This research studies industry exit in the Japanese context, by examining the process followed five Japanese flat panel display manufacturers as they de-committed to and later exited from the industry. The five cases examine firms with systematically different exit barriers due to the presence or absence of strategic centrality and vertical integration in each firm. With one exception, all the firms followed multi-staged exit processes involving cooperative arrangements with other industry participants. Firms with middle to high levels of commitment and exit barriers went through more steps in the process than those with the lowest levels of commitment. The effect of top management succession and long-term employment upon the exit process are considered, and the role of cooperative arrangements in reducing exit barriers are discussed.

Firms face a rapidly changing market environment under the pressure of difficult challenges such as limited resources and increasing costs. Organizations may actively seek to cooperate with other members for benefits from knowledge sharing. Establishing quality network ties among suppliers and customers is a significant study subject. Here, we assessed the impact of the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement on Taiwan flat glass industry and study measures adopted by the manufacturers. The effective sample size is 250. We found that through the intermediary of organizational agility and strong network ties, a firm can enhance its organizational performance.

The Darwinian logic of evolution occurring via the mechanisms of variation, selection and retention provides a possible theoretical framework from which to further develop the dynamic capabilities view. Presently, criticized for lacking a theoretical foundation and featuring a degree of confusion concerning how it aligns with the resource-based view, the dynamic capabilities view would benefit from greater clarity concerning its assumptions, theoretical base and the development of a series of testable predictions. We test elements of a potential Darwinian style framework through variation-focused hypotheses using panel data for 190 Australian service firms. Our results highlight the importance of market development as a basis for variation, however, the impact of dynamic capabilities upon a likely antecedent of selection was not clear and highlighted a nuanced relationship between capability development, market development and sales growth in an small-and-medium-sized enterprise environment. We conclude that applying a Darwinian lens to the dynamic capabilities view is challenging without longer time series data and additional measures, but such an approach remains theoretically attractive and further investigation may help clarify how we conceptualize the relationship between the dynamic capabilities view and resource-based view.

Organization studies have long focused on the problem of understanding the possibility of pursuing effectiveness and resilience at the same time. An emerging perspective, reconciling mindfulness and routines, allows to address these contrasting goals: routines channel the exploratory nature of mindfulness, but they also support it by providing context to its enactment. Despite these results, available empirical evidence from mindful organizations has not helped understand how mindfulness can be supported by routines without losing its broader scope of attention. Moreover, an operational definition of mindfulness is still an open question.

In this paper, we adopt an analytical framework allowing to break down routines into their sensing and reacting components. Using evidence from the flying practices of Tornado crews in the Italian Air Force, we show that mindfulness concerns the parallel activation and re-combination of these components, allowing the rapid deployment of responses but also the continuous reassessment of the situation.

In management studies, systems theory is an underexplored construct consistent with the dynamic capabilities framework. The systems approach received attention from management scholars in the middle of the last century, but, since then, has been largely abandoned. Meanwhile, academic disciplines have continued to narrow their focus. The capabilities and systems frameworks both adopt a holistic view that calls for all elements of an organization to be in alignment, and both recognize the importance of some form of learning for the purpose of adaptation. Dynamic capabilities go further by recognizing that organizations not only adapt to the business environment, they often try to shape it, too. While systems theory emphasizes internal stability over time and homogeneity across similar systems, dynamic capabilities include an explicit role for management/leadership that allows systemic change to start from within, which is the source of heterogeneity across firms. Dynamic capabilities are part of a system that includes resources and strategy. Together they determine the degree of competitive advantage an individual enterprise can gain over its rivals.

This paper focuses on the importance of dynamic capabilities in shaping the nature of international strategies of emerging market multinationals from mid-range economies. We argue that dynamic capabilities theory provides an insightful approach to understanding the internationalization of emerging market multinationals and their strategic choices. Drawing on dynamic capability theory and unpacking dynamic capabilities into four distinct but related dimensions or facets, we develop a typology of three internationalization strategies available to emerging market multinationals in their international expansion: sequential international ambidexterity (from exploitation to exploration, and vice versa) and structural international ambidexterity (simultaneous exploration and exploitation). Success factors associated with each of the ambidextrous internationalization strategies are also considered. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the dynamic capabilities framework for theoretical implications and fruitful areas for future research endeavors.

Increasingly, innovation in services is brought to market by a network of firms, or alliance networks, asset orchestration, knowledge sharing capabilities, resources and competencies, and operated in a coordinated manner. Recent literature has recognized the evolutionary nature of dynamic capabilities in that managers may adapt their alliance networks dynamically to sustain competitive advantage, as well as identified a continuing gap in the lack of empirical studies on feedbacks between network environments, dynamic capabilities, and innovation performance. In addition, other literature calls for more quantitative research on examining dynamic capabilities in a network environment to provide a better understanding of how firms should direct their resources and capabilities to successfully respond to competition. This study contributes towards closing both gaps by empirically examining the cumulative and incremental effects of fostering and deploying different dynamic capabilities on services innovation, and by quantifying their impact, thus providing managers with a better account of how services innovation comes about in a service value network. It does so using empirical data from 449 respondents from a telecommunications service provider in Australia and its partnering organizations, using structural equation modelling.

This study focuses on firms’ search behavior with regard to corporate R&D investment. Building on Cyert and March's (1963) behavioral theory of the firm, we develop specific hypotheses about how firms adjust their R&D investment in response to performance discrepancies, and how this adjustment varies for two types of slack resources. Moreover, by utilizing institutional logic, we also hypothesized that the firms’ search behaviors in response to performance feedback may differ between business-group affiliated and unaffiliated firms. Empirical evidence from panel data coving 274 Taiwanese electronics firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange over the period 1999–2008 is consistent with our theoretical predictions. In particular, we find that firms will increase R&D investment when they faced discrepancies in performance, but will decrease R&D spending when close to bankruptcy. Moreover, our results show that unabsorbed and absorbed slack have different impacts, positively and negatively affecting R&D investment, respectively. In addition, we find that both business group-affiliated and unaffiliated firms will increase R&D investment in response to negative performance feedback, but only business group-affiliated firms will increase R&D activity when facing positive performance feedback. Furthermore, we also find that only business group-affiliated firms have a greater inclination to invest in R&D when there is unabsorbed slack. Our findings extend the claims of behavioral theory in newly industrialized economies, and identify the important factors that need to be considered in future studies.

How firms’ dynamic capabilities lead to their competitive advantage and improved firm performance has been a core issue and full of debates. In this research, we theorize that dynamic capabilities, which could be defined by three distinct dimensions (sensing capability, integration capability, and reconfiguration capability), facilitate different types of innovation that in turn improve firm performance. Based on a sample of 204 Chinese firms, results from partial least squares structural equation modeling analyses generally support our arguments despite some nuanced differences existing among different dimensions of dynamic capabilities. This study contributes to dynamic capabilities literature by reducing the scarcity of empirical research and by uncovering the mechanisms through which dynamic capabilities influence firm performance.

Although previous studies have considered the antecedents and outcomes of absorptive capacity, much remains to be learned on this subject. Firms need to absorb breadth and depth of knowledge and form absorptive capacities that are contingent on various social capitals to improve innovation and performance. The purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents and outcomes of the breadth and depth of absorptive capacity from the perspective of social capital theory. Based on a sample of 218 Chinese firms, empirical results suggest that weak tie sources and knowledge breadth can enhance the breadth of absorptive capacity, and that strong tie sources and knowledge depth can strengthen the depth of absorptive capacity. The results also suggest that the breadth of absorptive capacity positively impacts the depth of absorptive capacity, and that both breadth and depth of absorptive capacity are positively related to innovation performance.