Developing a new value proposition requires that a set of partners align their interests. The challenge is to define an ecosystem strategy and agree on its constitutive features. Drawing on a “structuralist approach,” we provide insights into the conditions that constrain the alignment of partners. We conducted a longitudinal process study of the ecosystem of mobile contactless services in France that failed to reach alignment among partners. A comprehensive 12-year picture of the ecosystem is created using a double-analytical design that reinforces the accuracy of the analysis. Our results highlight the factors that hinder the alignment of partners and lead to the development of an ecosystem based on a very different blueprint at the expense of its initial contributors. We reveal three sources of nonalignment: an overly ambitious and loosely defined value proposition, a value distribution risk, and inconsistencies in the multiscale institutional context.

Integrated reporting has widely been promoted as the next evolutionary step in corporate disclosure, which would soon replace traditional reporting practices. Embedded in a zeitgeist that favors sustainability, this outlook would suggest high integrated reporting adoption rates among reporting organizations. Our analysis of integrated reporting in Germany from 2008 to 2019 shows, however, that organizations approached integrated reporting with a wait-and-see mentality. This approach cannot be described adequately by the existing conceptualizations of (partial) practice adoption. We therefore develop the notion of wait-and-see-ism, defined as the deliberate and potentially long-lasting postponement of a decision to adopt a practice while its further development is monitored silently. We see limited, though continuous, efforts to prepare for the prospect of adopting the practice of integrated reporting quickly at a later stage. Wait-and-see-ism expands on prior work on partial adoption by emphasizing its temporal dimension. This adds an important yet undertheorized option that organizations can employ to respond to ambiguous institutional demands, thus explaining the stalling of promising management practices.

While work on affect in strategy-making has been increasingly developing, relatively little research has been conducted on the emotional dynamics of strategy processes directed by strategy consultants. Drawing on a variety of qualitative data gathered during a 1-year consulting case, this article looks into the way emotions unfold when managers solicit external strategic advice. Specifically, this article reveals the mechanisms underpinning managers’ emotions in guided strategy-making from pre- to post-strategizing, highlighting processes as they develop over time. In doing so, three fundamental emotional drivers are laid bare: interaction—or how practitioners engage with each other; temporality—or how practitioners engage with time; and impression—or how practitioners engage with mental representations of strategy-making and strategy consultancy. By revealing how emotions evolve when managers find themselves strategically directed, this article offers insight into how a guided strategy-making trajectory can be affectively managed—to make sense of emotions when they unfold, and to address them appropriately as they do.

We examine the symbolic management of participative strategic decision-making programs that purportedly use crowdsourcing technology to solicit strategic input below the executive suite, but are often decoupled from actual strategic decision making. Specifically, top management may decide on a strategic option before soliciting input under the program. The first portion of our theoretical framework explains why disclosure of a participative strategic decision making program in communicating with security analysts is associated with more positive analyst appraisals, despite decoupling, and why the benefits of disclosure are amplified to the extent that leaders highlight the use of crowdsourcing technology in the program. The second portion of our framework addresses the antecedents of symbolic adoption. We suggest that firms are more likely to adopt and decouple a program when the CEO has a personal friendship tie to the CEO of another firm that has adopted and decoupled, especially following relatively negative analyst appraisals. Analysis of a unique dataset that includes longitudinal survey data from executives supported our predictions.

Prior research suggests interorganizational collaboration faces temporal challenges and also opportunities yet is scarce on the role of time enabling—more often deterring—collaboration for collective benefit. Our contribution is highlighting how a large industry–academic research network developed temporally complex collaboration through varying temporal rules and relationships. The three network-developed collaborative repertoires, with their particular temporal rules and relationships, complemented the externally imposed calendar repertoire: (1) sprint repertoire, following a familiar agile method for joint research, (2) narrative time repertoire, enabling sharing research results across various events at the program level, and (3) “right” time repertoire that turned research results into action in emerging business ecosystems. With these collaborative repertoires, both the temporal diversities of home organizations and the asynchronies of the network activities were resolved for collective benefit. We contribute to the intersection of the literatures on interorganizational network collaboration and temporality.

In this essay that serves to introduce the So!apbox Forum on quality in qualitative research, we argue that achieving quality involves a process of navigating the tensions between structure and creativity, and between accountability and professionalism. Guidelines for achieving quality such as those offered in this forum or elsewhere should not therefore be seen as absolute standards, templates or checklists to be strictly followed, but rather as toolkits that can assist in navigating the tensions involved in participating in and developing the qualitative research craft as a community of scholars, reviewers and editors.

Alliance experience has been a frequent topic in strategic alliance research in recent decades. Nonetheless, its performance consequences, either as a whole or differentiated into general versus partner-specific alliance experience, are neither theoretically clear nor empirically consistent. We use a range of meta-analytic techniques to integrate the empirical findings of 143 studies and provide a more conclusive assessment compared to prior research. Our study thus addresses a long-standing, understudied, and controversial topic: the distinction between the two types of alliance experiences. Going beyond traditional sub-group analysis, we reveal the contextual contingencies by examining how different types of alliance experiences and performance outcomes jointly affect the alliance experience–performance relationship. Moreover, we identify critical country-level institutional contingencies that moderate the focal effect.

Extending research on the role of managerial cognition in strategic decision-making, in this study, we examine the relationship between managerial hubris and strategic foresight. Building on the information-processing model, we argue that managerial hubris leads to a reduced level of strategic foresight due to biases in attending to information as well as encoding and processing information. We further argue that R&D capability moderates the impact in ways depending on the levels of R&D human and physical capital resources available. Furthermore, industry concentration weakens the main negative impact. Using a new and unique two-wave survey of about 500 firms across provinces of China, in combination with an archival data set, we find general support for our propositions in two studies. Our research has important implications for understanding the role of cognitive biases in managerial decision-making in strategic management.

Corporate governance has received substantial scholarly attention for decades, although the focus of this research has by and large been on publicly traded for-profit organizations. However, agency problems are increasingly recognized in nonprofits. As such, we examine the application of corporate governance logic in the context of nonprofits. Our study relies on nearly a decade of data spanning 6853 US-based charities and comprising nearly US$346 billion in total revenue. Our results show that common corporate governance practices—such as independent boards, chief executive officer oversight, and transparency—enhance the degree to which donor contributions are allocated toward a charity’s mission. Overall, we assess the broader applicability and benefits of corporate governance and build on literature highlighting links between for-profit and nonprofit organizations. In doing so, we demonstrate the usefulness of governance in this economically and socially consequential context.