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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework which sheds new light on how sustainability control systems (SCS) can be used in proactive strategic responses to corporate sustainability pressures.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Corporate sustainability pressures are identified using insights from institutional theory and the resource-based view of the firm.

Findings – The paper presents an integrated framework showing the corporate sustainability pressures, proactive strategic responses to these pressures, and how organizations might use SCS in their responses to the corporate sustainability pressures they face.

Practical Implications – The proposed framework shows how organizations can use SCS in proactive strategic responses to corporate sustainability pressures.

Originality/Value – The paper suggests that instead of using traditional financial-oriented management control systems, organizations need more focus on emerging SCS as a means of achieving sustainability objectives. In particular, the paper proposes different SCS tools that can be used in proactive strategic responses to sustainability pressures in terms of (i) specifying and communicating sustainability objectives, (ii) monitoring sustainability performance, and (iii) providing motivation by linking sustainability rewards to performance.

Purpose – The broader research question being addressed is whether head library administrators (HLAs) have the competitive nature required to respond appropriately to strategic and competitive pressures in the library service environment. In addressing this broader research question, this study seeks to determine how HLAs perceive themselves and their peers’ competitive behavior with regard to personal hobbies, sports and games, their personal career performance, and their library's performance.

Design/methodology/approach – A census of the 103 HLAs from North Carolina's two-year and four-year academic libraries (including both public and private institutions) and the 77 public library systems in the state was conducted using a mixed methods design survey instrument to obtain information regarding their perceptions about both their own and their peers’ competitive behaviors.

Findings – The survey response rate was 49% and included a sample that reflected an equal distribution of HLAs by library types and the demographics of the study population. An analysis of survey responses indicate that while HLAs do perceive themselves and their peers to be competitive in behavior for their own personal career and their library's performance, they are not competitive in nonwork activities such as personal hobbies or sports and games. The high levels of reported competitiveness in the respondent's and library's performance variables may indicate HLAs are highly motivated in performing competitive behaviors when it benefits their own careers. The extreme lack of reported competitive behavior in the strategy related variable (sports and games) may indicate HLAs are less motivated or ill-prepared in the strategic response skills required to respond appropriately to strategic and competitive pressures in the library service environment. Respondents projected their own perceptions of competitive behavior unto their peers, which indicates HLA perceptions of their peers in competitive behaviors (possibly other areas) needs to be examined in greater detail to assess the validity of these perceptions.

Research limitations/implications – Data analysis was unable to determine any significant statistical relationships between HLA competitive behavior responses and the variables examined. Further research is needed to identify environmental, psychological, or professional variables that may explain the degrees, motivations, and differences in reported competitive behaviors.

Practical implications – Based on the study findings, libraries may not have head administrators who can effectively respond to strategic challenges facing their libraries. Many libraries may have HLAs who are: not as motivated to respond to strategic needs as career performance needs; have a false set of perceptions of their competitiveness or competitive abilities; have a false set of perceptions of their peers’ competitiveness or competitive abilities; and providing a false sense of security to their libraries that believe the HLA that leads them will enable their libraries to effectively respond to the service environment challenges. In combination, these findings indicate that the library's ability to effectively compete/strategically respond may be dependent on inconsistent and potentially unreliable competitive abilities and personal career motivations. This could make developing strategic responses and sustainability more difficult for libraries in the future.

Originality/value – The study is the first of its kind to examine whether HLAs have the competitive nature required to respond appropriately to strategic and competitive pressures in the library service environment. Having a complete and effective understanding of how head library administrator's competitive behaviors work and impact their library's strategic response development is essential in preparing and supporting existing and future head library administrators in leading their libraries in strategic responses. As the library's head administrator is the primary driver of strategy and strategic/competitive responses for their library, the competitive behaviors and their motivations becomes a critical component of the library's success in effectively responding to strategic challenges and being sustainable for meeting future generation's information needs. It is hoped that by exploring head library administrator's competitive behavior in this study, the researcher has laid the initial framework for understanding how a library's leader will competitively respond or be capable of responding to today's library service environment challenges that have become very competitive in nature and require library organizations to continually develop and perform activities that generate increasingly effective strategic performance and value.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the prediction of competitive response based on the characteristics of market and non‐market actions comprehensively, and develop a four‐stage decision‐making model of firm's competitive action, which is significant for Chinese practicing managers when formulating and implementing the strategies, and further predicting competitors' strategic choices.

The research adopted the method of structured content analysis and carried out the survey in Chinese home appliance industry, mainly covering the largest firms, including TCL, Hisense, Changhong, Konka, Haier, and Skyworth. The method of multiple regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses.

The results show that in order to comprehensively forecast competitor's responding behaviors, the firms could not only limit their perspective to market field but also pay attention to non‐market. Additionally, in the process of dynamic interaction, the attacking or responding action is not independent and it is related significantly to another three type decisions, which are market and non‐market, strategic and tactic, and collective and individual. Further, the study asserts that, in market field, tactic activity is more likely to trigger competitor's response than strategic one, while in non‐market, the situation is just the opposite. Meanwhile, the study figured out that individual market attack is easier to trigger individual market and non‐market response, as well as collective market response. While for non‐market action, whatever it is individual or collective, both would be easy to provoke competitor's collective response.

The research findings extend the existing competitive interaction theory to non‐market field. When forecasting competitor's choice of the competitive action, the firms could not only limit their perspective to market field but also pay attention to non‐market, attaching importance to certain situation of competitor's taking such non‐market action as corporate philanthropy, etc. to launch an attack or a response for gaining competitive advantage.

This study aims to examine the influence of managerial perceptions on the strategic responses adopted by four Colombian organizations when facing a political crisis.

To address this research, face‐to‐face interviews were conducted with Colombian managers, consultants, journalists, government officials, and industry experts, and triangulated with documents and archival data.

The findings show that the response adopted by each organization was significantly influenced by their manager's perception of the crisis and, consequently, was prone to producing a particular performance outcome.

The authors’ findings constitute a strong warning call to managers and management teams about the possibility of falling into the “mirror trap”, through which their organizations will adopt strategic responses influenced by their own perceptions of crises.

These findings suggest that managers can affect performance through their individual assessment of a crisis as a threat, an opportunity, or neither one nor the other.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how response time in a laboratory experiment on bank runs affects withdrawal decisions.

In the authors’ setup, the bank has no fundamental problems, depositors decide sequentially whether to keep the money in the bank or to withdraw, and they may observe previous decisions depending on the information structure. The authors consider two levels of difficulty of decision-making conditional on the presence of strategic dominance and strategic uncertainty. The authors hypothesize that the more difficult the decision, the longer is the response time, and the predictive power of response time depends on difficulty.

The authors find that response time is longer in information sets with strategic uncertainty compared to those without (as expected), but the authors do not find such relationship when considering strategic dominance (contrary to the hypothesis). Response time correlates negatively with optimal decisions in information sets with a dominant strategy (contrary to the expectation) and also when decisions are obvious in the absence of strategic uncertainty (in line with the hypothesis). When there is strategic uncertainty, the authors find suggestive evidence that response time predicts optimal decisions.

Being a laboratory experiment, it is questionable if depositors in real life behave similarly (external validity).

Since episodes of bank runs are characterized by strategic uncertainty, the result that under strategic uncertainty, longer response time leads to better decisions suggests that suspension of convertibility is a useful tool to curb banking panics.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study concerning the relationship between response time and the optimality of decisions in a bank-run game.

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and the associated economic lockdown provided a jolt to businesses around the world and the global economy. Amid the ongoing uncertainty, circumstances varied across business sectors and regions, but the common goal for business organizations was to respond effectively, devising strategies to survive the turmoil and accelerate recovery. The narrative in India was no different from the rest of the world. Due to the novelty of the event, literature regarding its impact on the strategic management of firms was scarce. Thus, this paper aims to attempt to ascertain the crisis impact on firms and subsequently unravel the tactical short-term and long-term strategic responses initiated by Indian firms.

The authors carried out an empirical investigation to comprehend the strategic foresight adopted by Indian firms. Following a structured literature review, the authors conducted semi-structured open-ended interviews with 28 business experts who were involved in drafting strategic responses for their respective firms. Subsequently, the authors performed a thematic content analysis of the expert interview responses to document firm-level strategic responses to the COVID-19 crisis and associated economic lockdown. The authors further searched reputed media articles to supplement and triangulate the primary research findings with management perspectives.

The authors identified that managers had adopted a dual approach responding to the disruption. Companies simultaneously focused on surviving the crisis in the short-term by reconfiguring existing resources and initiated long-term recovery by mobilizing efforts for a redesigned business model. The research findings indicated that companies had adapted to the dynamic chaotic crisis environment to fulfill the changed consumer expectations. Remote working was widely implemented, supply networks were adjusted, operations were managed with minimal resources, working capital was closely monitored and the product-portfolio was revamped to reap benefits in an essentials-only world. The impact of several strategic firm responses was determined through this study on the revenue, profitability, operational costs and regulatory adherence of the companies along with the ability to meet stakeholder expectations. The study suggested that companies encouraged innovative solutions and highlighted the importance of collaborative inter-organizational practices.

The study contributed to an inter-theoretical perspective on firm strategic initiatives to confront a global crisis. Resource-based view, dynamic capabilities perspective and industrial-organizational theory-based perspectives, were applied. This facilitated an extensive analysis of the entire business ecosystem to identify various paths to accelerated recovery during and post COVID-19 world.

The research findings would aid managers in drafting a comprehensive response strategy during and post COVID-19 world. This study results would help managers in addressing multiple concerns such as the sustainability of operations in the short-term through working capital management, the fulfillment of changing consumer needs through sustained innovation and business model alterations to ensure long term growth. The study enabled managers to prioritize necessary actions, ascertain the impact of strategic initiatives and build sustainable competitive advantage for long-term growth.

The novel coronavirus pandemic and the associated economic lockdown impacted firm strategies and this was one of the very first empirical studies regarding how firm-level short-term tactics and long-term strategies were getting reshaped. Traditionally, companies were prepared to handle localized disruptions but a crisis of such epic global proportions jeopardized most business. This study provided an extensive review of the short-term tactical and long-term strategic response perspectives adopted by Indian firms to absorb the impact of this unique crisis and expected recovery with renewed strength. This was one of the first research articles to provide an inter-theoretical perspective on the ongoing global pandemic. This integrated view of the possible impacts of firm-level strategic initiatives provided a detailed knowledge repository to design the crisis response capability of firms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a decision-making tool achieving robust supply flow by incorporating strategic stock and contingent sourcing in mitigating minor and major disruptions.

The authors consider a firm with two suppliers where the main supplier is cost-effective but prone to disruptions and the back-up supplier is reliable but expensive due to built-in volume flexibility. In order to incorporate the randomness associated with disruptions and the available capacity during response time in the decision-making stage, the authors present a multi-stage robust optimization (RO) model. The design problem is to determine optimal strategic stock level and response speed of volume-flexible back-up supplier in order to achieve a robust supply flow.

The results show that the quality of optimal solution is improved by considering the randomness associated with available capacity. In addition, incorporating congestion effects allows identifying the appropriate level of supply chain responsiveness, thus improving the overall performance.

The novelty of the proposed model is the consideration of both strategic stock and volume flexibility in maintaining a robust supply performance while incorporating response capability and congestion effects.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrated model to understand and act on the institutionalization process into a company.

Additional to the conceptual development, survey method was applied in a single entity, through a structured questionnaire covering the management group of a multinational company.

High potential to explain why some non‐institutionalized cases happen and the importance to treat the strategic responses.

Model was applied only in one single entity. Futures researches may treat it in a more representative sample.

The active approach required by the entity to involve and reinforce the institutionalization process.

Integration of Tolbert and Zucker's approach with Oliver's and practical perspective of usage.

The study of strategy is the study of how firms gain and maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. It is an examination of both the types of strategy that appear to be most successful in a given situation, as well as the organizational resources, systems, principles, and processes that create, transform, and carry out strategic action in competitive arenas. Since its development as a distinct disciplinary area, strategy research has focused primarily on large, cross-sectional studies of quantitative data gathered through questionnaires, archival sources such as financial reports, and commercial data bases such as PIMS and COMPUSTAT. These analyses have focused on, and revealed, patterns of strategy content, formulation processes, and competitive interaction that exist across firms within a given competitive context and that explain variations in performance across firms. These results have led to the development of several basic theoretical frameworks that help us to understand and predict competitive activity and organizational performance.

Presents a model for analyzing the potential for value creation of the internal audit (IA) function, the human resource management (HRM) function, and the IA‐HRM pairing. A survey of 161 chief audit executives indicated that virtually all IA functions are risk managing in their audit approaches, while a great majority of HRM clients are also moderately or strongly strategic in their outlook. Findings included that a productive working relationship was strongest when a risk m anaging IA function is paired with a strategic HRM function. Also, the IA planning process was found to be more strategic in the presence of the same pairing. Analysis of written examples of strategic findings related to HRM supplied by the respondents suggested that there may be a significant gap between auditors’ knowledge of strategic HRM practices as developed in the literature and their self‐reported examples. Future research should use both HRM and IA responses to reduce bias. Additonally, there is a need for case studies of the IA‐HRM partnership.