Dear OMT Members,
Please see the attached call for papers for a upcoming special issue
of SMJ on temporary advantages.
Please consider submitting a paper.
Thanks for your attention and best wishes for the new year 2008.
Giambattista Dagnino
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CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A SPECIAL ISSUE OF
THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
THE AGE OF TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE
Guest Co-editors: Richard A. DAveni, Giovanni Battista Dagnino, and Ken G.
Smith
Special Issue Purpose
The aim of this special issue is to develop theory and empirical evidence
about whether and why competitive advantages are becoming less sustainable,
and how organizations can successfully compete using a series of temporary
or dynamic competitive advantages. The primary goal is to ask: What would
the field of strategy look like if the sustainability of competitive
advantage was very rare or nonexistent?
Background
Over the past decade and a half, two literatures have challenged the concept
of sustainable competitive advantage, suggesting that firm-specific
advantages are not sustainable and more temporary in nature due to
endogenous and exogenous reasons. These two literatures are: 1) the
literature on hypercompetitive, high-velocity, hyper-turbulent, and chaotic
environments; and 2) the studies on competitive dynamics that focus on speed
and aggressiveness of firm actions that may undermine the effectiveness of a
firms position and movements. Together these literatures have found
numerous endogenous and exogenous competence destroying strategies,
disruptions and discontinuities that have questioned the strategy fields
core tenet that firms should seek out sustained advantages. And they have
identified how product positioning-, knowledge-, resource-, barrier to
entry-, and deep pocket-based advantages have been deteriorating more
quickly in the past, due to revolutionary new business models, disruptive
technologies, fast diffusion and access to information, and more emphasis on
growth through innovation, than on maintaining margins and stability.
Yet the vast majority of strategic management scholarship has continued to
assume that sustainable competitive advantage exists. Indeed, from the very
outset of the field considerable effort is still being dedicated to defining
and empirically demonstrating the existence of sustainable advantages. The
fields most current response to the challenges to unsustainable advantage
is dynamic capabilitiesagain assumed to be a sustainable advantage that
enables continuous strategy innovation necessary in disruptive environments.
However, there is no consistent body of evidence that dynamic capabilities
are sustainable over extended periods of time and in different contexts, and
many suspect that firms can either become exhausted by continuous
transformation and innovation or get complacent by success.
Research Questions
The analysis of temporary and dynamic advantage can be partitioned into
three main parts: (a) causes or antecedents, (b) management of temporary or
dynamic advantages, and (c) consequences of temporary advantage. We seek
studies of the many causes of the erosion of advantage including studies
that focus on the following questions: What are the endogenous and exogenous
antecedents of various kinds of temporary or dynamic advantages? Are
controllable or uncontrollable causes more important? Answers to these
questions are necessary to understand whether there are ways to slow the
accelerating depreciation of advantages and which strategic solutions or
strategies are possible.
We are also seeking articles on how to manage a series of temporary
or dynamic competitive advantages. Specifically, we seek papers on: How do
companies develop strategies to actively manage luck? How does
organizational structure, culture, compensation, and processes vary to
enable the concatenation a series of short-lived advantages? How is
organizational decision-making and firm resource configurations different in
a world of temporary or dynamic advantages?
Finally, we are looking for papers that answer how firms achieve
high performance where advantages are fleeting? Do they intentionally
cannibalize old advantages and transition to new ones to pre-empt the
competition? If so, when and under what conditions? Is there logic to the
sequence and timing of moves deployed or is it a random walk? Do firm
shift to advantages designed to reduce risk or increase growth at the
expense of profitability? As the pace of change and disruption accelerates,
will other forces arise to create stability/instability in markets? What
economic, societal and collaborative actions and strategies, if any, are
emerging to dampen the escalation of strategic turmoil, rivalry and fleeting
advantage associated with dynamic, hypercompetition, high velocity and other
chaotic environments?
In sum, we are looking for papers that examine the formulation and execution
of very short-term dynamics of strategy, the use of temporary advantages in
hyper-competitive environments.
Deadlines and Submission Instructions:
The deadline for submission of papers is October 1, 2008. Please submit
your papers online on the Strategic Management Journal website and make sure
to follow the Submission Guidelines available at:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/2144/home/ForAuthors.html.
Review Process and Special Issue Conference: The Guest Editors are seeking
reviewers for this issue and are soliciting nominations and volunteers to
participate in the review process. Reviewers are invited to contact the
guest co-editor Giovanni Battista Dagnino, who is responsible for preparing
the list of potential reviewers. Papers will be reviewed following the
regular Strategic Management Journal double-blind review process. After the
second round of reviews, the authors of the most promising submissions will
be invited to a Special Issue Conference on The Age of Temporary
Advantages, to be held at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in
September 2009.
Guest Co-editors contact details:
-Professor Richard DAveni, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, 100
Tuck Hall, Hanover, NH email: richard.a.d
aveni@tuck.dartmouth.edu;
-Professor Giovanni Battista Dagnino,School of Economics and Business,
University of Catania, Catania, Italy; e-mail:
dagnino@unict.it;
-Professor Ken G. Smith, Robert H. Smith School of Business,
University of Maryland, College Park, MD; e-mail:
rhsmith@umd.edu.
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Giovanni Battista Dagnino
Professor of Business Economics & Management
University of Catania
Corso Italia, 55
95129 - CATANIA (Italy)
Ph: +39.095.7537.622
Fax: +39.095.7537.510
Email:
dagnino@unict.it
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