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The purpose of this paper is to report the results of testing a new approach to strategic sustainability and resilience – Sustainable Resilient Strategic Decision-Support (SuReSDS™).

The approach was developed and tested using action-research case studies at industrial companies. It successfully allowed the participants to capture different types of value affected by their choices, optimise each strategy’s resilience against different future scenarios and compare the results to find a “best” option.

SuReSDS™ enabled a novel integration of environmental and social sustainability into strategy by considering significant risks or opportunities for an enhanced group of stakeholders. It assisted users to identify and manage risks from different kinds of sustainability-related uncertainty by applying resilience techniques. Users incorporated insights into real-world strategies.

Since the case studies and test organisations are limited in number, generalisation from the results is difficult and requires further research.

The approach enables companies to utilise in-house and external experts more effectively to develop sustainable and resilient strategies.

The research described develops theories linking sustainability and resilience for organisations, particularly for strategy, to provide a new consistent, rigorous and flexible approach for applying these theories. The approach has been tested successfully and benefited real-world strategy decisions.

Businesses are always seeking resilient strategies so they can weather unpredictable competitive environments. One source of unpredictability is the unsustainability of commerce's environmental, economic or social impacts and the limitations this places on businesses. Another is poor resilience causing erroneous and unexpected outputs. Companies prospering long-term must have both resilience and sustainability, existing in a symbiotic state. The purpose of this paper is to explore the two concepts and their relationship, their combined benefits and propose an approach for supporting decision makers to proactively build both characteristics.

The paper looks at businesses as complex adaptive systems, how their resilience and sustainability can be defined and how these might be exhibited. It then explores how they can be combined in practice.

The two qualities are related but have different purposes, moreover resilience has two major forms related to timescales. Both kinds of resilience are identified as key for delivering sustainability, yet the reverse is also found to be true. Both are needed to deliver either and to let businesses flourish.

Although the ideal state of resilient sustainability is difficult to define or achieve, pragmatic ways exist to deliver the right direction of change in organisational decisions. A novel approach to this is explored based on transition engineering and robustness engineering.

This paper links resilience and sustainability explicitly and develops a holistic pragmatic approach for working through their implications in strategic decision making.

IT was no surprise to us, that news published just as this issue was being prepared, that Clive Sinclair was in an advanced stage of examining the possibilities of his firm, known all over the world as pioneers of electronics and the one which has brought micro‐computers within the reach of every family, expanding into the production of battery‐driven electric motorcars. He has recognised, as so many other directorates have failed to do, that the recession can only be beaten by finding new markets for new products. The world of yesteryear will never return.

This research presents a profile of the current skills and competencies that underpin construction management programmes' (CMP) curricula within United Kingdom (UK) higher education institutes (HEIs). In doing so, the work: synthesises disparate taught provisions across a range of HEIs; conducts a cross-comparative analysis between these provisions and engenders wider discourse and new insight into the consistency of current higher education practice.

Both interpretivism and pragmatism are adopted to analyse secondary data sourced from construction management undergraduate programmes in the UK inductive reasoning and inferential analysis (i.e. quantitative rank correlation, text/data mining and qualitative inquiry) are utilised to help underscore the current technical and interpersonal skills and competencies noted within the programmes and develop new theories on curriculum shortfalls and inadequacies.

Research findings demonstrate that the specific content of CMP are bespoke and tailored by the programme teaching team at each individual HEI; albeit, all programmes reviewed are in congruence regards the importance of broad technical and interpersonal themes. However, the degree to which these themes are publicly presented differ from the curricular and institutional documentation; specifically, a more “technical-based skill” image is being portrayed publicly whilst “interpersonal skills” are doing the heavy curriculum lifting. Hence, the foundational curriculum skills and competencies are firmly rooted in a sense of employability and career preparedness; a balance of technical and interpersonal skills. Identification of these skills and competencies provides a springboard for supplementary research to augment curriculum development.

This research constitutes the first attempt to conduct a cross-comparative analysis of descriptive metadata contained with curriculum development documents sourced from various UK HEIs. Emergent findings unearth the key skills and competencies that serve as the curriculum's foundation but also question whether a more consistent approach to construction management education should be sought.

Alpha Metals, supplier of solders and solder related chemicals, has promoted Mr Stan Renals to the position of Sales and Marketing Manager, reporting to the General Manager. Having been with the company for some five years, originally as Southern Regional Sales Manager and latterly in the position of National Field Sales Manager, Mr Renals will take on the additional responsibilities of internal sales, marketing and export sales.

Given that an industrial cluster contains a high concentration of numerous stakeholders, a firm in an industrial cluster often ends up forming relationships with many of the stakeholders. The research questions are as follows: Does stakeholder-based management always lead to greater value creation? What are the moderators in this association? This paper proposes that although relationships with stakeholders can act as a “catalyst” for value-creation, they can also act as a “retardant.” A combination of (1) the strategic nature of the relationships and (2) the policy environment determines whether the relationships with stakeholders act as catalysts or retardants.

Using relationship-focused theory, a conceptual framework that adopts a relational view of stakeholder theory is developed. Given the high concentration of stakeholders in industrial clusters, the conceptual framework uses stakeholders in industrial clusters as a setting. A firm can form relationships with a variety of stakeholders in an industrial cluster. The strategic nature of a relationship with a stakeholder is assessed in terms of variations in strategic intent and intellectual spillover.

The key argument is the following: whether a relationship with a stakeholder becomes a catalyst or a retardant for value creation is contingent on the fit between the strategic nature of the relationship and the policy environment. For instance, in a probusiness policy environment, relying on relationships with stakeholders that maximize intellectual spillover can act as a catalyst for value creation. In contrast, in an antibusiness environment, not having to rely on intellectual spillover is a safer option.

Whereas the literature implicitly assumes that stakeholder theory has relational essence, the conceptual framework developed in this paper adopts a relational view of stakeholder theory in a very explicit way. This paper applies relationship-focused theory by making explicit the different forms of stakeholder relationships. Such an explicitly relational approach in theorizing can help in more in-depth research on the link between stakeholder relationships and value creation. The conceptual framework will allow future research to analyze value creation in an industrial cluster, especially in terms of how stakeholder relationships can act as either catalysts or retardants.