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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.

The purpose of this study is threefold: 1) to examine the relevance of specific strategic orientations for family businesses in the context of an intense crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic; 2) to investigate the role of a family adaptability in surviving the crisis; and 3) to assess how proactive strategic responses connected with marketing or retrenchment responses connected with reducing costs relate to the expected survival of the crisis.

The method adopted is a quantitative research approach. The theoretical framework uses a partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) for the data collected from an online survey of a sample of 544 family businesses in the accommodation industry.

This paper makes three main findings. First, family businesses that invest in operational marketing actions as a strategic response to the crisis have a high expectation of surviving the crisis. Second, family businesses that reduce their operational and labor costs as a strategic response have a low expectation of surviving the crisis. Third, the family business’s adaptability is also fundamental to their expectation of survival.

This is the first paper to identify the possible reactions of family businesses to the COVID-19 crisis. the authors show that there are proactive or retrenchment strategic responses, and the authors relate those responses to the expectancy of surviving the crisis. This is also the first study to examine the relevance of family adaptability as a measure of the resilience of family businesses and, therefore, as a determinant of the expectation of surviving the crisis.

Although scholars in strategic management have identified innovating and exit as firms’ two sequential strategic responses to long-run crisis, the potential interdependency has yet remained implicit. Specifically, in the context of Chinese Privately Owned Enterprises (POEs), this study investigates the interrelationship of these two strategic responses during long-run crisis. Building on resource redeployment perspective, the authors propose that firms tend to simultaneously leverage innovating and exit responses.

The authors use the data from the 2010 Chinese POEs survey to verify how firms in the long-term crisis made strategic responses after the 2008 financial crisis. Besides, the authors utilize Probit regressions as the basic analysis and further employ bivariate Probit regressions to conduct robustness tests.

This study provides empirical evidence confirming that firms in the long-run period of the crisis tend to adopt both exit and innovating strategies at the same time, that is, the strategy of resource redeployment. Moreover, this study further finds that government subsidies, the degree of marketization and firm’s organizational capability could all accentuate the decision-making of firms’ resource redeployment.

The authors thus contribute to the study of strategic responses to crisis in strategic management by dynamically find out the interdependency of two responses and enrich the research on resource redeployment perspective by identifying three influential positive antecedents, adding to the ongoing investigation on positive drivers of resource redeployment.

A strategic response to crisis research is a critical and growing area of study in management and business literature. Consequently, the sudden rise of COVID-19, that has a substantial adverse impact on the global economy in a relatively short period of time, brings into sharp focus on the possible and most effective types of strategic responses adopted by firms. In this context, this study aims to shed light on the types of strategic responses adopted by firms and the possible outcomes.

To contribute to the advancement of knowledge around strategic responses in general for business, this study conducted a keyword bibliometric analysis reviewing 66 articles from highly ranked journals according to ABS list of journals published between the period 2006–2020 and synthesize the existing research on strategic responses.

This research enabled the identification of the novel typology of strategic responses to the crisis, such as revived stakeholders’ relationships, revived pricing mechanisms and revived organizational compliance, and their outcomes. Additionally, the analysis established many research areas for scholars who will deal with this topic in the future.

The literature review contributes to the management and business literature by providing a novel and comprehensive classification of crisis responses and synthesizing all new knowledge gained within a new conceptual framework.

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 purpose of this study was to examine the impact of strategic leadership (SL) on business operational resilience (OR) in the hotel industry in Egypt, namely, during and after the pandemic. This investigation also aimed to explore the mediating function of crisis response strategies (CRSs) and organisational e-readiness (Oe-R) in this relationship.

The researchers conducted a cross-sectional study using a questionnaire as the primary data collection method. Using partial least squares structural equation simulation (PLS-SEM), the study used a comprehensive sample that targets the general managers of all five-star hotels in Egypt.

Results indicated that SL has a positive impact on CRSs and Oe-R. Furthermore, the results reveal a positive influence of Oe-R on both CRSs and hotel OR. On the other hand, CRSs do not influence hotel OR. The findings showed that CRSs fully mediate the link between SL and OR. However, CRSs do not serve as a mediator between Oe-R and OR. Furthermore, the findings showed that Oe-R partially mediates the link between SL and both OR and CRSs.

The study yields unique and valuable theoretical and practical insights to guide hotel leaders and managers towards adaptive recovery and resilience in turbulent and crisis-ridden environments by demonstrating that the combined mediating function of CRS and Oe-R is more effective in strengthening the relationship between SL and OR.

This study represents a pioneering investigation that establishes a correlation between SL and OR, either through direct or indirect means. The research examines the involvement of CRSs and Oe-R as collaborative mediators in this relationship. Previous studies undertaken in the hotel industry and service sector have not investigated this specific element.

The author introduces a strategic responsiveness model that reflects an organization’s ability to sense environmental changes and learn from emergent adaptive responses that attempt to realign organizational activities and gain a better fit with the changing conditions. The author shows in computational simulations how superior strategic adaptation is associated with higher average returns and lower performance risk among firms that compete in the same industry contexts and generate negatively skewed outcome distributions consistent with empirical observations. The model is refined to incorporate an interactive strategy-making process, where experiential insights from decentralized initiatives update forward-looking projections in central planning. The ensuing analysis demonstrates how this adaptive strategy-making approach further enhances the favorable risk-return outcomes. The author discusses these findings and the implications for the study of dynamic adaptive strategy-making processes.