International Journal of Management Reviews最新文献

With respect to the increasing trend of companies reversing or modifying previous offshoring decisions, research on manufacturing relocation has gained momentum over the past decade. However, despite increasing efforts in this field, the general understanding of relocation still lacks maturity, with numerous conflicting results and arguments from a variety of industrial and regional contexts that are yet to be consolidated. This study uses a systematic literature review method to address this lack of consolidation, contributing to academia in three ways. First, this paper presents a novel decisional framework that involves all of the relevant aspects of a relocation decision based on 158 reviewed papers, laying a solid foundation for theoretical, conceptual and empirical development. Second, it consolidates and disambiguates all of the relevant terminologies used in relocation debates, providing proper logical clarification. Third, we identify 25 gaps in the research across all decisional aspects and propose three integrated research avenues that are critical to the accumulation of knowledge.

Strategic alliances have attracted substantial attention from industry and academia over the past three decades. However, due to rapid technological evolution, saturated marketplaces, globalisation of businesses on the one hand and de-globalisation of the market on the other (as marked by Brexit and the trade war between US and China, COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war), the strategic environment of businesses is changing quickly. Fundamental and rapid changes in the wider environment necessitate the review of theoretical and practical insights of earlier and emerging studies - to examine the new challenges, issues and paradoxes of strategic alliances. This special issue attempts to provide a forum to allow researchers to question the assumptions underlying existing theory a little further beyond just “gap-spotting” or “gap-filling”. This special issue includes four very interesting literature review pieces, which venture deeper into the phenomenon, and explore the opportunities, issues and paradoxes of strategic alliances while adopting alternative theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches and interpretations to address issues of managing strategic alliances and maximising returns from them in the new strategic context.

How firms respectively create and appropriate value by means of alliances are questions that management scholars have considered for several decades. Scholars have identified various factors underlying how alliances create value and how partner firms appropriate such value, respectively. Fewer studies have dealt with how both issues relate, and fewer yet have examined the interplay between value creation and value appropriation as an alliance develops. The purpose of this paper is to organize the extant literature through a theoretically coherent developmental framework that informs research on value creation and value appropriation as distinct but inter-related phenomena. A systematic review of 234 articles reveals factors associated with value creation, factors driving value appropriation, and, especially, interplay factors that explain potential cycles of value creation and value appropriation within an alliance. We also identify some important themes and theoretical directions for future research. This study thus contributes to alliance research by (1) developing a structured framework that explains not only the respective drivers of value creation and value appropriation, but also how they interplay in alliances; (2) explicating theoretically the specific factors that explain the interplay of value creation and value appropriation in cycles of alliance adaptation; and (3) developing recommendations for the further development of theory, especially for these interplay effects.

Strategic alliance theories have been studied widely over the past few decades. However, their key arguments may face new limitations and challenges brought by emerging technologies such as big data analytics capability (BDAC). This paper aims to identify the challenges BDAC brings to strategic alliance theories and the associated changes to strategic alliance research. Specifically, this paper systematically reviews and identifies how BDAC challenges the key arguments in the strategic alliances’ theories through the lens of three stages of strategic alliances: formation, governance and achieving alliance performance. Meanwhile, this study also finds some changes in strategic alliance research brought by BDAC. Finally, this study proposes promising directions for future research on strategic alliances under the influences of BDAC.

The legitimation of social enterprises is contingent upon the institutional context and targeted stakeholders; however, this claim has not been explored systematically, considering existing legitimacy strategies. Understanding the reasons behind the pursuit of legitimacy and the strategies that can be employed in specific contexts is paramount for social enterprises to obtain legitimacy and enhance positive social impact. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review at the intersection of social enterprise legitimacy, institutional theory and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Drawing on articles in journals included in the Web of Science database, the review enhances understanding of social enterprise legitimacy research through institutional contextualization by answering the question: ‘Why and how do social enterprises aim to obtain legitimacy in different contexts and towards which ecosystem actors?’ Six main reasons why social enterprises pursue legitimacy are identified, namely: to acquire tangible (financial and material) and intangible (community support and trust) resources; to compete with commercial businesses and non-governmental organizations; to comply with stakeholder demands; to overcome institutional challenges; to create social impact; and to bring about institutional change. Alongside these reasons for legitimacy pursuit, legitimacy strategies and the addressed actors and institutions are identified and synthesized into three categories: institutional context dependency; closeness to the audience; and multidimensionality and process perspective, identifying promising avenues for further research that are more context-sensitive. The review provides guidance for social enterprises seeking to identify and adapt legitimacy strategies, enabling them to address the pressing issues of legitimacy deficits that continue to hamper the generation of social impact.

Strategic alliances play a vital role in exploration and exploitation activities, otherwise known as the ambidextrous approach for value creation. This has led to an upsurge in studies on ambidexterity in strategic alliances by giving rise to various conceptualizations and theoretical challenges. However, we lack a systematic evaluation and synthesis of the theoretical and empirical insights from this growing body of research. In this paper, we use an integrative systematic literature review (SLR) approach to critically analyse 77 articles on ambidexterity in strategic alliances published in 38 leading journals across 13 disciplines. Findings from bibliometric and qualitative content analyses reveal three major research directions: (1) micro-foundation and organizational antecedents of ambidexterity in alliances, (2) governance mechanisms of ambidexterity, and (3) relational and performance outcomes of ambidexterity. We integrate these findings into a unified framework which provides a foundation for future research on ambidexterity in strategic alliances, with implications for academics, policymakers and practitioners.

Sustainability-oriented collaboration, a heterogeneous set of formal interorganizational arrangements that vary considerably in size, membership, focus and functioning, but share the same interest in addressing sustainability challenges of public concern, is becoming a mainstay of corporate agenda setting. Yet, the more firms interact on social and environmental issues, the more the burdens and tensions of collaborating for sustainability become apparent. Research and practice increasingly question whether an alliance management capability (AMC) perspective can be adopted to explain variability in collaboration effectiveness. With the aim to investigate whether, and to what extent, existing sustainability-oriented collaboration research integrates or challenges mainstream theory on AMC, we adopt a problematization method to unpack the root assumptions underlying the AMC construct. We find that self-interest in economic value creation and capture, the need for homogeneity to favour knowledge accumulation and learning on alliance management, and predictable patterns of AMC deployment are consistently assumed by scholars to predict success in alliance management. Accordingly, we analyse AMC assumptions’ current integration in the study of sustainability-oriented collaboration, conducting a systematic literature review on collaborative capabilities developed for, during and in response to sustainability challenges. In so doing, we identify what distinguishes sustainability-oriented collaboration from mainstream strategic alliances and the related implications on the collaborative capabilities firms should develop and deploy when dealing with sustainability challenges. We elaborate on these and their implications for AMC constructs to provide a future research agenda, which integrates further theoretical perspectives and broadens the scope of existing ones.

This paper aims to re-evaluate the customer experience literature in the hospitality and tourism (H&T) domain by employing a paradox lens and constructing a model for future research direction and practitioners. Using two co-citation analysis methods—a hierarchical cluster analysis and a multidimensional scaling analysis—to investigate 312 customer experience papers from the leading H&T journals with 22.124 citations over the 44-year period (1987–2021), we identified five knowledge foundations that have made up the intellectual structure of customer experience in H&T: experiential consumption, authenticity, memorability, place branding, and service. This result reveals the dualistic representations of the paradoxical character of customer experience including authentic/fantastical, structured/unstructured, branded/ecological, and bubbled/exposed. Based on this finding, this study developed a framework for scholars and marketers to reveal different approaches to managing the tensions between paradoxes.

This paper reviews the literature on relational dynamics in information technology outsourcing (ITO) relationships, a type of interorganizational relationship (IOR) between client and vendor firms that can vary considerably in complexity. While relational dynamics are understood to reflect changes in an IOR ex-post contract which can substantially influence relationship performance and development, prior IOR research is limited in its conceptualization. The extensive ITO literature offers fertile ground for exploring this limitation but has advanced different conceptualizations and is fragmented in empirical findings, which warrants a systematic assessment. We conduct an integrative review of 127 peer-reviewed empirical studies to enhance our understanding of the constituents of relational dynamics. The findings reveal that relational dynamics involve the occurrence and management of tensions within and across four relationship development stages (transactional, strategic, transformational, and termination). For each stage and between stages, we identify the main tension, the firms’ strategies to manage the tension, and the outcomes. Based on these findings, we develop an integrative framework that offers a comprehensive and multifaceted conceptualization of relational dynamics, revealing that as ITO arrangements progress (or regress), partner firms are confronted with structural and transitional tensions inherent in relationship stability and instability. Based on this framework, we offer future directions for developing a more comprehensive understanding of relational dynamics in ITO and, more broadly, IORs.