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The paper seeks to explore competitive intelligence as a complex business construct and as a precedent for marketing strategy formulation.

In total, 1,025 executives were surveyed about their companies' usage of competitive intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination as well as their perception concerning certain organizational characteristics.

This research develops and tests intelligence as a precedent to marketing strategy formulation, revealing multiple phases and contributing aspects within the process. It also discovers that the practice of competitive intelligence, while strong in the area of information collection, is weak from a process and analytical perspective.

While the sample was indeed a census of Canadian technology firms, care must be taken in generalizing the study beyond this industry, and certainly beyond the Canadian borders. Also, the questionnaire used only dichotomous variables (yes/no answers), which limited the testing that could be done.

Using these results, competitive intelligence departments and professionals can improve efficacy within their approach and execution strategies.

The contribution of this paper is two‐fold. It reveals many of the “state‐of‐the‐art” levels of practice within current competitive intelligence efforts, and it proposes a model of the intelligence process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the choice of buying managers to share or limit the sharing of strategic information with their suppliers relates to the presence or absence of goodwill and competence trust in the buyer–supplier relationship.

An interpretive single case study of a mid-sized retailer was used. In total, 17 semi-structured interviews examining information sharing events were conducted with buying managers, along with the analysis of company documents.

Goodwill and competence trust have a positive effect on strategic information sharing, yet this study reveals several tactics used by buying managers in the presence of competence trust only. With a lack of established trust, or earlier trust breaches, little to no information sharing occurs.

This study featured cross-sectional data of a single case from the buyer’s perspective. This limits its generalizability, yet provides opportunities to test the findings through longitudinal studies, potentially gathering data from both buyers and suppliers.

Relating which types of information being shared for different forms of trust guides managers’ expectations on which type of trust they wish to build for each of their buyer–supplier relationships.

This study examines the trust and information sharing relationship in more detail, linking different types of trust to categories of strategic information. It also distinguishes between the different concepts of encouraging information sharing and deliberately limiting strategic information sharing.

This chapter analyses the rise of the ‘global factory’ – the globally integrated network centred on a focal multinational enterprise. This is a response to the increased volatility of the global economy and involves the creation of systems that allow flexibility in both the location and the control of increasingly ‘fine-sliced’ activities, the avoidance of monopoly and the evolution of new management skills. Foreign direct investment is only one strategy amongst several utilised by globally integrated multinationals.

The purpose of this paper is to take a strategic perspective on how MNEs in the retail sector decide to enter a new market. Drawing on transaction cost theory, the contingency approach and resource-based theory, the implications of the interplay between global strategy, cultural distance and entry mode strategies are examined by means of an analysis of Carrefour’s global expansion.

To account for the shortcomings of prior research, a hypothesis in the relationship between entry modes and cultural distance is tested empirically using a sample of 44 foreign market entries by Carrefour over the 40 last years. The paper uses a quantitative approach, i.e., logistic regressions. To measure cultural distance, the authors rely on the GLOBE dimensions and the Kogut-Singh Index.

The findings suggest a positive relationship between a resource commitment, entry mode strategy and cultural distance for Carrefour. However, these findings are contrary to the mainstream argument that high cultural distance is related to entry strategies based on relatively low resource commitment. The authors explain these findings by integrating a cultural distance perspective with Carrefour’s overall global expansion strategy.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability.

The paper provides insights into why prior research on cultural distance and entry modes has yielded mixed results. From a strategic viewpoint, the paper stresses the particularities of the retail sector and how retailers try to account for cultural distance in their entry mode decisions.

By focussing on a single company instead of a meta-analysis, the analysis demonstrates how the search for strategic consistency and the particularities of the retail sector reverse a well-investigated theoretical assumption. The main originality of the paper is that it shows the implications of the interplay between cultural distance and entry mode as being part of the retail firm’s overall global expansion strategy.

This paper aims to look at the relative position of thought leadership between the areas of military and civilian logisticians.

The paper provides a theoretical framework in an exploratory study using the literature to evaluate the constraints on the military side of logistics thought.

The discussion identifies challenges that may preclude military logistics thought from becoming the leaders for the foreseeable future.

The paper provides an examination of the changing role between military and civilian logistics that has not been carefully examined since just after the Gulf War in 1991.