Strategic Reconfigurations


Book Description

In a world of ever increasing talent and ever more rapid creation of new knowledge, and in a world that is growing in complexity by the day, it is truly intriguing to learn of capabilities for success and failure in rapid innovation-based industries. The fusion of academic concepts and empirical insights make this book a source of inspiration for inquiring managers. Norbert Walter, Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank and CEO of Deutsche Bank Research, Germany This volume represents a most welcome and important contribution to the emergent and fast-growing dynamic capabilities view (DCV) of the firm and sustainable competitive advantage. It simultaneously helps to assess critically, integrate with a wide range of other perspectives, broaden the scope, and deepen the conceptual foundations of the DCV. In addition and importantly, it links DCV to, and contrasts it with, managerial practice. The authors dispassionate approach is a further plus. The editors have done an excellent job and should be congratulated for this work that should be a must-read. Christos Pitelis, Reader in International Business and Competitiveness, University of Cambridge, UK This path-breaking book provides unique insights into the organisational realities of strategic reconfigurations in uncertain markets, thus advancing the dynamic capability perspective. Dynamic capabilities continue to excite academics. It is a perspective that promises explanations of competitive advantage, but its full potential remains somewhat hidden behind abstract notions. This eloquent volume seeks to overcome the challenge by combining the theory and practice of organisational resource configurations. Joint contributions by expert academics and business executives demystify, but also confirm, elements of the theory. Thus, the book integrates dynamic capabilities with organisational realities as well as with adjacent theories of strategic innovation and entrepreneurship. Strategic Reconfigurations provides a guide to strategic management in turbulent times, for students, researchers, and professionals alike. Business executives in high-velocity markets will find the book invaluable.




Resource Redeployment and Corporate Strategy


Book Description

This volume examines the differences between resource sharing and resource redeployment, and the subsequent effects on firm value creation and industry evolution.




Fundamentalism and Women in World Religions


Book Description

This collection of essays by internationally renowned women scholars both contests the notion of fundamentalism and attempts to find places where it might convege with women's roles in the various world's religions. The essayists explore fundamentalism as a system or method of limiting women's religious roles and examine the ways that women embrace certain aspects of fundamentalism. The essays cover Hinduism, Buddhism, Confuciansim, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The contributors investigate the ways that women "fight back" against fundamentalist conceptions of family, gender roles, doctrinal practices, ritual practices, and God or theistic constructs. The writers reassert and preserve their identities by challenging the static categories of fundamentalism. The essays contain deep and powerful explorations of the intersections of culture, religion, and feminism.




The End of Competitive Advantage


Book Description

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.




Advanced Information Systems Engineering


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2009, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on June 8-12, 2009. The 36 papers presented in this book together with 6 keynote papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 230 submissions. The topics covered are model driven engineering, conceptual modeling, quality and data integration, goal-oriented requirements engineering, requirements and architecture, service orientation, Web service orchestration, value-driven modeling, workflow, business process modeling, and requirements engineering.




Entrepreneurial Innovation in the International Business of Tourism


Book Description

This international case study book provides 28 expertly curated case studies on entrepreneurship and innovation in tourism, each with detailed implementation instructions for the instructor to maximise student participation and learning. The dynamic characteristic of the tourism industry under the influence of micro and macro environment factors requires future professionals to be equipped with appropriate skills and competencies to deal with change and development in real-life practices. Curated and developed by industry experts and practitioners, these case studies embody real-world scenarios with the aim of best preparing students for their future careers. This compelling set of case studies explores the dynamics of entrepreneurship in global context, analyses emerging markets and new business models, and elicits the implications of innovation and entrepreneurship in different contexts and within a transdisciplinary perspective. The cases illustrate innovation and entrepreneurship as an accelerator of tourism growth and development, under a sustainable perspective. With reflective questions throughout to aid both in-class discussion and self-study, this book is an ideal study resource for use in higher and vocational education, and its unique, teaching-led approach positions it as a vital study tool for instructors and students alike.




Mirage of Police Reform


Book Description

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the United States, the exercise of police authority—and the public’s trust that police authority is used properly—is a recurring concern. Contemporary prescriptions for police reform hold that the public would better trust the police and feel a greater obligation to comply and cooperate if police-citizen interactions were marked by higher levels of procedural justice by police. In this book, Robert E. Worden and Sarah J. McLean argue that the procedural justice model of reform is a mirage. From a distance, procedural justice seemingly offers a relief from strained police-community relations. But a closer look at police organizations and police-citizen interactions shows that the relief offered by such reform is, in fact, illusory.




The Child Catchers


Book Description

Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of abortion. But as award-winning journalist Joyce makes clear, adoption has lately become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.




Knowledge and Strategy


Book Description

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




The Foundations and Anatomy of Shareholder Activism


Book Description

The Foundations and Anatomy of Shareholder Activism examines the landscape of contemporary shareholder activism in the UK. The book focuses on minority shareholder activism in publicly listed companies. It argues that contemporary shareholder activism in the UK is dominated by two groups; one, the institutional shareholders whose shareholder activism is largely seen as a driving force for good corporate governance, and two, the hedge funds whose shareholder activism is based on value extraction and exit. The book provides a detailed examination of both types of shareholder activism, and discusses critically the nature of, motivations for and consequences following both types of shareholder activism. The book then locates both types of shareholder activism in the theory of the company and the fabric of company law, and argues that institutional shareholder activism based on exercising a voice at general meetings is well supported in theory and law. The call for institutions to engage in more informal forms of activism in the name of 'stewardship' may bring about challenges to the current patterns of activism that institutions engage in. The book argues, however, that a more cautious view of hedge fund activism and the pattern of value extraction and exit should be taken. More empirical evidence is likely to be necessary, however, to weigh up the long terms benefits and costs of hedge fund activism.