators illustrate the kind of network-level dedicated, performance control systems, on which port communities need to rely when designing their global strategy.

Drawing on a unique case of a Web 3.0 recruitment campaign, the purpose of this paper is to explore how a Web 3.0 social media recruitment communication strategy influence, add value to and challenge conventional recruitment communication management.

The study draws on a reflexive dialogical research approach, which means that it is methodologically designed as a critical dialogue between on the one hand an empirical case and on the other hand theories on social media and strategic communication.

The study points toward a fundamental new approach to recruitment communication. The application of a Web 3.0 strategy entails what we term an open source recruitment strategy and a redirection of employee focus from work life to private life. These insights point toward ontologically challenging the basic assumptions of employees, work life and the employing organization.

The paper presents a single-case study, which prepares the ground for larger, longitudinal studies. Such studies may apply a more long-term focus on the implications of applying Web 3.0 recruitment strategies and how they may be integrated into – or how they challenge – overall corporate communication strategies.

A turn toward Web 3.0 in recruitment communication affects the degree of interactional complexity and the level of managerial control. Furthermore, the authors argue that the utilization of a Web 3.0 strategy in recruitment communication put forth precarious dilemmas and challenges of controllability, controversy, ownership and power relations, demanding organizations to cautiously entering the social media 3.0 employment market.

This study indicates how the value and potentials of social media as facilitating participatory processes and community conversations can be strategically used in and fundamentally alter recruitment communication, and hence offers new insights into a paradigmatically new way of understanding what strategic social media recruitment is, can and do.