Search results

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.

Although two decades have passed since the publication of Walsh and Ungson’s (1991) seminal article on organizational memory, there has been only limited theoretical elaboration and application of this critical aspect of cognition in the strategic management literature. We remedy this gap by advancing the construct of competitive memory, which we define as a firm’s dynamic capability consisting of stored information from its past competitive interaction with a given rival that can be brought to bear on present or future competitive actions. We theorize that competitive memory is composed of both procedural and declarative elements and can be accessed automatically and deliberatively. Additionally, we suggest that competitive memory is relational: As rivals within a competitive set interact in the market, competitive memory drives not only their strategic actions, but also their expectations about their competitors. Last, competitive memory is also dynamic, which can be constructed and reconstructed over time by an organization’s enactment of its internal and external environments and by purposive memory trials with its competitive set.

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.

We present an empirical investigation into how customers and competitors respond to merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, using data obtained from business-to-business customers of logistics industry acquisitions. We draw on the M&A and marketing literatures to develop a set of hypotheses about how customer loyalty may be affected by a supplier's involvement in an acquisition, including the influence of competitors reactions. Our data confirm that customers purchase behaviours can be affected by M&A activity, both positively and negatively, and we find support for a causal chain whereby post-acquisition integration actions cause changes in key customer relationship variables, which in turn drive changes in customer loyalty. Our results also provide empirical evidence of the significant role that competitors responses can play in reducing customer loyalty following an acquisition. We identify a number of factors that appear to influence the magnitude of competitors reactions, namely the scale and scope of the acquisition, the form of post-acquisition integration pursued and the ‘stickiness’ of existing customers. The implications of our findings for future research, as well as for executives engaged in M&A activity, are discussed.

In this chapter, the authors conceptualize corporate entrepreneurship as a mental model that allows firms to adapt to new competitive landscapes by facilitating the development of new cognitive scripts and schemas. The authors begin by explaining what it means for a firm to be competitively bewildered, or lost, in a rapidly changing competitive domain. The authors also describe five stages of being lost competitively. The authors then map the attributes of an entrepreneurial firm – adaptability, speed, flexibility, aggressiveness, and innovativeness – to stages of the bewilderment process wherein they may be most helpful to realign competitive realities and entrepreneurial scripts and schemas. The authors conclude by proposing contributions resulting from conceptualizing corporate entrepreneurship as a bewilderment schema and also explain how this represents a novel perspective.

Purpose – This chapter seeks to theoretically demonstrate that authentic corporate strategy is entrenched in an ethical responsibility, and ethical responsibility requires a strategic framework to qualify as a sustainable value co-creation process that determines the long-term success of the firm.Design/methodology/approach – Through economic philosophical analysis and content analysis, we critically reviewed literature which argues for the integration of corporate responsibility (CR) and corporate strategy both in theory and practice by putting the concept into a proper context of institutional and time-based dynamics.Findings – The chapter delineates the salient dimensions of the dominant logic (D-L) of strategic corporate responsibility (SCR). The traditional notion of CSR is explained, compared and contrasted with the transitioning process of strategic CSR and the D-L of SCR which is at the civic level. We also identified four global forces that serve as enablers of strategic CR logic.Practical implications – The D-L of SCR explains how a firm defines and redefines itself and not what a firm does. We underscore what firms are in the ‘process of becoming’ through a co-evolutionary process with markets and institutions. Firms which want to go beyond mere survival in the 21st century must see the D-L of SCR not as a choice but as an imperative constrained by these global forces.Originality/value of chapter – The novelty of this chapter is that it challenges traditional CSR and provides a shift in thinking about the concept of CR where sustainability and innovative strategies become the source of institutional and market legitimacy and hence a competitive advantage.

School leaders in the United States are increasingly embracing marketing practices in order to promote their schools in more competitive conditions. Yet while policymakers are actively encouraging such conditions, little attention has been paid to the equity effects of these practices. Advancing from the insight that marketing materials can illuminate some of the underlying incentive structures to which schools must respond, this study examines patterns in the marketing materials in two metropolitan areas with the most competitive education markets in the United States. Web-based materials for all schools in Washington, DC and post-Katrina New Orleans were analyzed, noting how individual schools and different types of schools represent their racial makeup. By analyzing these differences in traditional-public, charter, and private schools, we were able to see emerging patterns that suggest the role of market forces in school organizational behavior, with cautionary lessons for how different types of students are valued.

While extant entry theory has long prescribed a niche approach for new ventures, a preponderance of empirical research has found that broad strategies may be the key to new venture success. This study examines the difference between entry theory and empirical evidence by considering the moderating impact of initial financial resources on the effectiveness of venture strategy. Examining new, independent firms at the point of inception, we find that initial financial resources moderate the relationship between strategic breadth and performance, implying that the returns to a broad initial strategy increase with the level of initial capital. Contrary to popular niche prescriptions for new ventures, we did not find support for the belief that firms with low initial financial resources should pursue niche strategies and suggest that it may be time to re-examine theory on the nature of the relationship between entry strategies and performance.

Learning theory explains how organizations change as a result of experience, and can be used to predict the competitive strength of individual organizations and competitive pressures in organizational populations. We review extant learning theoretical propositions on how competitive strength is affected by experienced competition, founding conditions, and observed failures of other organizations. In addition, we propose that niche changes are an important source of learning. We test these propositions on data from the Norwegian general insurance industry. We find that historical density increases failure rates, contrary to some earlier findings, and also that the effect of founding density supports the density delay rather than trial-by-fire hypothesis. We find that failures of others before and during the lifetime of the organization reduce failure rates, and niche changes reduce failure rates for joint-stock companies but not for mutual firms. Overall the findings suggest that organizations learn more cheaply from the failures of others than from their own experiences, and that the stresses of competition can overwhelm the learning effects of competition.

Using an Internet-based business simulation, we examine emergent strategy processes and their consequences in a competitive environment. We find that the emergent decision processes of management teams vary in the extent to which they entail forward looking, anticipatory thinking and experimentation, and the attention the teams pay to their organizations’ capabilities. In dynamic and uncertain environments, information search activities and decision processes are key determinants of organizational performance. Our results suggest that effective emergent decision processes necessarily include elements of deliberate strategy.