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The purpose of the paper is to justify the research programme and describe the conclusions.

This paper is a summary of the aims and results of the research published in two special issues of Journal of Management Development. It argues that there are three fundamental issues that must be examined in order to resolve the conundrums of business strategy: the semantics; the structures; and the epistemology and ontology of the subject. To achieve this aim, four papers (Part 1) cover the literature that allows for a research aim to be developed. In the subsequent papers (Part 2), strategic thinking is reframed. An inductive frame is created to develop a model to help small business principals understand the need to think strategically about their business. The proposition that better strategy can be generated if answers are found to quality questions, rather than quality solutions found for poorly posed questions, is examined. A deductive frame of fundamental questions is created based on this concept and finally a reflective frame, which is “critically anti‐management”, provides the mechanism for the inductive and deductive frames to be applied to small business. The methodology is presented by French in “Action research for practising managers” in this issue and this paper is the summary of the research.

A research aim is developed: to examine critically the theory of business strategy and reframe strategic thinking in order to develop and test a viable small business strategic process. Thus, strategic thinking is (critically) reframed and emergence explored beyond the (modernist and postmodernist) “box” of traditional strategic management.

Small business principals have access to an integrated system of strategic frames that have been developed and tested using action research. Consequently the small business principal can be confident that the strategic process has both academic and practitioner credibility.

Parker suggests that little work has been done in the field of strategy in any non‐modernist paradigm. The author believes that this may be one of the early comprehensive studies in this field to utilise both critical theory, in the form of critical management studies, and to apply this epistemology to firms that are considered to be complex self‐adapting systems. The consequence is that there is now a theoretical answer to the problems of both Mintzberg, because there is now a mechanism for emergence, and of Hamel, because there is no longer a gap in the strategy discipline, we have a mechanism for strategy creation.

The business engineering (BE) methodology is used to design process-oriented and customer-centred companies in a systematic and holistic way. However, BE demands a high learning effort with regard to the logical flow, instruments and supporting software. The purpose of this paper is to explore which elements of action learning are most useful regarding BE.

To enable students to learn BE, a graduate-level course based on action learning is designed. Within a one-week schedule, participants are guided through the three phases of BE covering 31 learning elements. A post-test measures the learning experience. Regression analysis identifies elements that lead to high learning performance.

Results from five courses with 79 students reveal that action learning is useful to obtain declarative and procedural knowledge of BE. Learning elements delivering theoretical input and the use of an exemplary case could be reduced, while more time should be devoted to group work on a self-developed case study.

The paper is based on a specific course design for the topic of BE, which might limit the results’ transferability to other business process management (BPM) teaching areas. However, it provides implications about the decisive elements for learning how to design process-oriented companies.

The results can be used by instructors to design more meaningful courses on BE.

The paper delivers new insights into how issues of BPM should be taught. This area, particularly regarding BE, has received little research attention.

Destination Marketing was the main theme of the 40th AIEST CONGRESS in Marrakech. The various contributions and discussions to this Congress inspired the author to attempt to define destinations, products and/ or groups of products, as well as strategic business fields more precisely, and against this background to discuss the opportunities and risks involve in positioning destinations and giving them a clear profile.

The purpose of this paper is to review the semantics of the language of management in order to seek clarification of the terminology and how it is used and misused in the strategy literature.

An extensive review of the literature was undertaken.

Managerial language has been used to obfuscate and politicise the managerial process, especially the strategic process. In order to develop the ideas of the strategy specialty the use and misuse of the words in the strategy lexicon must be understood. The problem that the lack of consistency creates is, that in trying to assess the strategic process in the literature and in practice, it is often impossible to know exactly what strategic methodology is being expressed.

Rather than concentrate on definitions of strategy it is necessary to seek to understand how the terminology is applied and then allocate the meaning of the terms to the school of strategic ideas that the writer/scholar espouses in each relevant paper that is published.

It is necessary to recognise how the words in the strategy literature have subtle, different meanings and the way to understand the usage is to apply the terminology to a school of thought.

This paper proposes the “fields and weapons of the competition model applied to business networks” – CAC-Redes (in Portuguese, Campos e Armas da Competição – Redes de negócio), an extension of the fields and weapons of the competition model (CAC) – to study the competition and competitiveness of companies operating in business networks in a competitive environment while integrating organizational competencies, interorganizational ties and company positioning to provide competitive advantage.

CAC-Redes is born from the cross-fertilization process of various theoretical perspectives, namely, industrial organization, traditional view of operational activities and resources, relational view, strategic alignment, transaction cost theory and social perspectives in networks, structured according to systems theory and under the mantle of competitive advantage theory. To discover the structure of existing models of competitiveness in networks, a bibliographic search was conducted in the Scopus database. Quali-quantitative empirical research was undertaken in companies from six different economic sectors through structured questionnaires and personal interviews to understand how companies competed and discover the determining factors of their competitive advantage.

Only seven models of competitiveness in network were found, and their structures and characteristics are quite different from those of CAC-Redes. Empirical research confirms all the hypotheses that support CAC-Redes, which, combined with those of CAC, indicate the CAC-Redes corroboration.

CAC-Redes does not apply to networks without intercompany competition, studies on network governance and corporate strategy formulation.

CAC-Redes is effective in studying complex competitiveness phenomena because it considers multiple influences; provides a process based on qualitative and quantitative variables that increase the probability of formulating successful competitive strategies; simplifies the differentiation of skills from core competencies and determines them; proposes a competitive advantage criterion to select suppliers; creates a unifying language to represent the different strategic specificities of companies, competitors, suppliers, customers and the company environment and provides a library containing 181 weapons (resources) and dozens of interorganizational ties that can be used in empirical studies with other methodologies.

CAC-Redes, due to its originality and peculiarities, theoretically contributes to theory of resources because it dispenses with the assumption, “unique resource, source of competitive advantage”; to relational view because it considers interorganizational relationships as a competence and treats it quali-quantitatively and to core competencies because if the strategy changes, different core competencies will be needed. Furthermore, it is an alternative to the dynamic capabilities perspective, and it transforms the five manufacturing performance objectives into nine for the entire company.

CAC-Redes is an original model because its structure and characteristics comparatively differ from those of existing models, and 14 singularities are detected.

This chapter contends that the international business (IB) and strategic management (SM) fields have many commonalities that should be considered in a turbulent globalized business context. IB studies refer to the need for local integration and local adaptation whereas empirics in SM pinpoint the complementary effects of central planning and decentralized decision-making. We present and synthesize these rather field specific perspectives and try to synthesize insights from both fields in an adaptive strategy-making model including the effects of autonomous subsidiary initiatives and intended mandates from corporate headquarters. The model considers local subsidiary actions of both operational and strategic nature and we argue that it may be futile to distinguish between these effects as incremental operational responses can cumulate into more substantial changes over time with dimensions of strategic adaptation. The model provides a foundation for further considerations about how to combine central intent and direction with decentralization and autonomous initiatives in the multinational corporation.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Strategic management researchers in Europe challenged the historical concern of the field with economic performance. As a result corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been transformed into a key strategic issue. Given the large amount of social problems in Latin America, much of them related to the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows over the last decade, the growing literature on strategic corporate social responsibility (SCSR) produced in the US has been reproduced in the region by consulting firms, big corporations firms and strategic management researchers. Drawing upon critical arguments of Latin American scholars on the dominance of the US literature in the region and on problematic outcomes of the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows this paper develops a critical analysis on the so‐called SCSR. The vantage point construed by big corporations within the fields of strategic management and organization studies, the increasing dependence of the field of strategic management on corporate resources, and the decreasing power of the state and civil society in relation to big corporations are pointed out as key issues for the development of a critical approach on SCSR in Latin America. In the end the author argues that the responsibilities of big corporations, especially in Latin America, are too important to be addressed only by the field of strategic management.

This chapter highlights some of the tensions and most promising points of convergence between the strategic management and stakeholder theory literatures. We briefly examine the early development of both areas, identifying some of the background assumptions and choices that informed how the fields evolved, and how these factors led the two fields to engage in scholarly pursuits that seldom intersected for a period of years, followed by a renewal of interest among strategists in themes that are central to stakeholder theory. From this discussion, we develop a larger agenda with specific topics as examples of areas that offer promise for integrative research that can advance knowledge in both fields. Our vision of the future is one in which the larger aspirations of scholars in strategy and stakeholder theory are more fully realized with human purposes, broadly defined, as the focal point.