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The development of a business strategy is widely believed to be one of the major responsibilities of the chief executive officer. Yet, an effective strategy can accomplish nothing unless it is effectively communicated, and communicating strategy effectively is a major stumbling block for many CEOs. The troops simply won’t follow if they don’t know where they are going and what they are to do.

Managers have traditionally concentrated on the offensive aspects of strategic planning. With a few important exceptions, the strategic planning literature is also heavily weighted toward offensive considerations. Yet two fields to which business is frequently compared, the military and sports, often give defensive considerations as much emphasis as offensive ones. The purpose of this article is to stress the importance of defensive considerations in strategic planning. A risk‐threat matrix is developed which managers can use as a guide to formulating defensive strategies to counter the full range of potentially detrimental situations their firms may face.

Volume 25 celebrates the 25th year of publication for the American Journal of Business (AJB). Launched by eight MAC schools of business in March 1986, the Journal has featured more than 700 authors who have contributed more than 330 research articles at the intersection of theory and practice. From accounting to marketing, management to finance, the Journal prominently covers the breadth of the business disciplines as a general business outlet intended for both practitioners and academics. As the Journal reaches out beyond the MAC in sponsorship, authorship, and readership, we assess the Journal’s first quarter century of impact.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the causal mechanisms that explain the relationship between the long-term buyer–supplier relationship and buyer performance. Building on the growing body of research on social capital in supply chain management (SCM), the authors examine how a buyer achieves superior performance in forming the enduring partnership with a supplier through two different forms of supplier embeddedness: buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness.

The bootstrapping method is utilized in data analysis to examine the mediating effects of the two different forms of supplier embeddedness simultaneously on the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer performance outcomes.

The authors find that the two forms of supplier embeddedness serve as distinct conduits for the buyer to translate the long-term buyer–supplier relationship into performance effectiveness. Notably, dyadic embeddedness only mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer economic performance, while supplier external embeddedness solely mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer innovation performance.

This study empirically demonstrates that different forms of supplier embeddedness may benefit a buyer differentially when directed at distinct performance goals. If a buyer can leverage both buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness, the buyer will overcome value creation limitations of social capital from a single source, obtaining more comprehensive performance benefits sought by developing long-term buyer–supplier relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the reception and impact of Jürgen Habermas’s global academic best seller in the USA between 1974 and 2018. It specifically addresses the consequences of the long delay in the publication of the English translation of Habermas’s 1962 public sphere concept until 1989 in the context of Habermas’s paradigm shift from the Kantian ideal of a participatory democracy to a systems-theoretical interpretation of deliberative democracy, which informs Between Facts and Norms (1992/1996).

This paper can be classified as a “conceptual paper” that draws on empirical research, namely, Adrian Rauchfleisch’s (2017) bibliometric co-citation analysis of two decades of public sphere research, which features a multi-dimensional scaling of these research communities based on the distance matrix of the co-citation network.

As the 22,000 scholarly citations for structural transformation as of April 2018 already indicate, this paper confirms in detail that Habermas’s original public sphere concept attracts significantly more academic interest on an interdisciplinary basis than Between Facts and Norms, which no longer pursues a critical theory of contemporary democracy. Instead, this shift toward a uniquely sophisticated theory construction in the realm of normativity produces a work in Rechtstheorie (Thomas McCarthy) that is by definition removed from political practice. The paper demonstrates that only the criteria developed in structural transformation can be applied to the analysis of constitutional crises in the USA.

This paper was researched and written solely by the author. All sources are clearly identified.

The purpose of this article is to explore career development programs for the sales force including benefits, implementation and managerial implications.

Career development programs are viewed through a conceptual model consisting of assessment, direction and development.

This paper provides a comprehensive list of the benefits of a career development program for sales forces.

The conceptual model can serve as a checklist for sales managers to evaluate, add to or modify their programs. The conceptual model also provides a framework for tying together many disparate areas of career development that have been handled separately or ignored in the sales management literature.

This paper provides a comprehensive conceptual model of career development that has not been present in the sales management literature. This should be useful to sales managers in evaluating their own career development efforts. The framework should also be useful to sales management scholars who teach and do research in this area.

Gambling has been a part of the human experience for a long time, perhaps as long as humans have interacted socially. Its literature has been accumulating since ancient times, with references found in some of the earliest records. Throughout history gambling has had a bad reputation because of the multitude of social problems attributed to it. The gambling industry today refers to the activity as “gaming,” which does not sound quite as notorious.

This is an article about the possible lessons for academic freedom that Dühring’s expulsion from the University of Berlin might have for us today. It begins with a brief discussion of his strange fate in the English language literature in contrast with his high position in the history of economic thought. It is no surprise that questions of the denial of academic freedom have long been discussed. The remainder of the article is devoted to a discussion of academic freedom since his time and the possible lessons these developments might have for us today. The most important of these is the ancient truism – academic freedom is always under attack from many sides and must be vigorously defended.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how “New Deal” regulatory initiatives, primarily the Securities Acts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), changed US auditors’ professional knowledge conception, culminating in the 1938 expansion of the Committee on Accounting Procedure (CAP), the first US body to set accounting principles.

The paper combines Halliday’s (1985) knowledge mandates with Hancher and Moran’s (1989) regulatory space to attain a theory-based understanding of auditors’ changing knowledge conceptions amid regulatory pressure. It draws on a range of primary and secondary sources to examine the period from 1929 to 1938.

Following the stock market crash, the newly created SEC aimed to engage auditors as a means to regulate companies’ accounting practices based on a set of codified principles. While entailing increased status, this new role conflicted with the auditors’ knowledge conception, which was based on professional judgment and personal integrity. Pressure from the SEC and academics eventually made auditors agree to a codification of their professional knowledge and create the CAP as a cooperative regulatory solution.

The paper explores the role of auditors’ knowledge conceptions in the emergence of today’s standard setting. It is suggested that auditors’ incomplete control of their professional knowledge made standard setting a form of co-regulation, located between the actors occupying the regulatory space of accounting.

The statements which have recently been made in various quarters to the effect that Danish butter is losing its hold on the English market, that its quality is deteriorating, and that the sale is falling off, are not a little astonishing in face of the very strong and direct evidence to the contrary furnished by the official records. As an example of the kind of assertions here alluded to may be instanced an opinion expressed by a correspondent of the British Food Journal, who, in a letter printed in the March number, stated that “My own opinion is that the Danes are steadily losing their good name for quality, owing to not using preservatives and to their new fad of pasteurising… .”