Strategy Process

Advances in Strategic Management · Volume 22 (2005)

Gabriel Szulanski, Joe Porac and Yves Doz, Editors

Over the past three decades, there have been several waves of interest in what has been called the “strategy process.” This broad label reflects an interest shared by numerous fields of inquiry in uncovering connections between the social, cognitive and political processes by which strategy comes about, and firm performance.

Recent theoretical advances in cognition research, evolutionary accounts of organizations, complexity theory, corporate governance, resource-based views of the firm, real options, as well as the increased accessibility of strategic decisions makes strategy process, once again, a vibrant, timely and fertile context in which to explore theoretical and practical problems of interest to the strategic management field. Particularly, these expanding developments promise the doubly enticing prospect of a firmer grounding in theory as well as rigorous and systematically collected field-based accounts of strategy-in-action.

Yet, the notion of process continues to intrigue and frustrate strategy and organizations scholars. While the promise of process is and remains high, the reality of process is confusing. The notion of process is not clear, and the community of scholars that studies process is hard to locate and identify. In a sense everything is process and nothing is process. This volume of Advances in Strategic Management continues the conversation on strategy process by bringing together strategy and organization scholars from around the world who are doing cutting-edge research on the process of strategizing. The sixteen chapters explore the strategizing process at multiple levels of analysis and from various viewpoints. As such, the volume represents an attempt to summarize the state-of-the-art among researchers interested in strategy process as a domain of inquiry and uncover new and emerging connections between strategic processes and new theoretical developments in the study of strategy and organizations.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Challenge of Strategy Process Research

Gabriel Szulanski

Joseph Porac

Yzes Doz

Cognitive and Emotional Foundations of Strategy Making

An Emotion-based View of Strategic Renewal

Quy Nguyen Huy

An Attention Based Theory of Strategy Formulation: Linking Micro and Macro Perspectives in Strategy Processes

William Ocasio

John Joseph

Top Managerial Cognitions, Past Performance and Strategic Change: A Theoretical Framework

Jerayr Haleblian

Nandini Rajagopalan

Sequence of Thinking and Acting in Strategy-Making

J. Ignacio Canales

Joaquim Vilà

Interorganizational Monitoring: Process, Choices and Outcomes

Giuseppe Labianca

James F. Fairbank

Institutional and Resource Foundations of Strategy Making

Managing the MNC and Exploitation/Exploration Dilemma: From Static Balance to Dynamic Oscillation

Catherine Thomas

Renata Kaminska-Labbé

Bill McKelvey

Adaptive and Creative Strategy Logics in Strategy Processes

Patrick Regnér

The Development of the Resource Based Firm Between Value Appropriation and Value Creation

Arabella Mocciaro Li Destri and Giovanni Battista Dagnino

Contemporary Empirical Studies of Strategy Making

Communication Dissonnance and Pragmatic Failures in Strategic Processes: The Case of Cross-Border Acquisitions

Olivier Irrmann

Strategy-Making as a Complex, Double-Loop Process of Knowledge Creation: Four Cases of Established Banks Reinventing the Industry by Means of the Internet

Maria P. Salmador

Eduardo Bueno

Top Managers and the Product Improvement Process

C. Annique Un

Alvaro Cuervo Cazurra

Strategy Content and Process in the Context of E-Business Performance

Tim R. Coltman

Timothy M. Devinney

David F. Midgley

Emergent Strategies and their Consequences: A Process Study of Competition and Complex Decision Making

Quintus R. Jett

Jennifer M. George

Meta-commentaries on Methodologies for Strategy Process Research

Comparative Causal Analysis in Processual Strategy Research: A Study of Causal Mechanisms in Organizational Decline and Turnarounds

Kalle Pajunen

Future Directions from the Past: Management and Accounting Discourse in Historical Perspective

Luca Zan

Practices of Organizing: Inside and Outside the Processes of Change

Eamonn Molloy

Richard Whittington