Corporate self-greenewal: Strategic responses to environmentalism

The rise of environmentalism in the past decade has become a major transforming force in pollutive and hazard prone industries. Corporate environmental responsiveness is not simply a peripheral and one of the many ‘social’ or ‘ethical’ issues facing business. It is becoming a central concern for competitiveness, productivity, and profitability. It is creating strategic transformation of companies in a diverse range of industries such as, Autos, Chemicals, Oil, Fast Foods, Power Generation, Pharmaceuticals, etc. The process of environmentally directed self-renewal, called ‘greenewal’ here, affects all aspects of companies. It implies changes in products, production systems, waste management practices and internal systems. It seeks to make companies simultaneously more competitive and environmentally responsible. This paper describes the pressures of and responses to environmentalism in a selected set of industries. It examines the processes of greenewal that companies are undergoing. It identifies implications for strategic greening of firms.     

Organisational Justice: A Senian Perspective

In this paper, we draw inferences from the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s book, The Idea of Justice to inform the organisational justice literature. The extant societal-level theories of justice tend to emphasise aspects that are analogous to either the procedural or distributive dimensions of organisational justice. The Senian idea of comprehensive justice is different in that it synthesises the procedural- and distributive-related dimensions at the societal-level. We theorise that the Senian notion could be applied at the organisational-level to facilitate outcomes that are actually valued by the workforce. Further, we contend that the emphasis on non-parochialism in the Senian notion of justice makes it particularly relevant to the ethics of multi-national corporations (MNCs) operating in alien cultures. To support our contention, we analyse the lean manufacturing practices of a Japanese MNC operating in India. Our case analysis demonstrates how Senian thinking helps one surface unjust outcomes that would otherwise go unacknowledged. Our analysis also offers tentative support to Senian claims about the capacity of human behaviour to undermine well-designed institutions. Concurring with the Senian view, which favours combating manifest injustice rather than fixating over designing perfectly just institutions, we derive some normative implications to advance the cause of striving for outcomes that are actually valued by the workforce.     

A PROFILE OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: A NOTE*

A study of 88 randomly selected strategy-related dissertations was conducted to develop a statistical profile of dissertations in the strategic management field. This study also provides some empirical evidence supporting the criticism that the field is fragmented.     

Rigor and practical usefulness of research in strategic management

This paper examines the rigor and usefulness of research programs in strategic management. Using a facet analysis technique, 23 research programs are examined on eight criteria reflecting their relative rigor and usefulness. Results show that this field has emphasized the practical usefulness of research results. Some research that is rigorous and has practical usefulness also exists in the field. Suggestions for generating more such research are discussed.     

Manifestations of rural entrepreneurship: the journey so far and future pathways

Management Review Quarterly - Rural entrepreneurship has manifested into a diverse and progressive field of research in the last two decades. It has seen research amalgamating from different fields...     

Empirically derived models of strategic decision-making processes

This paper reports on an empirical study of strategic decision-making processes and organizational learning in 32 business organizations facing complex environments. The decision processes were found to vary in four prototypical patterns described here as the strategic decision-making models. These models are proposed as an initial step towards the development of a taxonomy of strategic decision processes. The relationships between strategic decision-making models and organizational learning systems that support them are explored. These models may help researchers to conceptualize and practitioners to manage strategy formulation processes in organizations.     

Unpacking the effect of exploration during environmental uncertainty: Evidence from the information technology sector

Environmental uncertainty can render managerial decision‐making about resource deployment particularly difficult. Integrating the knowledge‐based view of the firm and the organizational learning literature, we make a case for deploying specific knowledge‐based resources to cope with specific types of environmental uncertainty. We unbundle knowledge‐based resources into technology‐based and social‐network‐based resources and, using Milliken's (1987) typology of environmental uncertainty, we hypothesize that (a) technological exploration will be more effective during state uncertainty and (b) while being generally beneficial, social exploration will prove more effective during response uncertainty. An analysis of the financial performance of information technology (IT) firms in the United States over the period 1995–2004 generally supports our hypotheses. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transdisciplinary Study of Sustainable Enterprise

Our research explores more holistic ways of understanding and creating sustainable enterprises. Enterprises and business school scholars are two primary actors in this research endeavor. Enterprises are moving towards sustainability but with a partial and selective understanding of global sustainability. Business school scholars generally study sustainability in their respective functional areas, such as management, accounting, finance and marketing, with some notable exceptions. We suggest that transdisciplinarity offers a unique real‐world problem‐solving framework that crosses disciplinary boundaries and the academic–practitioner divide. We explore the nature of transdisciplinarity and its application to corporate sustainability. We argue that enterprise sustainability requires trans‐functional, trans‐disciplinary, trans‐stakeholder, trans‐aesthetic and trans‐human knowledge that is possible through transdisciplinarity. We provide an example of transdisciplinary work in art and sustainable enterprise. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The structure of man-made organizational crises: Conceptual and empirical issues in the development of a general theory of crisis management

Analyses of a nationwide questionnaire sent to the public affairs officers of the Fortune 1,000 corporations reveals that the crises their organizations experienced in the last three years and the preventative actions they are undertaking to blunt potential crises cluster together in a relatively small number of distinct factors or families. The differences in the factor scores between those organizations with a crisis management unit (CMU) and those without one are statistically significant. The paper suggests that organizations would do well to consider forming dual crisis portfolios: one made up of a set of preventative actions drawn from the action clusters and another composed of a set of crises drawn from the crisis clusters. In this way, organizations could not only begin to insure themselves with minimal coverage across a broad family of crises, but they could also add a significant component of needed rationalization to their CM programs. The paper discusses the broad implications of the results for an emerging general theory of CM.     

Which green matters for whom? Greening and firm performance across age and size distribution of firms

Small Business Economics - A growing body of literature links firm performance with sustainability efforts. We contribute to this literature by developing a novel framework for contextualising...