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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the service infusion literature explains competitive advantage through services. The four strategic management theories – competitive forces, the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, and relational view – are applied in the analysis.

A systematic literature review analyzes the links between the service infusion and strategy literature.

The review reveals that although discussion of service infusion applies strategic management concepts, the stream lacks rigor with respect to construct definition and justification. Additionally, contextual variables are often missing. The result is an over-emphasis of contextually bound measures, such as technology, and focal actors.

The growing trends toward social networks, co-specialization, actor dependency and shared resources encourage service infusion scholars to focus on network-related and relational capabilities, co-opetition, open business models, and relational rent extraction. Furthermore, service infusion research would benefit from considering strategy-based theoretical discussions, constructs, and constraints that would improve the scientific rigor, impact and contribution.

This paper represents a systematic attempt to link the service infusion literature with strategic management theories and thoroughly analyzes the knowledge gaps and possible misconceptions.

The combined roles of strategic planning and decentralized strategy-making remain an essential issue in strategy research and its resolution has implications for management practice. To this end the current study considers the added effects of adopted leadership style and use of interactive controls and thereby uncovers new interesting insights about the combined strategy-making process. The authors use structural equation analyses to investigate these more fine-grained relationships based on an updated cross-sectional dataset from among the largest companies in Denmark. The analyses find that a participative leadership style drives the application of interactive controls, which in turn has a positive interaction effect on the relationship between strategic planning and corporate performance. A participative leadership style also exerts positive influence on autonomous strategic actions, which in turn has a negative direct relationship to performance, but a positive interaction effect on performance together with use of interactive controls. The authors discuss the theoretical foundation for these intricate relationships and consider opportunities to extract further research insights.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new framework for exploring the key elements of strategy workshops and provide empirical evidence on how these can influence strategy making within a firm.

The research is based on structuration theory and the “practice” view of strategy. The empirical data are based on a longitudinal case study, including ethnographic data, extensive observations and interviews.

The findings show that strategy workshops are institutionalized as part of a firm's strategy‐making process, and provide a forum for strategic discourse facilitated through knowledge‐sharing and/or promotion of strategic consensus. Strategy workshops may, however, also constrain strategy making through opposition and rejection of participation which may lead to strategic paralysis.

This research propose guidelines for managers on the effective preparation and management of strategy workshops.

The paper provides a new framework to explore key elements of strategy workshops and evidence of how these influence strategy making. The research highlights the dualistic nature of strategy workshops in strategy making.

In this chapter, the authors describe and explain how executive management enacts strategizing routines to strengthen their entrepreneurial agility, as a precondition to make new strategic moves possible. The authors contribute to the routine dynamics research program, by showing how the dynamics of routines, in a strategy context, shape strategic outcomes: the authors describe four strategizing routines – distancing, evaluating, experimenting, and re-assembling – as a particular promising focus for routine and strategy research. The authors discuss executive management’s enactment of such routines as part of their strategy work. The authors show how routine enactment makes entrepreneurial agility and new strategic moves possible. By exploring the dynamics of strategizing routines and their impact on strategic outcomes, the authors at the same time benefit from and contribute to the strategy-as-practice research program. Empirically, the authors study how the executive management of Hoechst AG successfully made unthinkable new strategic moves possible, discussable, and realizable in the context of the corporation’s strategic transformation between 1994 and 1996.

The characteristics of new public management and new public governance are well known, but their impact on managerial knowledge needs and the implementation of knowledge management in local government remains unclear. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the key elements of a public organization’s knowledge strategy and shows how knowledge management can support public management.

A case study on the application of an action research process was conducted to study how the City of Tampere in Finland aimed to overcome challenges in utilizing performance information by applying the ideas of knowledge management.

The study suggests that a holistic knowledge management strategy promotes the use of performance information by providing a systematic management framework for gathering and utilizing the information.

Four factors appear critical for strategic knowledge management in local government. First, it should be driven by the city’s strategy. Second, it should be carefully integrated into the general management system. Third, clear processes and responsibilities for refining the data are needed. Fourth, the quality of the data must be guaranteed. The results also emphasize the roles of management culture and continuous performance dialogue.

This paper makes two contributions. First, it extends the analysis of a knowledge management strategy to public management, and second, it provides a practical illustration of the development process, where knowledge was put into prime focus in developing public management.

The purpose of this research is to explore the effects of the diversity of experience and different personalities of top management team members on mediating processes such as agenda‐setting, the generating of strategic alternatives, and the speed of strategic decision making. Previous research has studied the effects of top management team characteristics on strategic decision‐making and performance by analyzing team demographics such as age and tenure – with ambiguous results.

In a multi‐case study approach, 46 members of eight top management teams were interviewed and surveyed.

The study suggests that the ambiguity of research results can be decreased by: introducing more deep‐level measures; and further differentiating the mediating processes. The results indicate that diversity of experience affects agenda‐setting and the generating of alternatives but – unexpectedly – does not appear to affect the speed of decision making. Personality factors such as flexibility, achievement motivation, networking abilities, and action orientation seem to have a clearer impact on decision speed.

This study suggests ways to build successful teams by differentiating between the effects of experiences and personalities of team members. Furthermore, it indicates that teams might be able to compensate for different strengths and weaknesses within the team, and stresses the importance of transparent strategic objectives and leadership.

This study extends existing research by proposing ways to reduce the ambiguity of recent research results regarding the effects of management teams on strategic decision making. It is based on a broad empirical research and offers theoretical and managerial implications.

This paper aims to conceptualise the interplay of strategic design and market-shaping capabilities.

Drawing on the emergent scholarly discourses related to strategic design and dynamic markets, this paper merges a contemporary view of markets and market-shaping capabilities with a conceptual exploration of strategic design.

This paper proposes that the strategic design process can shape markets through orchestrating and leveraging market-shaping capabilities. Specifically, it highlights how these capabilities trigger and facilitate purposeful intent; situated and systemic understanding; and collective collaboration.

Furthering the notion of strategic design, this paper contributes to clarifying how to interpret and use design as a strategic practice in business management.

This paper identifies strategic design as an innovative approach for creating future value-creating systems or markets, and as such, it develops a process framework for market-shaping capabilities, addressing the “how” of market shaping.

This paper reports the findings of in‐depth case study research carried out with the board of a UK family business. The research was designed to explore interaction amongst directors seeking to achieve agreement on a key strategic issue in one of their quarterly board meetings. In particular there is a focus on the extent to which there is parity between individual directors’ own opinions and views about this strategic issue, contributions they made in the boardroom and the collective agreement reached.

Strategic management is traditionally seen as an exclusive managerial task rather than inclusive where accountability is reserved for top managers. However, contemporary strategy management practices increasingly pay attention to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by engaging with broader internal and external stakeholders via more open business models such as ecosystems. Hence, central to our examination is the concept of openness disposition, which in the context of strategic management refers to the tendency of individuals, collectives, and managers to make strategy transparent, participatory, and/or inclusive, or look for closure. While openness in strategy is regarded as a positive means of contemporary management, fostering diversity, creativity, innovation, and empowerment, there are some researched downsides too. The purpose of this chapter is to address the openness puzzle in strategy and gain a deeper understanding of the dilemmas of bottom-up strategy initiatives, and investigate the associated dilemmas, if any in the context of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We contribute to addressing the performative effects of the dynamic expansion and contraction in openness within the SME strategy process while using the concept of openness dilemmas, tensions, and disposition. Using the Management Control Theory, this chapter will combine theory with SME practitioners’ experiences of bottom-up strategy initiatives to increase EDI in their organisations. Based on findings that emerged from a four-year longitudinal multiple case study research with 10 European SMEs, we found that bottom-up strategy exercises are more interactive. They consider a greater number of views, increase legitimacy, and EDI at the workplace, and yield more process benefits, but are time-consuming and difficult to organise that require special attention to the capability, reciprocity, and credibility dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of screens which would filter in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs that make business sense for a firm and screen out those that do not. This process based set of screens filter CSR initiatives based on certain inclusion and exclusion parameters. This paper further presents an integrated conceptualization of a strategic CSR framework. The CSR programs that pass through the set of screens are evaluated based on its strategic characteristics and the business gains from it.

This paper is conceptual in nature. The approach adopted in this paper is first to set the study context by presenting the extant literature on CSR and strategic management. Further based upon the perspectives from extant literature, the author incrementally builds an integrated framework on strategic CSR by using and providing logical arguments.

This conceptual paper presents new and richer theoretical perspectives on strategic CSR and thus extending the known theoretical knowledge boundaries on CSR. Further, insights could be gathered if the strategic CSR theoretical framework developed in this paper is studied empirically.

The perspectives on strategic CSR developed in this paper would help managers to design strategic CSR programs based on its focus and direction, proactiveness, activity nature, characteristics, and benefits.

In the past some scholars had attempted to develop framework on designing strategic CSR. In this paper, the author attempts to provide a more holistic and yet comprehensive theoretical perspective on strategic CSR initiatives. CSR managers can use this framework to design their CSR initiatives and manage their firm's CSR initiatives in a more effective and efficient manner.