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Talking about smart cities also entails talking about new ways of mobility. Various concepts compete for reimagining future mobility, most prominently connected cars, robo taxis, and other forms of shared mobility. New digital technologies, changing customer requirements, but also new competitors are dynamically affecting previous market logics. To stay future-proof in this new world of mobility, the automotive sector, which is an important nucleus for developing such mobility solutions, is currently undergoing fundamental digital transformation processes. Established car manufacturers have to find their path to choose out of the many possibilities on the rise. Against this backdrop, they face the major challenge to find an answer to the question: Who are we and who do we want to be in the future? Therefore, we argue that organizations’ digital transformation is highly entangled with questions on organizational identity and discuss digital transformation as a potential identity threat for established organizations.

We begin this chapter by introducing the concept of organizational identity. Afterward, we will continue with applying it to the practical context of car manufacturers: After depicting the major trends of digitalization in the mobility and automotive sector, we will focus on the digital transformation processes of established automotive companies and discuss their impact on organizational identity. Empirical illustrations of the Volkswagen case depict our theoretical considerations.

We provide theoretical ideas for better understanding the impact of digital transformation on organizational identity, as well as suggestions for practitioners concerned with organizations’ digital transformation processes.

The purpose of this study was to explore the leadership competencies that are effectively transferring into the workplaces of recent military college alumni from both their curricular and co-curricular experiences.

Through semi-structured interviews, this study explored 15 military college alumni’s perspectives on the leadership competencies they developed in college and currently apply in the workplace.

The findings indicated the 15 military college alumni participants developed and applied the following student leadership competencies at work: productive relationships, helping others, supervision, empathy, ethics, functioning independently, resiliency, positive attitude and scope of competence.

Limited research explores leadership learning at military colleges and service academies in the United States. Yet these collegiate military environments have a missional focus on leadership education and development. This article highlights the importance of the alumni lens in assessing leadership learning in collegiate military environments and provides recommendations to administrators of this institution type.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.

This chapter describes and discusses how the notion of network pictures would contribute to the literature on management cognition. Network pictures, as conceptualized in business-to-business marketing, refer to managers’ sensemaking of the context and put focus on the interconnectivity among firms, along with managers’ subjective idea about what parties would be relevant for the firm. A systematic literature review on network pictures shows that network picture research focuses on how managers may have difficulties comprehending parties beyond present business partners, while the theoretical conceptualization emphasizes interdependences and prioritization and reprioritization among relevant parts of the limitless network. These latter ideas add to current research on managerial cognition. They do so through introducing a different notion of the context – or environment – and thereby raising the awareness of its complexity. Albeit the network picture literature focuses on how managers’ network pictures affect their strategizing in the network, the core idea entails how reactions and partners strategizing in parallel describe an ever-changing context but not the less important for any manager to comprehend.

The main issue of stakeholders’ inclusion nowadays is the establishment of relationships between policy actors and creation of a supportive environment for stakeholder participation to allow a straightforward stakeholder inclusion with a meaningful contribution to policy making. The concept of a collective identity describing how shared values, shared activities and a shared identity lead to social cohesion between a large number of people, could suggest a hint for stakeholder empowerment. We argue that a proper inclusion leads towards empowerment of stakeholders only where efforts to build collective identity are allocated. Otherwise, stakeholder inclusion is only about static participatory governance where knowledge collection predominates over knowledge sharing and co-production. The goal of the present chapter is to trace formal governance networks as a participatory governance mechanism and analyse stakeholder perspectives to be empowered to act in a formal governance network presuming that the network structure creates an environment where a collective identity is being built.

The formal governance networks of 2013 led by the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Economy and Ministry of Education and Science were reconstructed on the bases of documents available in the organisations. The structure of the governance networks of 2013 is analysed as a precondition for an organisational collective identity to form.

The structure of the governance networks leads us to the conclusion that stakeholders are expected to be knowledge providers instead of being knowledge co-producers.

The networks demonstrate that the process of sharing knowledge and values is not recognised as an important element of participatory groups and efforts made to build a collective identity are too scarce.

Designing a top-quality research study is a complex challenge. We introduce the research design canvas as a tool to help researchers manage this complexity and create better studies. Completing a research design canvas requires researchers to a priori articulate one or more research questions, identify a gap in the literature in need of closing, select a guiding theory or theories, construct hypotheses, choose a sample, select measures, recognize boundary conditions, plot a data analysis strategy, ascertain a study’s limitations, clarify the value added of key research partners, pinpoint a target journal for potential publication, and think ahead about their backup plans in case the research process goes awry. Many studies are doomed to bad fates by poor decisions about these elements. Using the research design canvas can help researchers ensure that they have selected a valid approach to each element, reason through the interrelationships among each decision point within the canvas to ensure that there is consistency among them, and critically assess whether the design as a whole provides the basis for a new advance. By doing so, scholars may be able to improve their chances of defying the high rejection rates of leading journals.

Marion has just taken on the directorship of a joint university/public library. You, as her protégé, are interested in observing how she approaches the new venture. You are curious about what information she will gather, whose advice she will seek, how she will figure out the expectations others have of her and the library, how she will prioritize the many challenges before her, and how she will negotiate her leadership role with the staff. In other words, you want to study Marion's organizational sensemaking.

In this chapter, we examine the role of M&A (mergers and acquisitions) leadership by conducting a review of recent empirical studies on M&A leadership. Our aim is to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge concerning M&A leadership. More specifically, we examine how M&A leadership has been studied (i.e., study methods, data sources), where M&A leadership has been studied (i.e., geographic distribution, industries, level of analysis), which leadership M&A outcomes and M&A leadership perspectives have been examined, and finally, how M&A leadership influences post-M&A outcomes. This allows us to identify main areas of interest and provide suggestions for further research.

This study explores how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artifacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, the study examines the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response was conducted. This study offers two contributions. Firstly, it develops a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, this study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and unpacks how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.

Purpose – This chapter presents four different approaches to doing and writing qualitative research in strategy and management based on different epistemological foundations. It describes two well-established “templates” for doing such work, and introduces two more recent “turns” that merit greater attention.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The chapter draws on methodological texts and a detailed analysis of successful empirical exemplars from the strategy and organization literature to show how qualitative research on strategy processes can be effectively carried out and written up.

Findings – The two “templates” are based on different logics and modes of writing. The first is based on a positivist epistemology and aims to develop nomothetic theoretical propositions, while the second is interpretive and more concerned to capture and gain insight from the meanings given to organizational phenomena. The two “turns” (the practice turn and the discursive turn) are not as well defined but are generating innovative contributions based on new ways of considering the social world.

Originality/Value – The chapter should be helpful to researchers considering qualitative methods for the study of strategy processes. It contributes by comparing different approaches and by recognizing that part of the challenge of doing qualitative research lies in writing it up to communicate its insights in a credible way. Thus while describing the different methods, the chapter also draws attention to effective forms of writing. In addition, it introduces and assesses two more recent “turns” that offer promising routes to novel insight as well as having particular ontological and epistemological affinities with qualitative research methods.