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This article aims to analyze the strategic work of Polish entrepreneurs in the furniture industry following the political changes in 1989. The authors examined how these entrepreneurs transitioned from local craftsmen or importers into leaders of international manufacturing companies and how their strategizing contributed to the unprecedented growth of the Polish furniture sector.

The authors examined extant data, specifically biographical interviews conducted with 11 prominent leaders in the Polish furniture industry (Hryniewicki, 2015, 2018). They analyzed within a theoretical framework that integrates J.C. Spender’s theory of strategic management with Barry Johnson’s concept of polarity management. Polarity is a way of understanding and managing interdependent, opposing pairs of values or perspectives that give rise to conflict.

The analysis reveals key patterns of strategic challenges at the level of human agency, history and sense-making. The authors identified four key polarities: life and business, knowledge presence and absence, concordance and discordance, and instrumental and non-instrumental sense-making.

The polarity concept illuminates the interplay of agency and determinism in strategic decision-making, offering valuable insights for methodology and a deeper understanding of Poland’s furniture industry.

In order to overcome potential limitations in their own experience with a strategic action, firms will often outsource to expert firms that have greater experience with such actions. In this study, the authors contribute to theory on organizational experience and learning by examining an important but understudied type of experience – outsourced experience. The authors show whether, and under what conditions, such experience may be beneficial for focal firms. In the context of acquisitions, the authors find that outsourced acquisition experience brought to acquisition deals by advisors is typically assessed by markets to be detrimental but may become beneficial if such experience is specific to the acquirer’s context. Further, the authors find that acquirers’ own knowledge can signal that they are less reliant on advisor experience, thus mitigating its potentially harmful effects. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Organizations are confronted with problems and political risks to which they have to respond, presenting a need to develop tools and frames of understanding requisite to do so. In this article, we argue for the necessity of cultivating “political judgment” with a “sense of reality,” especially in the upper echelons of organizations. This article has two objectives: First to highlight how a number of recent interlinked developments within organizational analysis and practice have contributed to weakening judgment and its accompanying “sense of reality.” Second, to (re)introduce some canonical works that, although less in vogue recently, provide both a source of wisdom and frames of understanding that are key to tackling today’s problems. We begin by mapping the context in which the need for the cultivation of political judgment within organizations has arisen: (i) increasing proliferation of political risks and “wicked problems” to which it is expected that organizations adapt and respond; (ii) a wider historical and contemporary context in which the exercise of judgment has been undermined – a result of a combination of economics-inspired styles of theorizing and an associated obsession with metrics. We also explore the nature of “political judgment” and its accompanying “sense of reality” through the work of authors such as Philip Selznick, Max Weber, Chester Barnard, and Isaiah Berlin. We suggest that these authors have a weighty “sense of reality”; are antithetical to “high,” “abstract,” or “axiomatic” theorizing; and have a profound sense of the burden from exercising political judgment in difficult organizational circumstances.

Knowledge management (KM) is an important topic in the age of big data, and this study adds to the existing body of literature by providing a novel KM perspective on the technological phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI). This study aims to discover how AI might facilitate knowledge-based business-to-business (B2B) marketing. In this chapter, the authors take a close look at the building blocks of AI and the relationships between them. Future research directions and also the effects of the various market information building components on B2B marketing are discussed. The study’s approach is theoretical; it tries to provide a framework for characterising the phenomenon of AI and its constituent parts. Additionally, this chapter provides a methodical analysis of the three categories of market information crucial to B2B marketing: knowledge of customers, knowledge of users, and knowledge of external markets. This research looks at AI through the lens of the conventional data processing framework, analysing the six pillars upon which AI systems are founded. It also explained how the framework’s components work together to transform data into actionable information. In this chapter, the authors will look at how AI works and how it can benefit B2B knowledge-based marketing. It’s not aimed at AI experts but rather at general marketing managers. In this chapter, the possible effects of AI on B2B marketing are discussed using examples from the real world.