What are the basic issues of strategic management ?

Strategy Processes and Practices: Dialogues and Intersections

Since Mintzberg and Burgelman started to question the seemingly innocent division between strategy formulation and implementation, many scholars have sought to understand strategy processes and practices in organizations. The Winter and Summer Special Issues on Strategy Processes in Strategic Management Journal in1992 represented a major milestone in this regard. Since then major progress has taken place on several fronts. The theories of practice and activities have opened new perspectives on strategy processes and practices. Similarly, the so-called linguistic turn in social studies has affected the ways in which strategy scholars usually conceptualize strategy processes. The objective of this Special Issue is to bring together the state of the art of strategy process and practice research and to call for exemplary contributions to extend and bridge the existing streams of research on strategy as it happens in organizations. We see major potential, for example, in the recent research on organizational cognition, evolutionary perspectives, historical analysis, as well as narrative and discursive approaches in contributing to an improved understanding of strategy processes and practices. We are open to a wide range of paradigms within strategic management. In particular, we invite innovative research that enhances theorizing on strategic management through cross-fertilization of ideas across different perspectives.

The Interplay of Competition and Cooperation

Research in strategy has traditionally focused on the study of competition. More recently, cooperative interorganizational relations have drawn attention, with scholars studying the motivation for forming them and their implications. While competition and cooperation were considered separate modes of interaction between firms, scholars have begun to acknowledge that firms simultaneously engage in these activities. For instance, studies have investigated partners’ competitive behaviors within cooperative relations and explored how firms engage in "coopetition". Nevertheless, cooperative strategy has not been integrated with literature on competitive strategy, and the interplay of competition and cooperation has remained under-researched. This special issue calls for research on the interplay of competition and cooperation that connects these separate streams of research, highlight value creation and appropriation in coopetitive interactions, and sheds light on the coevolution of competition and cooperation, while analyzing their consequences or identifying antecedents and mechanisms that drive their interplay and the trade-offs between them.