EURAM - European Academy of Management

Strategic Management

Welcome to the Strategic Management SIG!

The Strategic Management Special Interest Group (SIG) is devoted to promoting state of the art strategic thinking by encouraging dialogue along several interrelated lines of inquiry crucial for increasing scholarly and managerial understanding regarding strategic choice, competitive advantage, adaptation, and long-term performance and survival. The SIG was launched at the EURAM 2010 conference in Rome attracting close to a hundred submissions including the best conference paper of the year. Since then the SIG has gone from strength to strength.

We are committed to each year bring together scholars from all around the world to engage in the development and exchange of high-quality research ideas with the potential to fertilize and drive the future directions of scholarly and practitioner strategic thinking alike.

Empirical, conceptual, and practitioner-oriented papers from a plurality of theoretical perspectives, units of analyses, contexts, and research designs are welcome, with particular encouragement for those integrating multiple theoretical lenses and/or methodological approaches. All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind basis by two reviewers.

Strategic Management SIG Officers

The officers of the Strategic Management SIG are

Strategic Management SIG Chair
Tomi Laamanen, University of St.Gallen, tomi.Laamanen@unisg.ch

Strategic Management SIG Past Chair
Henk Volberda, Erasmus University

Strategic Management SIG Program Co-Chairs

Anabel Fernández
University of Valencia

Patrick Reinmoeller
Cranfield University

Strategic Management Pre-Conference Chair
Xavier Castañer, HEC Lausanne

Tracks

The Strategic Management SIG has a general strategic management track and six standing tracks. In addition, every year there are a number of emerging tracks and themes. For example, in 2015, in the Annual EURAM Warsaw Conference the emerging themes include Behavioral Strategy Track and Strategies for Air and Maritime Transportation Track.

(0) Strategic Management – General Track

Strategic management is about setting the direction of a corporation and steering it through challenges in its environment. The discipline “deals with (a) major intended and emergent initiatives (b) taken by general managers on behalf of owners (c) that utilize resources (d) to enhance performance (e) of firms (f) in their external environments.” (Nag, Hambrick, Chen, 2007). The purpose of this Strategic Management General track is to foster research in areas not covered by the other more focused tracks.

(1) Corporate strategy: Dynamics and Micro-foundations of inter-organizational encounters

The aim of this track is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary discussion and engagement to further an analysis of the dynamics shaping M&A and alliance implementation, maintenance, and performance. We welcome papers analyzing the dynamics and micro-foundations of these inter-organizational encounters, be it from theoretical as well as methodological approaches. Strategic, organizational, cultural or human relations perspectives are welcome, particularly when combined to shed light on the some of the conundrums in this area of research. We encourage submissions that identify new avenues of research in M&As and alliances and provide a fresh look at mixed findings in existing research.

(2) Nurturing Business Ecosystems to Deal with Uncertainties: Theoretical roots and practical implications

Rapid and often unpredictable innovation, when combined with hyper competition on a global scale, has created conditions where static models of organizational structures and strategic processes seem increasingly dated. This proposed track aims to achieve two objectives: (1) To explore the theoretical antecedents of business ecosystems and consider the ways in which technological and competitive uncertainty have provided the conditions appropriate to the development of new business models and new strategic processes. (2) To explore the architecture of business ecosystems in different industrial and competitive contexts and consider the strategic implications.

(3) Strategic Processes and Practices

Strategic processes refer to the organizational processes related to the formation and implementation of (business, corporate and geographical) strategies as well as the processes enabling firms to seize and deploy strategic initiatives (acquisitions, alliances, divestitures, internal ventures, et cetera) as well as the management of strategic issues associated with these (Ansoff, 1980; Dutton, Fahey and Narayanan, 1983; Floyd and Wooldridge 1990, 2000; Lechner and Floyd, 2012)). Strategy-as-practice, as a research stream, focus on what people do 'inside' such organizational processes (Whittington, 2003) and seeks to highlight the role of organizational actors in creating and exploiting competitive advantage (Felin et al., 2012; Sirmon and Hitt, 2009; Vaara and Whittington, 2012). This research topic area aims at bringing together these organizational and people levels of analysis to advance understanding of strategy in the making, in the flow of environmental dynamics.

(4) Competitive Strategy

Why would companies have to choose between competitive and cooperatives strategies to obtain a sustainable advantage when they can adopt a coopetition strategy combining simultaneously the advantages of both? So far, competition and cooperation strategies have been mostly investigated separately. The concept of coopetition offers a new approach of strategic management. However, the interplay between competition and cooperation strategies still remains under-researched. This topic aims thus to explore the dynamics between competition, cooperation and coopetition.

(5) Micro-foundations of Strategy, Dynamic Capabilities, Knowledge, and Ambidexterity

The topic aims to bring together scholars interested in recent approaches to the understanding of how firms deal with their environment to achieve (temporary) competitive advantage. This topic aims to investigate how the following approaches inhibit or contribute to this advantage or other outcomes: (1) How micro-foundations of strategy shape, mediate between, and explain aggregate strategy phenomena (strategic decision-making, strategic consensus seeking); (2) dynamic capabilities promoting entrepreneurship, innovation, and organizational learning; (3) Balancing between internal knowledge accumulation and external knowledge absorption. We are interested in submissions that explore the interconnections between levels of analysis and combinations of the approaches above.

(6) Strategy and Business Model Innovation

Despite the rise of research on business models (e.g., Zott, Amit, Massa, 2011), many questions on the topic and in particular on business model innovation are still largely unanswered. The aim of this track is to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding on business models and in particular on business model innovation. This track in particularly welcomes submissions that open-up the black box of business model innovation, examine its antecedents, internal and external contingencies, and outcomes. Moreover, we welcome a multi-level approach and empirical papers on the topic. This track is organized together with the Knowledge and Innovation SIG.

Track Chairs

A key pillar of our success is the high-caliber academics that chair our sessions and help authors develop their ideas (see further below for an alphabetical listing of chairs). These scholars will bring their ample experience from publishing and serving on the editorial boards of leading journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, Organization Science, and Journal of Management Studies to engage with you in state-of-the-art dialogues in strategic management.