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The purpose of this study is to deal with the performance consequences of business units that adopt varying knowledge roles within the internal multi-business network. Multi-business firms are distributed knowledge systems in which business units are extensively involved in internal knowledge transfer processes. Business units play different roles within their respective corporate knowledge networks as knowledge providers, knowledge receivers, both or neither.

Survey data from a sample of 225 business divisions were analyzed using a multivariate analysis of covariance (ANCOVA).

Results indicate that divisions which occupy knowledge roles that reveal the possession of unique knowledge (knowledge signaling) or guarantee the accumulation of new knowledge (knowledge learning) outperform those divisions that have access to spilled knowledge (knowledge depreciation) or have no access to any kind of knowledge (knowledge insulation).

Four knowledge roles are distinguished according to the extent to which a business division provides the rest of the corporation with knowledge or receives knowledge from the rest of the corporation, thus exploring the issue of internal knowledge transfer from an integrated perspective that takes the directionality of knowledge flows and the position within the knowledge network into account.

This study contributes to existent research on knowledge transfer and performance outcomes by demonstrating the usefulness of the knowledge role as an integrating concept within this literature. It also extends the four-role framework to the prescriptive domain and tests its normative implications in an intensive internal knowledge transfer setting which has to date gone relatively unnoticed, as is that of multi-business firms.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the topics published in the journal in the five-year period from 2005 to 2009.

A qualitative examination of content by year identifies prevalent themes.

The beginning and ending of the time period demonstrate continued interest in major figures of our field and the context of their thinking. Quality, excellence and continuous improvement were recurrent topics as were those of business in society, ethics and social responsibility. The value of historical analysis with suggested methodologies for further study was included.

The paper is limited to the topical papers within this five-year timeframe and a qualitative analysis of themes. Fewer than expected papers were published on leadership and international subjects given their important to the field.

Aspiring authors may find the historical background for the current topics of entrepreneurship, quality, ethics and social responsibility convenient. Helpful advice from experts about how to study management history is highlighted. Cross-cultural and international historical linkages on themes and concepts are identified as areas in need of additional research.

The social construction of studying and teaching history is discussed. The context in which major writers lived and events occurred is recognized as a major factor in interpreting situations.

The paper reviews over 100 articles to categorize the historical origins of current and recurring topics into major themes. Papers are organized by topic, person or event into a chart by year.

This paper expands theory on strategists by investigating how non-executive strategy professionals in multi-business firms strategize. In focus is the strategizing of two groups of non-executive strategy professionals: a corporate strategy team and eleven business strategists employed in each of the incorporated units.

A case study design was employed to explore privileged accessed data to gain first-hand in-depth qualities of strategists' work. The design was characterized by phenomenon driven immersed participatory insider research with retrospective reflection and theorizing. Data includes strategies, interview data, calendars, meeting minutes, workshop material and observational field notes.

Non-executive strategy professionals in multi-business firms are either employed at the corporate center or in the peripheral businesses. Based on this location and their individual experiences they assume an exclusive content or an inclusive process strategizing orientation. In practice, the groups strategize tightly together.

Case studies are useful in explorative research providing thick descriptions. While empirically rich, the results of this study are limited by the context of one single case. Future research is encouraged to confirm, contradict and refine the results presented.

The insights from this study can help organizations regarding how to employ strategy professionals in multi-business firms.

This paper contributes to a recognized need to explore strategists' work. In contrary to the majority of existing research, focusing on senior management and/or strategy formulation, this paper highlighted non-executive strategy professionals' strategizing.

The purpose of this paper is to revise Burgelman’s idea (1991, 1994) that induced strategic processes is necessarily variation-reducing. In doing so, the authors explore whether major change in a firm’s administrative system can be managed in an evolutionary fashion via induced variation-increasing mechanisms. In particular, the authors focus on a multi-business multinational firm in which different administrative systems were experimented simultaneously as a way to determine which of these systems provided the most conducive context for innovation and capability development.

The authors adopted an inductive perspective and developed a single case research project aimed at documenting the process of experimentation and subsequent selection and adoption of a new administrative system by a large multi-business multinational firm.

The paper’s main contribution is the concept of “induced variation”, understood as intra-organizational variation-increasing mechanisms deliberately created at the top level of the organization to trigger an intra-organizational evolutionary process of management innovation. This finding extends and modifies Burgelman’s discussion of induced and autonomous strategic behavior by showing that induced processes need not necessarily be variation-reducing, but may actually be variation-increasing. Additionally, the authors explain how an evolutionary process aimed at learning about the relative merits of alternative administrative systems through in vivo “reflection in action” (Schön, 1983) unfolds in a complex global organization.

While the work provides several insights on the development of an evolutionary process leading to management innovation, its inductive nature limits its external validity and requires the development of further work for such purpose.

The authors explore the roles of regional organizations in creating new corporate capabilities for the MNC.

The authors show how management capabilities developed in the Latin American context were rolled out to other locations.

The authors' findings confirm that major drastic reorganization initiatives can actually be approached using an evolutionary approach.

The major purpose of this paper is the development of a theoretical framework that can be used by corporate practitioners to understand the implicit parenting strategy of their company, assess its performance, and adjust it for improving the net corporate value creation.

In this paper, a three‐dimensional framework is developed that accounts for corporate‐to‐business and business‐to‐business interactions, value‐adding and value‐destroying activities, and strategic and operational levers. The framework is operationalized by assigning a broad set of individual activities to these levers.

The paper delivers a robust, systematic, and operational framework to assess the net benefits to a given business of being part of a corporate portfolio, and to identify and evaluate implicit parenting strategies in corporate practice. While previous studies mainly focused on broad parenting approaches with low granularity this framework now allows earlier observations to be substantiated, finer distinctions between the applied strategies to be drawn, and the core of superior value added approaches to be investigated.

The introduced framework can be used to analyze the origin and underlying drivers of conglomerate discounts and premia and thus enhance understanding of capital market valuation of multi‐business companies. The developed framework can also be the basis for the derivation of a typology of corporate parenting strategies. In this way, it can support practitioners in portfolio management – which was also the explicit motivation for the development of the original parenting advantage concept.

The outlined framework will facilitate the investigation of structural, strategic, and organizational roots of superior parenting strategies in corporate practice. It may be used to analyze performance differences of multi‐business companies that go beyond the degree of diversification and may finally contribute to solving the puzzle of the conglomerate discount.

The practice of strategic decision‐making has two major perspectives to help managers create and maintain competitive advantage in the face of a range of business challenges. One stresses market position and the other core competence. (1) Market position – the positioning approach to strategy development is associated mainly with the work of Michael Porter; strategic choice is focused primarily on the structure of the industry and how it might be shaped to advantage. The aim is to establish a “privileged”/hard‐to‐replicate position in an industry that is difficult to enter. (2) Core competence – the competence‐led perspective is associated with the work of C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel; strategic choice focuses primarily on assessing which distinctive competences should be built, then considers the market opportunities that would exploit them best. It may be tempting to use one approach or the other because the market position and core competence approaches do create perspectives that see things very differently, and their analytical methodologies offer different guidance. But instead of picking one over the other, the astute strategist may be best served to test out both perspectives and generate a wider range of options. This is shown in the article’s illustrations of corporate strategy in the multi‐business firm and strategic renewal. In sum, looking at your business from both approaches will generate two sets of contrasting perspectives and options for action. For many firms, this binocular vision of the available strategic options will lead to a better result than if either perspective was used alone.

RUNNING A LARGE, MULTI‐BUSINESS COMPANY HAS never been harder than it is today. For one thing, investors tend to accord higher multiples to “pure play” firms, in part because they understand what they're buying. In a 1998 study, for example, Raghuram Rajan, Henri Servaes, and Luigi Zingales found that the shares of highly diversified firms traded, on average, for almost 10% less than those of focused firms during the 1980s and early 1990s (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 6368).

This study aims to expand the knowledge on strategy and alignment by exploring how executives and strategists can manage alignment between corporate and business strategy to leverage synergies, from a corporate strategy perspective, without limiting local responsiveness, from a business strategy perspective.

The study is characterized by privileged access and richness of data. A case study design was used to explore the results. Data include interviews, observations in workshops, material produced in workshops and personal field notes.

The study provides insights about how alignment between corporate and business strategy can be managed to balance requirements on both corporate and business strategy. To do so alignment needs be understood and managed based on its contribution to the competitiveness of the firm. In addition, alignment encompasses two dimensions: direction of alignment (which can be vertical and horizontal) and relation of alignment (which can be numerical and non-numerical). This leads to four different types of alignment.

Explorative case studies yield results less generalizable. Future research is thus encouraged to confirm or contradict the results of this study.

When formulating strategy, executives and strategists need to consider what type of alignment is appropriate for what parts and elements of the strategies (e.g. goals and activities) to gain competitive advantage. By using different types of alignment, it is possible to balance the need for both corporate synergies and business responsiveness.

This study fulfils an identified need to study what alignment between strategies on different organizational levels encompasses and the potential risks of alignment.

In the last decade, the Italian natural gas market has undergone profound changes. The slow ongoing process of liberalization that began in 2000 has produced many changes in the industry as companies have had to react to the new regulatory framework. Many companies have sought agreements, alliances and mergers to consolidate their position in the market, other companies have sought to diversify their product range by becoming multi-utility companies, others, unable to react to the new competitive pressures, have gone bankrupt. The aim of the work is to analyse the performance of natural gas retail companies after the liberalization of the sector.

The authors carry out a financial statement analysis for indexes in order to evaluate business management in terms of the financial, profitability and liquidity aspects. The authors analysed a sample of 111 companies operating in Italy for a six-year period (2004-2009) following the full liberalization of the sector (January 1, 2003).

Results show that many of the firms in the sample are suffering from a reduction in profits and present serious financial weaknesses. In particular, the companies that perform the worst are the small, new entrants and those in the south of Italy. In regard to the new entrants it should be noted that although more than ten years have passed since the beginning of the liberalization process, entry barriers are still present. As regards the business diversification, the best financial and operating results are achieved by large firms, listed companies and those which grew mainly through M&As.

Even though there are numerous theoretical and empirical studies on the effects of diversification strategies and M&As, very few researchers have analyzed these effects in the context of a liberalization process of an energy sector. Starting from this gap in the literature, the work aims to analyse the strategies implemented by the Italian companies in the natural gas retail segment.

The empirical findings will help the policy makers of Italy in understanding that more than ten years since the beginning of the natural gas market liberalization, entry barriers are still present. Although all consumers have been free to choose their supplier since 2003, the incumbent firms have maintained a dominant position in the market, thanks to a “weak” unbundling (often the incumbent retail operator belongs to the same group as the distribution network operator) and to the advantage in the supply phase by means of a long-term contract with a “take or pay” clause.

Italy has always been characterized by the centrality of natural gas in its energy basket and it is the third European country for annual consumption. Despite the importance of this energy source, no substantial work has been done in this regard with reference to Italy.