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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how strategic renewal affects the reconfiguration of capabilities. In the context of organizational change in a large utility firm, we examine the evolution of the capability structure, and explain the emergence and persistence of capability gaps.

The paper uses an inductive multiple case study methodology to compare four processes of capability reconfiguration at Eskom, South Africa's electricity supplier.

The results show that strategic renewal unfolds through different processes, which vary in their impact. Some processes have an immediate effect in closing capability gaps. The impact of others is with a significant time lag. Most critical, however, are processes that widen capability gaps. As a result, firms may face severe and persistent performance deficiencies.

Prior research has only marginally addressed the relationship between strategic renewal and capability reconfiguration, and has largely neglected emerging capability gaps.

Strategic renewal may cause unintended crowding out effects of specific capabilities. Managers need to consider these potential implications of strategic renewal.

Understanding the challenges of how to improve the performance of utility services is crucial for economic development, welfare and social inclusion.

This study importantly highlights that the emergence of capability gaps is a common phenomenon rather than an exception in strategic renewal processes. The findings contribute to the strategic renewal literature and to management research in infrastructure sectors.

The local food tourism in Pakistan is increasing rapidly, and it attracts scholars to determine the factors affecting local food tourists' buying choices. Particularly, the authors aim to investigate the role of food consumption values on predicting domestic tourists' attitude toward local food and its effect on the intention to try local food with the moderating effect of personality traits (neophobia and neophilia).

The authors tested the study model on 250 completed responses from local food tourists. They collected the data from three tourism locations (Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar) in Pakistan. Their study utilizes the consumption value theory within the limits of Pakistan's local food tourism.

The empirical findings show that consumption values, such as price, emotion, interaction, epistemic value, location value and variety value, effectively explain the domestic tourists' attitude toward local food. The authors further report that food neophilia strengthens the local tourists' positive reception toward the local food. However, food neophobia weakens the direction between local tourists' attitude toward local food and the intention to try local food.

This study provides insights pertaining to tourists' local food consumption values (LFCVs) to a local destination owner and marketing manager to strategically work on LFCVs that are crucial for domestic tourists to derive their intention to try local food. Practitioners should work on domestic tourists who possess food neophobia trait and enquire them for their rejection or avoidance of a particular local destination. This will enable practitioners to bring innovation and development in the local destination, which ultimately promote local food tourism.

This study is the first to incorporate the variety and local value in tourists' LFCVs to predict local tourists' attitude toward local food. Additionally, the authors contribute to local food tourism by empirically studying the moderating role of personality traits (food neophilia and food neophobia) to examine the direction between local tourists' attitude and intention to local food.

This paper examines the relationships of absorptive capacity, organizational creativity and agility to organizational resilience and competitive advantage in disruptive environments and proposes modeling these relationships.

Data were collected from 216 respondents out of the 300 targeted respondents (a response rate of 72%) across different industries. The questionnaire data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The paper provides empirical insights into how resilience is created through the interactions between absorptive capacity, organizational creativity and agility. It suggests that organizational creativity acts more as a “determinant force” in enhancing resilience in the disruptive environment, whereas organizational agility is more associated with competitive advantage. This study also shows the bi-directional relationships between organizational resilience and creativity. In a disruptive environment, an organization tends to seek new knowledge externally through its absorptive capacity to foster its creativity to build resiliency, whereas organizational resilience is also needed for the organization to promote its creativity.

The research was conducted using cross-sectional data; thus, causality among the constructs could not be fully established.

The paper shows that an organization needs to build a culture of learning to enhance its absorptive capacity, creativity and resilience capabilities and sustain its competitive advantage.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how absorptive capacity, organizational creativity, agility and resilience play strategic roles interactively and differently in developing a firm’s competitive advantage in a disruptive environment.

How to support the rapid internationalization of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is a hot topic in academia and industry. The main purpose of this work is to study the role of relational assets (R-assets) in promoting the speed of internationalization of MNEs, and to explore the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty (institutional environment and industry environment) on the relationship between R-assets and internationalization speed of MNEs.

This study uses the outward foreign investment data of China’s A-share listed enterprises from 2009 to 2021, and employs the Cox proportional hazards model to empirically test the research hypothesis.

The empirical results revealed that R-assets can promote enterprise internationalization speed. In addition, the study also finds that the institutional uncertainty of host countries weakens the promotion effect of R-assets on internationalization speed of MNEs, while the industry uncertainty strengthens the promotion effect of those. Heterogeneity analysis illustrates that, compared with state-owned enterprises, non-state-owned enterprises have a more significant effect on the above conclusions.

This study enriches the literature on internationalization speed of MNEs by focusing on the determinants of internationalization speed through R-assets. From the perspective of knowledge, the work also provides a theoretical reference whereby MNEs can use host country R-assets to accelerate knowledge acquisition and then internationalization practice. In conclusion, this study provides valuable insights for managers aiming to develop effective strategies through R-assets to achieve rapid internationalization, contributing to an emerging literature stream on catch-up for emerging-market MNEs.