Long Range Planning最新文献

We explain why some traditional companies fail to sense new digital technologies when facing an identical scenario of digital transformation. Our objective is to investigate situations where discontinuous changes steaming from digital transformation are actively rejected, in the sense that they are not perceived as a strategic issue, i.e., a threat or opportunity. We draw on a mixed-method research design comprising two sequential studies. The first study is based on Delphi's Technique, which uses a panel of specialists to build the most likely future scenarios in the medium term for the language education industry. The second one is a qualitative comparative study with eleven traditional firms. Their senior executives were first asked for their spontaneous sensing of emerging technologies and later asked to provide their assessment of the most likely future scenarios. Our contribution lies in developing a conceptual model that proposes a structural “schema-driven” explanation of why firm-level structures – concrete, contextual and knowledge – can hinder perception and attention. Active rejection is prompted not by the absence of attentional structures, but by their specific attributes. This expands the dominant ontology of issues, asserting their existence independently of an organization's epistemological experience, and adds to the theoretical understanding regarding the constraints of the sensing dynamic capability in digital transformation.

Decision makers switch between analytical-rational and intuitive-experiential approaches to decision making, a phenomenon termed “cognitive gear switching.” Such switching is crucial for decision making in any organization. However, how decision makers switch between the intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational approaches, the interplay between these approaches and contextual factors remains poorly understood. We study this in the context of decisions made in ongoing product-development projects, where we distinguish between the decision-making behavior of project managers and other project members. We show that project managers are more likely to switch decision-making approaches when faced with project uncertainty and, in such cases, to favor the analytical-rational approach. As such, we define project managers as “conditional cognitive switchers” and the strategy used as “rationally stepping up.”

This study examines the effects of rival firms' negative earnings surprises on focal firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment. I theorize that rival firms' negative earnings surprises attract stronger scrutiny by shareholders in the focal firm, which exposes short-term pressure on the focal firm and makes it limit investments in socially responsible activities. I find that rival firms' negative earnings surprises decrease a firm's CSR engagement, and the effects are stronger when the focal firm has poorer financial performance, when market uncertainty is lower, and when rival firms that experience negative earnings surprises receive a greater amount of media coverage and more consistent news tone.

This qualitative study examines the relationship between the mission statements of 161 Italian B Corps and their social impact performance, measured by the B Impact Assessment (BIA). The research combined different qualitative methods: content analysis, text mining, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) in a homogeneous research design to explore the content of B Corps mission statements and their influence on social impact performance. The results reveal that B Corps’ mission statements are compound in nature, combining elements related to philosophy and values, environmental protection, and social benefit with the drive toward market success and economic performance. Additionally, mission statements with rich content are associated with better social impact performance, highlighting the role of the mission statement in creating identity and imprinting differentiation for B Corps. Finally, this study offers practical recommendations for entrepreneurs and managers of B Corps to craft clear mission statements that promote positive social impact.

This study extends the literature on CEO replacement, top management change, and corporate turnaround by examining the sequence of top management team change events and turnaround outcomes among declining firms in industries affected by technological innovation and digitalization, including information technology, electronics, imaging and communications. This study focuses specifically on the top management change events before and after CEO replacement during the turnaround attempts. Using 12 cases of successful/unsuccessful turnaround matched pairs, we adopt a two-phase case study research approach, first generating insights from six cases (three pairs), and then cross validating our findings with additional six cases (three pairs). Through the qualitative examination of these cases, we uncover top management vacancy as a new theoretical construct and refine an existing construct, top management change, by differentiating between primary and support functions. We then observe distinct patterns of CEO replacement and top management changes separating successful and unsuccessful turnarounds. Our case findings indicate that successful turnarounds are characterized by top management vacancy in primary functions before the new CEO arrival and by top management stability in support functions after the new CEO arrival, and that unsuccessful turnarounds involve top management personnel replacement in primary functions after the new CEO arrival. Based on the case findings and related literature, we propose a theoretical model for CEO replacement, top management change, and corporate turnaround.

Choosing the right company name is challenging and may have major consequences for firm prospects. Drawing on the strategic conformity literature, we investigate the implications of “nonconforming” company names, i.e. foreign sounding and family-unrelated, for family firms’ performance. Consistent with the idea that such names endow the business with greater visibility and recognition, we find that nonconforming names are positively associated with financial performance. This association is stronger when the firm operates in an industry with a low share of nonconforming peers and a high share of eponymous peers, in a crowded product class, and is smaller than industry peers. Collectively, our analysis provides new evidence on the strategic implications of company names.

Event studies, which have significantly advanced mergers and acquisitions (M&A) research, obtain excess returns based on a theory linking a firm's shareholder returns to those of the market. For outcomes lacking such a theory, we propose an empirical approach using a synthetic control method with machine learning to link outcomes for the acquirer or target to those for a group of comparison firms. We discuss the method's assumptions, its close parallel to event studies, and its difference in weighting comparison firms (based on data versus derived from theory). We provide an illustration of Dollar Tree's acquisition of Family Dollar, by analyzing shareholder returns (to demonstrate consistent results with an event study), realized cost and sales synergies, and customer sentiment (derived from more than 52 million Twitter messages). We highlight this method's potential—for M&A and other areas of strategy research—to open up new lines of inquiry.

Building on recent international business research that embraces insights from economic geography, we hypothesise that MNEs locating a high share of the total number of their subsidiaries in global cities (which we conceptualize as global city location intensity) exhibit higher financial performance. We further argue that knowledge-intensive firms benefit more from global city location intensity than less knowledge-intensive firms. We also posit that multinationality (international geographic dispersion) negatively moderates the relationship between global city location intensity and financial performance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 497 MNEs and find strong support for our predictions. We contribute to the literature by introducing the notion of intensity into the relationship between global city locations and financial performance and call for considering scale effects when examining locational decisions and their consequences.