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More than ever, businesses need to get their strategy right. Part of achieving this is the approach to strategy making that is chosen. The purpose of this paper is to describe how strategy making happens on the continuum of deliberate versus emerging strategy.

Through in‐depth interviews with “strategy informants” (CEO's) in businesses and questionnaires to respondents (managers) in the same organizations, statistical techniques have helped us draw interesting conclusions about strategy making approaches, its elements and factors moderating the choice of strategy making approach. Through factor analysis, the construct of strategy making is informed by three concepts namely: “performance consensus”, “ends and means specificity” as well as “ends and means flexibility”.

“Ends and means specificity” was associated more with the deliberate strategy approach while “ends and means flexibility” was associated more with the emerging strategy approach. “Performance consensus” was neutral and therefore relevant to both approached. Approaches also show differences depending on the following characteristics: “degree of risk taking preferred”, “comfort with stability and predictability” as well as “primarily autonomous or individual behavior preferred”. Finally, strategy making approach is moderated by “firm size”, “CEO influence” and “environmental uncertainty”.

Knowing the appropriate strategy making approach gives managers flexibility. There is no need to choose one approach above the other but rather to be aware of benefits that can be derived from both. The fast changing environment places pressure on the use of emergent strategy, therefore performance consensus is critical contributor to successful use thereof.

The topic of this article provides a discussion on the importance of well‐defined concepts and approaches used by scholars and by practitioners in various contexts. It is troublesome when the use of a concept or an approach is ambiguous and confusing. The discussion focuses on, and is exemplified through, the globalization of business activities and the term “global strategy”. The widespread use of popular jargon cannot cover the fact that a genuine or true global strategy approach appears to be a managerial utopia. The terms “glocal strategy” and the “glocalization” of business activities are introduced to enhance the accuracy of the present usage by scholars and by practitioners of the term global strategy and the phenomenon often described as the globalization of business activities.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

Research focussed on the scenario method has increasingly criticized the widely used intuitive logics (IL) approach to scenario development and introduced enhanced approaches, such as the backwards logic method (BLM) or the antifragile (AF) method, to overcome the restrictions associated with the IL approach. The BLM and the AF method have contributed to the further development of the scenario method by integrating backward reasoning and by increasing the method’s effectiveness for decision making. The purpose of this paper is to build on these ideas and introduce strategy scenarios as a further enhancement of the scenario method that directly applies the benefits of scenario-based planning to strategy development in corporations.

The authors argue that the existing methodologies do not fully integrate the benefits of scenario-based planning for strategic decision making and strategy development, as they mostly aim to develop macroenvironmental scenarios and test organizations’ existing strategies.

The paper suggests that changing the scope of scenario planning from environmental developments to the organization’s strategies themselves can further strengthen the method’s effectiveness for decision making.

The strategy scenario approach provides an enhanced approach to more comprehensively utilize the benefits of scenario-based reasoning for strategic decision making.

In today's competitive industries, the selection of best suitable maintenance strategy is dependent on large number of quantitative and qualitative factors, and it becomes an extensively difficult problem for maintenance engineers. Over the years, a diverse range of solution methodologies have been developed for solving this multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In this paper, the authors have presented a comprehensive review of latest maintenance strategy paradigms and solution approaches proposed for the selection of an appropriate strategy in various industries. It would provide a systematic mapping of developments in this field and identify some research gaps to explore further studies.

A systematic state-of-the-art comprehensive literature review on maintenance strategy paradigms and selection approaches is presented in this study. In this study, 87 research articles published in peer-reviewed journals, since year 2012, are reviewed.

For the selection of a suitable maintenance strategy, a variety of criteria are considered to better evaluate the alternatives. In this study, contemporary strategies are discussed, and their applications in different industries are also depicted. Moreover, through the analysis of extant literature, critical criteria are selected and classified in six major categories (namely, economic, technical, safety, environmental, feasibility and social) and further sub-categorized in quantitative and qualitative classes. These clusters of criteria can be helpful as an initial set of criteria for survey and then case- or industry-specific criteria can be shortlisted for further alternative evaluation.

From the perspective of maintenance managers, maintenance management can be a very difficult task, considering the numerous factors affecting the decision-making process. In order to help in the decision-making process, this study presents the contemporary maintenance strategies in a systematic manner. In a previous study (Kothamasu et al., 2006), these strategies were classified into repair and prevent classes only. With the developments of autonomous maintenance and design out maintenance (DOM), it was fair to include continuous improvement class. It will help managers and practitioners to identify, according to organization policy, appropriate maintenance strategy alternatives for the asset. A benchmark set of state-of-the-art maintenance strategies are laid out with their applications. The industrial case studies discussed in this study summarizes the optimal maintenance strategies for respective industries. Also, most critical criteria are identified from the existing studies for various industries that can help maintenance practitioners in acknowledging the critical factors and making appropriate decisions. Evaluation parameters for the maintenance strategy selection (MSS) generally conflict with each other, and considering the difficulty of quantifying the qualitative measures, it is a challenging task to determine the optimal trade-off. In order to overcome these challenges, popular MCDM approaches, demonstrating effective results across different industries are discussed with their limitations and applications. Decision-makers can refer this study to identify best suitable decision-making technique for the MSS problem in the industry of their choice. Maintenance managers and engineers can refer the case studies illustrated in Tables 1 and 2 to analyse the MSS techniques proposed by previous studies with industry-specific applications.

This study is an attempt to provide a reference point for research scholars interested in the field of maintenance management and/or development of maintenance strategy framework. This study provides a critical state-of-the-art review of efforts made in the field of MSS. The prominent maintenance strategies being implemented in contemporary industries are discussed with respective case studies. Interested researchers and academicians can familiarize themselves with these strategies and their distinct features in this study. In order to guide future studies and provide a reference point for academicians, MSS critical criteria used in extant literature are identified and classified into a comprehensive benchmark framework. Moreover, the industrial case studies are discussed with the most critical criteria of MSS for different industries and which strategy is most suitable for the respective industries based on these criteria. Table 1 presents different MCDM techniques and their hybrid applications for solving MSS problem that can help researchers in identifying research gaps. Future research can be directed at addressing the limitation of MCDM approach employed in existing studies and comparing the differences in results obtained by the proposed approach. Different industrial case studies with considered maintenance strategy alternatives are presented in Table 2, which can help researchers in identifying the industries that have not been studied yet. Moreover, not all of the existing studies are carried out by considering all the presented benchmark strategies, which can be addressed in future studies by interested researchers. More detailed discussion on research gaps is presented in the following section.

From the analysis of the extant literature, the authors could observe that the decision-making process adopted in numerous studies was limited to the classical maintenance strategies and not inclusive of aggressive maintenance strategy alternatives. To overcome these limitations and help maintenance managers in the decision-making, this study depicts the contemporary maintenance strategies, critical evaluation criteria and MCDM frameworks (employed to solve the MSS problem with industrial case studies) in a structured manner.

The paper extends the organizational learning framework: Structural-Functional (SF)-single-loop or Conflictual-Radical (CR)-double-loop learning to the management accounting literature. The sociological approach of organizational learning is utilized to understand those contingent factors that can explain why management accounting innovations succeed or fail in organizations.

We view learning as enhancing an organization’s strategic competitive advantage by making it better able to adopt and diffuse innovation in respond to changes in its environment in order to manage improved performance. The success of management accounting innovations is contingent upon whether its learning process involves SF-single-loop or CR-double-loop learning to adopt and diffuse process innovation.

The paper suggests that the learning strategy that the organization chooses is the reason why some management accounting innovations are more successfully adopted than others and why some innovations are easily diffused in some organizations but not in others. We propose that the sociological approaches to learning provide an alternative framework with which to better understand the adoption and diffusion of process innovations in management accounting systems.

It has become evident that management accounting researchers need to pay particular attention to an organization’s approach to adoption and diffusion of innovation strategies, particularly when they are designing and implementing process innovation programs for an organization. According to Schulz (2001), there are two interrelated stages of the learning that can shape the outcome of the innovation process in an organization. The first stage is related to the acquisition/production (adoption) of knowledge that results in gathering information, codification, and exploration. This is followed by the second stage which is the distribution or dissemination (diffusion) processes. When these two stages – adoption and diffusion – are applied within an accounting context, they address issues that are commonly associated with the successes and/or failures of management accounting innovations.

Although innovation involves learning, the nature of the learning process does not completely describe the manner in which an innovation affects the organization. Accordingly, we suggest that the two interrelated organizational sociological dimensions of innovations processes, namely, (1) the adoption and diffusion theories of Rogers (1971 and 1995), to approach organizational learning, and (2) the SF (single loop) and CR (double loop) approaches to learning be used simultaneously to describe management accounting innovations.

When an innovation is implemented, it initially can be introduced as an incremental change, one that can be limited in both in its scope and its breadth of administrative changes. This means that situations which are most likely to benefit from its initiation can serve as the prototype for its adoption by the organization. If successful, this can be followed by systemic accounting innovations to instituting broader administrative changes within the existing accounting reporting and control systems.

While metaphors are widely used in strategy teaching and development, this study aims to present an approach how to benefit from metaphor analysis in strategy implementation. The authors find that metaphors used by organizational actors in strategy implementation processes carry a great range of implicit meanings and tacit knowledge that – when made explicit and critically examined – may serve as early warning signals to anticipate difficult or problematic developments in the strategy rollout phase.

The authors conducted narrative interviews with the main protagonists involved in the implementation of a strategic knowledge management project for the sales force of a multinational telecommunication solution provider. The data collected resulted in the surfacing of distinct groups of metaphors used by different organizational groups at different phases of the project implementation.

The metaphor analysis showed that metaphors not only reflect but also foreshadow project developments, and thereby reveal organizational conflicts that may erupt at later stages of the strategy implementation. Learning through metaphors can be realized through a sensitization to the detrimental effects of particular metaphors, as well as through the revelation of inconsistencies between the metaphors used and the exposed behaviors.

The study is an in-depth case study of a strategy implementation project in one organization. While the findings are related to the particular case context, the methodological approach to use metaphor analysis as an early warning signal in strategy implementation can be replicated for strategy implementation processes in general.

Organizations may use metaphor analysis as a tool to calibrate to what extent their strategy implementation is aligned with initial strategic objectives. Metaphor analysis will be particularly helpful to check if there is an alignment in the implementation approach between different organizational groups. Such analysis can serve as an early warning signal for the strategy implementation phase.

The approach provides an inexpensive but very effective way of anticipating problematic project developments and unforeseen difficult collaborations during strategy implementation processes. With its focus on metaphors, it captures implicit meanings and connotations that business languages tend to filter out, yet that play a powerful role for enabling or obstructing strategy implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of business strategies with executive staffing of multinational companies (MNCs).

Based on in-depth interviews conducted with top executives of 22 MNCs’, the authors identify important connections between international business strategies and staffing orientation. The authors used the qualitative research approach of building theory from interviews; thus, creating theoretical propositions from empirical evidence.

The authors find that when the pressure for global integration is high, MNCs use more parent-country national (PCNs) (ethnocentric staffing) as against the use of host-country managers (HCNs) (polycentric staffing) when this pressure is low. Additionally, MNCs using a global strategy are more likely to use an ethnocentric staffing approach, those using a multi-domestic strategy use a polycentric approach and firms using transnational strategy adopt a mix of ethnocentric and polycentric approaches.

Although the authors derive theoretical patterns based on rich qualitative data, their sample is relatively small and comprises mostly of French MNCs. Generalizability to a broader context is limited. However, the authors’ findings have critical implications for future research.

The authors’ findings provide critical managerial implications for MNCs in matching their HR strategies with business strategies. These are important for effective strategy implementation.

Although MNC staffing orientations have been studied for a long time, their relationship to international business strategies is still not clearly understood. The authors contribute to the literature by investigating the relationship between MNCs’ business strategy types with staffing orientations.

This article explores how strategy formulation affects firm performance to determine whether rational/analytical strategy formulation is more effective than emergent/reflexive strategy formulation. Additionally, the article assesses if such superiority holds for different cultural contexts.

Meta-analysis was performed using the Raju, Burke, Norman, and Landis (RBNL) procedure applied to a dataset of 43 empirical studies reporting 54 effect sizes on strategy–performance relationships.

Implementing a formal strategy formulation process positively relates to firm performance. Rational/analytical formulation approaches are more effective than emergent/reflexive approaches in enhancing firm performance, especially for cultures with low future orientation, high uncertainty avoidance, and high power distance.

The reduced number of published empirical studies limited the scope and generalizability of the results across countries, industries, or firms. This limitation might be especially true for Latin American firms given the absence of relevant studies in this region. Another potential limitation is related to the distinction between strategy formulation and strategy implementation. Given the empirical nature of the studies meta-analyzed, strategic tools are used as a proxy to determine the formulation approach.

Firms that operate in short-term oriented, uncertainty-avoiding, and elitist cultures should favor implementing rational/analytical strategy formulation techniques rather than emergent/reflexive approaches. Although prescriptive recommendations are limited by the lack of studies in Latin America, firms in this region would seem to be better off using rational/analytical strategy formulation approaches.

These findings provide a partial explanation for the varying results yielded by strategy formulation and suggest cultural contexts in which rational/analytical strategy formulation should be more effective than emergent/reflexive approaches.

Este artículo explora cómo la formulación de la estrategia afecta el desempeño de la empresa y busca determinar si la formulación de la estrategia racional / analítica es más efectiva que la formulación de la estrategia emergente / reflexiva. Además, el artículo evalúa si dicha superioridad es válida para diferentes contextos culturales.

El metaanálisis se realizó aplicando el procedimiento de Raju, Burke, Norman y Landis (RBNL) a un conjunto de datos de 43 estudios empíricos que reportaron un total de 54 tamaños de efecto sobre las relaciones estrategia-rendimiento.

La implementación de un proceso formal de formulación de estrategias se relaciona positivamente con el desempeño de la empresa. Los enfoques de formulación racional / analítica son más efectivos que los enfoques emergentes / reflexivos para mejorar el rendimiento de la empresa, especialmente para culturas con baja orientación al largo plazo, alta evitación de incertidumbre y alta distancia al poder.

El reducido número de estudios empíricos publicados limitó el alcance y la generalización de los resultados entre países, industrias o empresas. Esta limitación podría afectar especialmente a las empresas latinoamericanas dada la ausencia de estudios relevantes en esta región. Otra limitación potencial está relacionada con la distinción entre la formulación y la implementación de la estrategia. Dada la naturaleza empírica de los estudios meta analizados, las herramientas estratégicas se utilizan como proxy para determinar el enfoque de formulación.

las empresas que operan en culturas orientadas al corto plazo, que evitan la incertidumbre y que muestran alta distancia al poder deberían favorecer la implementación de técnicas de formulación de estrategias racionales / analíticas en lugar de enfoques emergentes / reflexivos. Aunque las recomendaciones prescriptivas están limitadas por la falta de estudios en América Latina, las empresas en esta región parecen estar mejor utilizando enfoques de formulación de estrategias racionales / analíticas.

estos resultados proporcionan una explicación parcial de los resultados variados producidos por la formulación de la estrategia y sugieren contextos culturales en los que la formulación de la estrategia racional / analítica debería ser más efectiva que los enfoques emergentes / reflexivos.