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What strategy should top management pursue to enhance the value of the firm or, more specifically, the wealth of the owners or shareholders? This is a perplexing question in light of the many alternative actions being touted by business soothsayers. Consequently, top management is confronted by a variety of competing strategic choices, each presenting an apparently outstanding opportunity for the firm. Invariably, though, more questions than answers are generated in the quest for the corporate Holy Grail.

Corporate mergers and acquisitions are pervasive. Much of the attention has focused on the dollars involved and the financial packages put together to effect them. Little attention has been given to the human resource management implications of such corporate restructuring. Attention here is focused on the impact of these restructurings on individual employee stress and on various human resource management functions such as human resource planning, recruitment, training and organisational development, and employee benefits and compensation.

In recent years, organisations around the world have been seriously affected by a range of economic, political and social upheavals that have gathered momentum in most parts of the globe. The viability of the conventional (pyramidal) organisational structures is being challenged in conjunction with major shifts in the roles of mid and top managers. In many countries, the pace of the above socio‐economic events and uncertainties is happening at an unprecedented pace. Some markets are showing signs of potential gigantic expansions while others (historically prosperous) are on the verge of complete collapse (Dent, 1991). In responding to the socio‐economic challenges of the nineties, organisations (across the board) have resorted to dismantling the conventional pyramidal structure and adopting so‐called “leaner” structures (see Zeffane, 1992). The most common struggle has been to maintain market share in an economic environment increasingly characterised by excess labour supply (Bamber, 1990; Green & Macdonald, 1991). As organisations shifted their strategies from “mass production” to “post‐fordism” (see, for example Kern and Schumann, 1987), there has been a significant tendency to emphasise flexibility of both capital and labour in order to cater for the niche markets which are claimed to be rapidly emerging, world‐wide. This has resulted in massive organisational restructuring world‐wide.

Literature on strategic planning and management is prolific. Articles deal with various aspects of strategic planning, its definition, process, and application. However, many of these articles concentrate on the theory and on the strategic planning models rather than deal with practical application or problems experienced at implementation levels. My interest in reviewing this literature is to identify studies which offer significant key approaches and relate them to the field of education planning. Can we learn something from the way in which strategic plans are formulated and implemented in the business world and apply this knowledge to planning and operation of academic institutions?

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Marketing Intelligence & Planning is split into nine sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Business Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Customer Service; Sales Management; Promotion; Marketing Research/Customer Behaviour; Product Management; Logistics and Distribution; Sundry.

To benchmark the degree to which companies in Slovenia, a country that has experienced success in its transition to a market economy, apply strategic management accounting (SMA) techniques.

Survey data collected in Slovenia has been benchmarked to survey data collected in similarly sized Australian companies.

For the Slovenian sample, while none of the techniques investigated are applied extensively, it has been found that competitor focused SMA techniques are the most popular. A group of SMA techniques that have a costing orientation are applied more extensively in Slovenian companies than in the Australian benchmark sample. It has also been found that some techniques that have a relatively high popularity ranking in one country, rank relatively lowly in the other country.

In addition to the generally accepted limitations of survey research, it should be noted that there is no definitive listing of SMA techniques and debate concerning this matter can be expected to continue. A further shortcoming is evident in the cross‐country comparison aspect of this study, as a disappointingly small number of Australian financial controllers committed themselves to participating in the study.

It appears likely that systematic differences between the economies and culture of countries contribute to differential use of SMA. This highlights the importance of management considering economic and commercial context when designing management accounting systems.

Despite considerable normative commentary, there is still a paucity of empirical research concerned with SMA. A particularly significant facet of this study concerns its extension of our appreciation of SMA application in a novel international context.

Quality has typically been regarded as a key strategic component of competitive advantage and, therefore, the enhancement of product quality has been a matter of prime interest to firms. Quality provides a basis for strategic advantage, and thus improvement in product quality may lead to enhanced performance. However, a frequent concern is that product quality no longer provides enduring competitive advantage; instead, it has become essentially a competitive prerequisite. Hence, an assessment of whether improvements in product quality are reflected in greater quality performance is likely to be of considerable interest to organizations. Suggestions have been made that the implementation of environmental accounting also contributes to the enhancement of quality performance. Argues that the greater the integration of environmental issues into financial decision processes, the better the performance of the firm. Investigates the extent to which product quality and the implementation of environmental accounting positively influence quality performance.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the use of strategic management accounting (SMA) techniques in hospitals under competitive market environments. The paper analyses the dissemination of SMA techniques in consideration of structural characteristics and perform a cluster analysis in order to investigate performance differences between various groups of hospitals.

The paper collected empirical data in a nationwide survey of German general hospitals. Analyses are based on questionnaires from 116 hospitals.

Results show that strategies are applied and regularly adjusted in most hospitals. However, SMA techniques are not in widespread use. The paper explores performance differences between the clusters comprised. The paper finds evidence that the use of SMA techniques varies among hospitals based on their structural characteristics.

The authors' exploratory analysis suggest that further study exploring both the determinants and effects of the use of SMA techniques in hospitals represents an interesting path for future research. This study is subject to limitations, particularly concerning the limited number of contextual variables and performance measures taken into consideration.

Considering the limited use of SMA techniques, this paper conclude that hospitals should consider the adoption of additional practices. The paper identifies particular potential for development in the areas of risk management and capital budgeting methods.

This study provides the first comprehensive overview of SMA techniques used in hospitals and advances the literature, which primarily includes case study evidence on single SMA techniques or analyses of the impact of strategies and health reforms on “conventional” management accounting practices. This paper, then, constitutes a useful starting point for further research on SMA practices in hospitals.

High team performance helps achieve several organizational benefits, such as strengthened competitive advantages, enhanced productivity, and higher profits and market share. For these reasons, the purpose of this paper is to propose a model based on the framework of proactive motivation and the theory of collectivism to analyze the formation of service flexibility and team performance.

To test the hypotheses, this study conducts a survey of service staff in teams from high-tech firms in a well-known industrial zone in Northern Taiwan. These teams provide service for their industrial customers. From the survey, this study confirms the full mediating mechanism of service flexibility among the teams.

The test results reveal that service flexibility fully mediates the relationship between team performance and its exogenous factors. Whereas collectivism negatively moderates the relationship between team efficacy and service flexibility, it does not moderate the relationship between service recovery and service flexibility. Furthermore, collectivism positively moderates the relationship between service flexibility and team performance.

This study provides important findings that complement previous literature by examining three fresh antecedents for explaining how team performance is motivated by the mediating role of service flexibility and how some of the study’s model paths are moderated by collectivism. The mediating role of service flexibility indicates that managers can apply service flexibility as a firewall that calibrates a team’s input and output. Managers should encourage the application of agile solutions and advanced technology for facilitating team flexibility, consequently improving team performance.

Collective work motivation (CWM) has been construed as humans’ innate predispositions to effectively undertake team-oriented work activities under ideal conditions (Lindenberg and Foss, 2011). However, management research aimed at explicating its etiology in knowledge-based organizations (KBOs) has been largely ignored. Given that these organizations strive to gain market competitiveness by motivating employees to cooperatively share knowledge, as well as protect organizational specific knowledge from being externally expropriated, it becomes expedient to understand how they can mobilize and sustain CWM that is geared towards the normative goal of knowledge sharing and knowledge protection.

Conceptual insights from the social identity theory were deployed by the study.

Three hypothetical principles derived from the processes of social categorization, social comparison and social identification tentatively mobilize and sustain CWM in KBOs.

This paper adopts the social identity perspective to CWM. In so doing, it sees CWM as a team-based intrinsically derived process rather than an extrinsic means of eliciting the motivation of people in KBOs to engage in the normative goal of knowledge sharing and protection.