This volume brings together various emerging perspectives in strategy research for further interaction and debate. Contributions address a range of issues related to the globalization of strategy research and chapters examine strategy theory, methods and research as well as strategy as practice, discourse and reflexive design.

The globalization of the competitive landscape has forced companies to fundamentally rethink their strategies. Whereas once only a few industries such as oil could be labeled truly global, today many-from pharmaceuticals to aircraft to computers-have become global in scale and scope. As a consequence, creating a global competitive advantage has become a key strategic issue for many companies. Crafting a global strategy requires making decisions about which strategy elements can and should be globalized and to what extent.

Transformative Strategies is based around the idea that strategic thinking is critical for organizational success in today’s environment. The financial crisis, continuing economic uncertainty, digitalization, environmental issues, and social issues involved in globalization present strategic problems for enterprises. Unlike other textbooks that take a standard solutions-based approach, Transformative Strategies provides readers with a way to develop strategies that fit their own complex situations and shows how models may be applied in different ways to different problems. Each of the four key elements affecting the business environment (globalization, disruption, collaboration, and responsibility) are addressed as a set of tensions in eight areas: global competition, business model innovation, digital strategizing, business eco-systems, corporate social responsibility, top management teams, and trans-cultural leadership in a globalized world. This tension-based pedagogy enables readers to shift from dichotomized thinking (such as exploring or exploiting) to transformative thinking (such as exploring and exploiting; exploring through exploiting) and readers are challenged to solve real problems that companies face, encouraging them to acknowledge the broader context in which organizations operate and to analyze the problem from multiple perspectives. Each chapter is structured to aid engagement and discussion, including a discussion of the tension tied to the chapter’s topic, learning objectives, theoretical frameworks, real life case studies, exercises and reflective questions. A highly practical book that encourages readers to develop solutions that fit their own complex problems, it will be particularly suitable for those studying strategic management as part of an MBA, MA or MSc in Management, as well as those in executive education. It will also appeal to all those interested in learning how to lead and transform organizations towards impact, purpose and relevance. Online resources include discussions of the case studies, supplementary problems for class discussion, and an instructors’ manual outlining the pedagogical approach.

Executive search, headhunting, is now one of the archetypal new knowledge intensive professional services, as well as a labor market intermediary bound up with globalization. In this book, the authors examine the key actors in the process of executive search globalization – leading global firms – and offer an interpretation of the forces producing the contemporary organizational strategies of global executive search. The Globalization of Executive Search documents the forms of institutional work that have legitimated the role of executive in elite labor markets and created demand for the services of global firms; this exposes not only the changing geographies of executive search, but also how executive search has established itself as a new knowledge intensive professional service. The authors reveal how the globalization of executive search is exemplary of the processes by which a range of new knowledge intensive professional services have come to be globally recognized, approaching the heart of contemporary capitalism.

The field of strategic management emerged and developed in North America before migrating to other parts of the world. Historically, the relationship between North American strategy research and research elsewhere was asymmetric: North America led, other research communities followed. More recently, however, the pattern of interaction has shifted as strategy research communities outside North America have attained critical mass and begun to challenge North American dominance. The challenge takes several forms. To begin with, whereas a decade or more ago top management journals rarely featured strategy research conducted outside North America, today the volume of work by non-North American strategy researchers that appears in these journals is substantial, and arguably approaching parity. Moreover, strategy research communities outside North America are no longer inclined to defer to the North American community as sole arbiter of research quality, nor do they routinely accept North American views of what constitutes “cutting edge” research. This newly gained confidence in their own abilities and judgment has emboldened non-North American researchers to explore intellectual traditions distinct from those that ground North American strategy research. As North American strategy researchers are increasingly exposed to these new ideas and approaches, optimistically, this should give rise to cooperation, consolidation and common ground. But, for the present, strategy research seems to be moving in the opposite direction, toward increased rivalry and fragmentation as new rhetorical, discursive, and practice perspectives emerge and gain traction. For some, this fragmentation reflects the effects of globalization on the larger cycle of variation, selection and consolidation in the evolution of strategy research. For others, however, it is the result of a confrontation between diverse intellectual traditions and socioeconomic conditions that not only make fragmentation and hostility likely to persist, but also give rise to distinctive and potentially irreconcilable schools of thought (O'Shannasy, 2001) . Whether strategy research is destined for permanent pluralism or merely in transition to greater coherence is difficult to say precisely because we do not understand adequately how fields evolve in general, and how globalization will affect the intellectual evolution of our field in particular (Baum, 2007). At one level it can be argued that the end-state does not matter. What matters at this point is letting a “thousand flowers” bloom by encouraging new ideas and giving new voices an opportunity to be heard. This is the policy we adopted for this volume of Advances in Strategic Management. We cast our net wide deliberately, inviting contributions that tackle and capture the globalization of strategy research, with particular emphasis on contributions that “challenge the historically dominant North American tradition in strategy research - from both outside as well as inside North America.” We believe we have succeeded in bringing together as diverse a collection of contributions as space allows, but in the course of reading and editing them it became clear to us that not only do many of these contributions challenge the dominance of the North American influence in strategy research, but they also challenge each other. For us, as editors, this posed a dilemma: Espousing diversity may satisfy our belief in the importance of keeping an open mind, but stopping there would ignore how the increasing conceptual diversity of strategy research is changing the field. A useful starting point for understanding the impact of this diversity on the field of strategy is the wider historical context. As with the broader impact of globalization, the emergence of a challenge to North American dominance of strategy research is due in part to technological change, specifically convenient access of researchers via the Internet to articles published in what are often colloquially referred to as 'second tier' management journals. Easier access to these journals has increased their influence, and reduced the power of so-called 'top tier' journals, which are almost invariably North American, to enforce a particular approach to strategy research. It has also allowed non-North American researchers, and North American researchers who dissent from the dominant perspective, to link up and form new research perspectives. The increased diversity, however, has intensified competition for what Collins (1998) terms the “intellectual attention space”. This, in turn, has triggered greater attention to fundamental questions of legitimacy, or more specifically, why it is increasingly difficult for strategy researchers to agree on how knowledge claims should be judged. This the main issue that we examine in this opening chapter. We begin by framing the issue of intellectual or scientific legitimacy in general. This is a large issue so, by necessity, we focus on several key points that are useful to our analysis. We continue by examining how the history of the field of strategy or, more precisely, the “emergence narrative” of how the field began has been used to legitimize the dominance of North American strategy research. We show that contrary to the emergence narrative that now prevails, there were alternative visions of how the field should evolve, but that these alternatives were marginalized when certain epistemologies, specifically logical empiricism, were promoted as the best way of legitimizing research. Research that challenges the dominant North American approach to research could only make headways if it sought different sources of legitimacy. In the final part of the paper we therefore examine the various ways in which emerging perspectives in strategy have sought to consecrate their research, and consider to the extent to which different consecration tactics exacerbated the fragmentation of the field of strategy as a global enterprise.

Today's China is governed by a new economic model that marks a radical break from the Mao and Deng eras; it departs fundamentally from both the East Asian developmental state and its own Communist past. It has not, however, adopted a liberal economic model. China has retained elements of statist control even though it has liberalized foreign direct investment more than any other developing country in recent years. This mode of global economic integration reveals much about China’s state capacity and development strategy, which is based on retaining government control over critical sectors while meeting commitments made to the World Trade Organization. In China's Regulatory State, Roselyn Hsueh demonstrates that China only appears to be a more liberal state; even as it introduces competition and devolves economic decisionmaking, the state has selectively imposed new regulations at the sectoral level, asserting and even tightening control over industry and market development, to achieve state goals. By investigating in depth how China implemented its economic policies between 1978 and 2010, Hsueh gives the most complete picture yet of China's regulatory state, particularly as it has shaped the telecommunications and textiles industries. Hsueh contends that a logic of strategic value explains how the state, with its different levels of authority and maze of bureaucracies, interacts with new economic stakeholders to enhance its control in certain economic sectors while relinquishing control in others. Sectoral characteristics determine policy specifics although the organization of institutions and boom-bust cycles influence how the state reformulates old rules and creates new ones to maximize benefits and minimize costs after an initial phase of liberalization. This pathbreaking analysis of state goals, government-business relations, and methods of governance across industries in China also considers Japan’s, South Korea’s, and Taiwan’s manifestly different approaches to globalization.

Companies know that globalizing their web sites should produce revenue growth. This book aims to show web developers how to do it, presenting spotlights on real companies who have globalized their sites and the benefits they've received.