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The purpose of this paper is to examine how two large health systems formulate and implement strategy with a specific focus on differences and similarities in the nature of strategic initiatives across systems. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the role of resource dependency theory (RDT) and resource based view (RBV) in healthcare strategic management.

A comparative case study design is used to describe, categorize and compare strategic change initiatives within a children's health and a multi-hospital system located in two competitive metropolitan markets. A total of 61 in-person semi-structured interviews with healthcare administrators were conducted during 2009. Summary statistics and qualitative content analysis were employed to examine strategic initiatives.

The two health systems have as their top initiatives very similar pursuits, thus indicating that both utilize an externally oriented RDT method of strategy formulation. The relevance of the RBV becomes apparent during resource deployment for strategy implementation. The process of healthcare strategic decision-making incorporates RDT and RBV as separate and compatible activities that are sequential.

Results from this comparative case study are based on only two health systems. Further, the RBV perspective only takes managerial resources and time into consideration.

Given that external resources are likely to become more constrained, it is important that hospitals leverage relevant internal resources, in the identification of competitive advantages and effective execution of strategic initiatives.

The author propose a refined healthcare strategic management framework that takes both RDT and RBV into consideration by systematically linking strategy formulation with deployment of resources.

In business environments characterized by intense competition, globalization, rapid technological diffusion, accelerated product life cycles, and evolving industry boundaries, the ability of firms to adapt effectively to their changing environments is a strategic imperative (Hitt, Keats, & DeMarie, 1998; Nadler & Tushman, 1999). The exhibition of strategic adaptability – the ability of a firm to alter its alignment with the environment through reactive and proactive behaviors (Evans, 1991) – is a function of the goodness-of-fit that exists between the capabilities of a firm and the demands imposed by its relevant industry context (Burgelman & Grove, 1996). When firm capabilities are well aligned with industry success factors, those capabilities constitute strategic assets for the firm, or resources that lead to the achievement of competitive success in that context (Amit & Schoemaker, 1993). The possession of strategic assets thus contributes to a state of adaptation, defined by Chakravarthy (1982) as a state in which an organization exhibits the capacity to survive the conditions of its changing environment. Because of the constantly shifting nature of the environment, a state of adaptation is not a permanent settling point for the organization, but rather a moving target for the organization as it attempts to remain “mapped on” to the exigencies of the environment.

Empirical evidence indicates that effective management of resources to implement strategy in a balanced scorecard (BSC) system is essential. We present a mathematical model for allocating limited resources in the BSC strategy implementation process.

The proposed facilitated negotiation model provides a systematic approach to prioritizing strategic initiatives in the design and implementation of a BSC.

Our joint decision model prioritizes strategic initiatives and concurrently calculates the optimal (or approximately optimal) set of BSC targets and weights, given multiyear resource restrictions.

The model assumes full, open, and truthful exchange of information between the parties; an assumption that may exclude many organizations.

We address an important gap in the BSC literature on how organizations can effectively link strategy to the potential constraint of resource budgets.

Quantitative models are being used in practice for allocating resources, but we are not aware of their use by organizations for allocating resources in a BSC application.

Funding agencies such as the Office of Naval Research, Department of Homeland Security, and others, have reduced funding for non‐tactical operations. Simultaneously, organizations are squeezing their overhead budgets (where security initiatives fall) and are focusing more on revenue generation given current economic climates. Thus, in both governmental sectors and in commercial settings, there are reasons to believe that strategic security initiatives are being sacrificed, and those that survive must be compelling. To assist organizational leaders with these difficult choices, it is critical to understand biases that affect decisions about strategic security initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to validate and empirically test the predictability of a theoretical model, from which implications can be made for research and practice.

Using behavioral decision theory, a randomized longitudinal study was conducted over three years with a multinational corporation with headquarter‐offices in the UK and the USA, and regional offices in India, Germany and France. From these data, a model was developed and tested for fit with a confirmatory factor analysis and its predictive ability was tested using structured equation modeling.

It was found that risk aversion, overconfidence, adjustment of cognitive anchors, and expected utility biases affected whether managers and other stakeholders continued or terminated strategic security initiatives.

Prematurely terminating or over commitment to a strategic initiative can be costly if not significantly damaging to an organization or government military or intelligence agency. Understanding how biases factor into these decisions can help strategic initiative decision makers improve their decisions and assist them in recognizing normative rules or optimal (straddle point) solutions.

Temporary and permanent organisations have contrasting yet co-dependent perspectives regarding time; temporary organisations are made to ‘die’, yet most of them exist to enable permanent organisations to ‘survive’. The authors studied the temporal tensions of strategic initiatives – that is, temporary organisations that aim to implement strategic change in permanent organisations. Our empirical data identified three temporal tensions emerging when senior managers timed their strategic initiatives: ambition versus realism when enacting the time horizon, patience versus urgency when enacting the pace, and clock time versus event time when enacting the temporal perspective. By evoking the literature on paradox and temporal work, the authors extend the view of temporality at the temporary and permanent interface and indicate how temporal work played an important role in creating, reinforcing, or transforming temporal tensions. The authors conclude by providing implications for theory and practice.

This study of a market-leader in a turbulent hostile telecommunications market uncovers how the competitive context influences strategy-making and cultivates central control that opposes autonomous initiatives. It shows how a highly competitive industry context reduces organizational slack that inhibits autonomy and drives central actions. Strategic initiatives primarily arise as deliberate actions induced by top management. This creates an information gap between ongoing experiences gained by employees operating in the periphery of the organization and the perceptions of decision-makers at the corporate center. In this organizational setting, the authors observe maverick behavior among entrepreneurial individuals that deliberately circumvent the formal rules to turn autonomous initiatives into viable strategic ventures in the best interest of the firm. Where conventional views presume that power delegation and organizational slack are necessary for autonomous strategic initiatives to emerge, the authors find that central control can provoke autonomous rule-breaking maverick behavior among resource-deprived entrepreneurial individuals inside the organization.

This paper aims to investigate the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives adopted by Chinese firms during the outbreak of COVID-19. Facing this unknown, unexpected and devastating disease, Chinese corporations demonstrated their CSR in different approaches. The purpose of this paper is to explore how CSR influences the decisions of the corporations that respond to a severe incident and how corporations can achieve their mission or strategic objectives by responding to a serious incident.

Based on secondary data and thematic analysis, this paper examines six Chinese corporations which are the leading firms in their respective industries.

This paper finds that firms adopted a mixed approach to conducting their CSR initiatives, including altruistic, strategic and citizenship CSR initiatives. This paper also confirms that strategic CSR initiatives were in line with the five dimensions of strategic CSR including centrality, specificity, proactivity, visibility and voluntarism. In addition, this paper also shows that a company could create its competitive advantage by carrying out CSR initiatives that are able to strengthen its value chain activities or the competitive context. This is based on the partnership built by the firms with their stakeholders to recognize the shared value.

This paper shows the implication that business leaders should understood the role of a business in society and the importance of stakeholders’ expectations. The underlying philosophy is that CSR could strengthen the resilience of society; business organizations need to operate in a healthy society.

This paper provides insights of Chinese corporations responding to a severe social incident. It highlights the strategic perspective of CSR initiatives and the linkage between CSR activities and a firm’s competitive advantage.

Global outsourcing shifts manufacturing jobs to emerging countries, which provides new opportunities for improving their economic development. The authors develop and test a theoretical model to predict first, how sustainable supply chain initiatives might influence reverse logistics outcomes and second, the impact of eco-reputation and eco-innovation orientation strategies on the deployment of sustainable supply chain initiatives. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The proposed new model of antecedents and outcomes of sustainable supply chain initiatives underwent a rigorous empirical test through structural equation modeling with samples from an emerging market.

The results show that firms that implement sustainable supply chain initiatives can realize positive reverse logistics outcomes; the study also provides new insights into eco-innovation and eco-reputation strategic orientations as theoretically important antecedents of sustainable supply chain initiatives.

Though the authors identify three components of sustainable supply chain initiatives, other components could exist, and ongoing research should investigate them.

The findings have important implications for managers in emerging markets seeking to initiate ecologically friendly business practices. The authors offer strong evidence of the benefits obtained from reverse logistics in sustainable supply chain initiatives. Policy makers and firms attempting to nurture sustainable supply chain initiatives should not overlook the important role of eco-reputation and eco-innovation strategic orientations, which the results identify as important enablers.

This study offers evidence of the critical role of eco-reputation and eco-innovation strategic orientations in deploying sustainable supply chain initiative programs, as well as of their mutual effects. This study also offers empirical evidence that implementing sustainable supply chain initiatives leads to reverse logistics, creating value, and a new source of competitive advantages.

Macro- and microorganizational perspectives on strategy processes are typically treated as distinct lines of inquiry. This paper proposes an attention-based theory (March & Olsen, 1976; Ocasio, 1997) of strategy formulation processes to bridge both perspectives. In particular, it links evolutionary perspectives on strategy (Burgelman, 1991, 2002) and strategic choice (Child, 1972) perspectives on organizational and strategic decision making (Bower, 1970; Carter, 1971; Cyert & March, 1963; Frederickson, 1986). Our treatment of the strategy process extends theory by viewing strategy processes as assemblages of tightly and loosely coupled networks of operational and governance channels (Allison & Zelikow, 1999; Ocasio, 1997), strategy formulation as a fluid and distributed process, and environmental, organizational level and individual level forces as consequential. Like Lovas and Ghoshal (2000), we view strategy formulation as a process of guided evolution. Unlike Lovas and Ghoshal who view strategic intent as the objective function that guides evolution, we view strategy formulation processes as more fragmented and contested, with multiple foci of attention, rather than an explicit objective function, and both top-down and bottoms-up processes capable of generating changes in the strategic direction of the firm.

The purpose of this study is to identify the business strategies that entrepreneurs have formulated to establish the business with the intention of scaling up in the information technology (IT) sector in Chile, given that they have managed to scale up sustainably at an average annual rate of 73.3% and an average annual employee growth rate of 37% for four consecutive years after an establishment period of 25 months.

Three methodological steps were used to identify which strategic initiatives are relevant to the establishment of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on the path to scaling up. The first part consisted of identifying the literature and defining the research propositions and research questions. The second part was to prepare, collect and analyse the data to conduct the research by applying, transcribing, reviewing and coding the sources of evidence to explore how SMEs are able to develop strategic initiatives for the start-up process. The final stage was to validate the research proposal to identify potential strategic initiatives identified during the multi-case study.

As a result of the data analysis and empirical findings, three deliberate strategic initiatives were identified: staying engaged with customers, delivering successful business solutions and articulating social capital. However, in crisis situations, entrepreneurs readjust their strategies based on their management skills and an emergent strategic initiative was identified as securing the financial structure and revolutionising change. While this research was not designed to identify personal attributes, it did highlight the importance of adaptation and learning as a skill to drive the business model for scaling up during the establishment of their business.

It is clear that the study focused on Chile and cannot be replicated in other regions or sectors due to the characteristics of the sample itself, but it provides empirical evidence that there are cycles prior to scale up that need to be understood. The findings were empirically validated during the establishment phase, but the deliberate and emergent strategic initiatives that consolidated the SME to prepare for its scale-up process are not evident in the theory.

The IT sector will continue to grow and change after the pandemic, and the global economy will use more digital systems, creating new ways of working with the use of IT. This context will impact on SMEs where strategies, whether deliberate or emergent, will need to be part of the new business models, and therefore, caution should be exercised when using the results of this study. Public and private institutions should educate and guide entrepreneurs for the potential scaling up of their SMEs without having to wait 42 months, according to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2021-2022 (Hill et al., 2022). Scaling up can begin as early as 25 months after establishment, breaking the paradigm of the theory that the SME must be established in a period of 3.5 years. This period cannot be generalised as business opportunities in the IT sector are faster. The research also contributes by reporting that contingency planning is relevant during the establishment phase.

Educational institutions and the public sector have made efforts to change business cultures regarding the importance of strengthening entrepreneurship, but teaching the emergent strategies that often challenge SME creation is not yet widespread in educational formats. This is a challenge not only for institutions but also for entrepreneurs trying to anticipate the constant changes in the global economy. This research provides an opportunity to create more dynamic business models with more conscious risk planning.

Although the literature has confirmed the findings, this research has provided a pre-scaling picture that links these two important stages on the axis of deliberate and emergent strategies. The findings confirm the importance of correctly embedding five strategic initiatives for the establishment of the SME if it is to continue on its journey towards business scale-up. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence in emerging economies on how entrepreneurs have found the right path to scale-up.