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Based on the transaction cost theory, this paper aims to investigate the impact of cultural distance on international strategic alliance formation and its underlying mechanisms.

This paper uses the investment of foreign firms in the Chinese Venture Capital market as an empirical background, Obtaining VC data from Zero2IPO Private Equity, CVsource Investment Database (2001–2015). This paper chooses the Logit regression method, according to Lind’s three-step method to test the inverted U-shaped relationship.

The empirical analysis of foreign venture capital firms invested in China revealed that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between cultural distance and the possibility of international strategic alliances. This relationship is the result of two opposing mechanisms, which are the need and the feasibility of international strategic alliances. In addition, this study further examined the moderating effects of social embeddedness and social reputation, revealing the boundary effects on the complex relationship between cultural distance and possible international strategic alliance formation.

This study focuses on cultural difference, which is a key factor leading to a firm’s transaction costs. Based on the transaction cost theory, this paper investigates the impact of cultural distance on international strategic alliance formation and its underlying mechanisms.

Strategic group has been intensively studied since this term emerged in 1970s, but previous studies have been limited to the comparisons between groups such as performance comparison. The purpose of this paper is to explore the internal structure of strategic groups by examining the effect of strategic distance from a firm to the center of its strategic group on firm performance.

The research is based on data acquired from the annual reports of listed companies and some Chinese domestic databases, including CSMAR Solution, WIND financial database, and China Core Newspapers Full-text Database. After grouping listed pharmaceutical companies in China over the period 2010-2011, the authors test three hypotheses by using fixed effect regressions.

The paper finds that the strategic distance from a firm to the center of its strategic group has a significant negative effect on the firm's financial performance. Two factors are discovered to influence that effect: corporate diversification strengthens the negative effect of strategic distance on performance, while firm's media visibility weakens that negative effect.

The findings reveal the relationship between intra-group strategic positioning and firm performance, and specify how firms can gain competitive advantage through positioning choices and strategic actions. This study promotes the establishment of a more comprehensive strategic group theory by revealing the structure within strategic groups.

We investigate the dynamics of competitive repositioning of firms in the deregulated U.S. airline industry (1979–1995) in terms of a firm's target market, strategic posture, and resource endowment relative to other firms in the industry. We suggest that, despite strong inertia in competitive positions, the direction of repositioning responds to external and internal alignment considerations. For external alignment, we examined how firms changed their competitive positioning to mimic the positions of similar, successful firms, and to differentiate themselves when experiencing intense rivalry. For internal alignment, we examined how firms changed their position in each dimension to align with the other dimensions of positioning. This internal alignment led to convergent positioning moves for firms with similar resource endowments and strategic postures, and divergent moves for firms with similar target markets and strategic postures. The evidence suggests that repositioning moves in terms of target markets and resource endowments are more sensitive to external and internal alignment considerations, but that changes in strategic posture are subject to very high inertia and do not appear to respond well to alignment considerations.

The paper aims to provide administrators with a comprehensive view of the necessity for careful strategic planning to deal with the emerging “virtu‐versity.”

This paper examines current trends in e‐learning in the USA and extrapolates its impact to provide strategic guidance for colleges as they consider issues related to organization and governance, physical facilities and virtual environments.

The paper provides a suggested list of areas to consider before and during the transformation that leads to more on‐line courses and programs.

The paper is not based on empirical research and is confined primarily to what is occurring in the USA.

The paper offers an overview that can help administrators begin and continue planning for the explosion of e‐learning.

This paper gives a general and balanced view of the need for strategic positioning in considering how e‐learning may continue to affect higher education.

This paper, anchored in the resource‐based view of the firm, attempts to develop linkages between firm‐level resources, Porter's competitive strategy space and firm performance and explores them in the context of a new industry – the marketing technology industry.

In the marketing technology industry the authors classify resource configurations (generalists, specialists, innovators) which group firms with distinctive competences on similar resource dimensions. They then map these firm‐level resource configurations onto their respective optimal strategies in the industry's competitive strategy space.

The major findings are: some firms that are close together in strategy space vary in performance; some firms that are close together in strategy space belong to quite different resource configurations; firms that belong to the same resource configuration (i.e. are close together in resource space and distant from others) vary in performance; given the origin (i.e. resource configuration) of a new entrant there exists an optimal strategy that can be theoretically defined; and corresponding to each resource configuration there seems to exist a unique optimal region in strategy space.

It is one of few attempts to empirically explore the parallels between firm level resource‐based and industry level competitive strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the current status of strategic group theory in the light of developments over the last three decades. and then to discuss the continuing value of the concept, both to strategic management research and practising managers.

Critical review of the idea of strategic groups together with a practical strategic mapping illustration.

Strategic group theory still provides a useful approach for management research, which allows a detailed appraisal and comparison of company strategies within an industry.

Strategic group research would undoubtedly benefit from more directly comparable, industry‐specific studies, with a more careful focus on variable selection and the statistical methods used for validation. Future studies should aim to build sets of industry specific variables that describe strategic choice within that industry. The statistical methods used to identify strategic groupings need to be robust to ensure that strategic groups are not solely an artefact of method.

The paper looks specifically at an application of strategic group theory in the UK pharmaceutical industry. The practical benefits of strategic groups as a classification system and of strategic mapping as a strategy development and analysis tool are discussed.

The review of strategic group theory alongside alternative taxonomies and application of the concept to the UK pharmaceutical industry.

This paper aims to propose an integrated framework combining the cost-reduction rationale and the institution-leveraging rationale to explain how institutional distance, both formal and informal, influences emerging multinational enterprises (EMNEs)’ foreign direct investment (FDI) location choice. This paper also explores the moderating role of EMNEs’ FDI experience and strategic intent on value chain positioning as a reflection of firm heterogeneities, on the link between institutional distance and location choice.

This paper tests the hypotheses based on a firm-level longitudinal data set of FDI by Chinese EMNEs. The unique data are manually collected from Chinese companies listed on Shenzhen and Shanghai Stock Exchanges, composed of 250 FDI entries of 122 manufacturing firms from 2006 to 2010. The conditional logit model is used to estimate the proposed main effect and moderating effect.

Cultural distance does not deter Chinese EMNEs’ entrance in general, but firms investing in low value-added manufacturing subsidiaries are more likely to choose culturally similar countries than those investing in high value-added subsidiaries such as in upstream R&D and downstream marketing. Formal institutional distance with positive direction promotes Chinese EMNEs’ entrance, and this effect is enhanced when firms have less FDI experience and have the strategic intent to invest in high value-added subsidiaries.

This paper contributes to the current literature by identifying a holistic view of the institutional influences on FDI location choice of EMNEs and revealing how firm-level heterogeneities, particularly FDI experience and strategic intent of subsidiary value chain positioning, shape the boundary conditions of the institutional effects in different ways.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute a multilevel, cross-national analysis of the role that sociocultural context may play to enrich the understanding of strategic renewal in family firms. The authors conceptualize sociocultural context as consisting of firm-level social contexts and national culture, and propose that: heterogeneous social contexts in family firm management, i.e. family CEO and multigenerational involvement, give rise to mindsets that have differential effects on renewal efforts and that the proposed effects are subject to variation due to the moderation of national cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and power distance.

The authors use unique date set consisting of 959 family firms from 26 countries drawn from a cross-national, quantitative study of family firms.

The authors found that family CEO is negatively related to renewal across cultures, and this relationship is attenuated by uncertainty avoidance and power distance. In addition, multigenerational involvement is positively related to renewal, and this relationship is enhanced by the two cultural dimensions.

The authors suggest that decision makers examine how different contexts, practices and cognition contribute to overall dominant logics that exist in firm. In doing so, they can evaluate how logics as a whole affect renewal, and also how different parts of the logics play a role. This overall evaluation will afford managers a holistic picture of renewal forces that operate in family firm and allow managers to make precise changes to enhance strategic renewal.

The findings support the contention that there is cultural-dependent countervailing effects on strategic renewal within family firms.

This paper has two objectives in the area of industrialised small- and medium-sized industrial company (SME) export activity. First, it responds to the gap in the literature on the role of market intelligence in the interrelations between perceived psychic distance, marketing mix decisions and export performance. The second objective concerns the influence of resource heterogeneity (size and export department) in the proposed model.

The current paper tests a posited research model and its hypotheses using the data from a multi-sector sample of exporters (196 Spanish industrial SMEs). The data are analyzed using a partial least squares approach.

The results of the empirical study show that: strategic decisions to adapt marketing mix elements to suit foreign markets have a positive effect on export performance; strategic adaptations are more numerous when export managers perceive a greater psychic distance; an export department helps develop market intelligence ability, which positively moderates the impact of strategic adaptations on export performance; and size does not have a significant effect on the interrelations studied.

Export managers in industrial SMEs can use the results and conclusions of this present paper to systematise their decision-making in export activity.

This paper makes a significant contribution towards covering an important gap in research into industrial SME exporters, by demonstrating the importance of market intelligence in export activity.