How and why do organizations change? These questions have been an enduring and central quest of management scholars and many other disciplines. To find answers concerning these questions, it is indisputable that executives need to develop strategies in order to reach their goals and successfully respond and adapt to the environment while facing ‘change’. Or as Ocasio (1997) put it, “explaining how firms behave is one of the fundamen-tal issues or questions that define the field of strategy (…) and the contribution it makes to the theory and practice of management.” When companies are faced with environmental or internal changes, some organizations start changing their strategies and others do not. Accordingly, in this paper we will view strategic change as the firm’s alignment with its external environment and with internal organizational issues. Hence, the starting point for why organizations take action concerns the environment within which the company operates.
Over the past decades, managers and scholars assumed that the environment needed to be assessed, observed and enacted in order to gain information, process this information and to formulate a strategy to reach future goals and push the firm’s overall performance. The most popular assumptions within the strategy formulation literature are that “the appropriateness of a firm’s strategy can be defined in terms of its fit, match, or congruence with the environmental or organizational contingencies facing the firm.” Thus, the environment inhibits global competitive pressure, dynamics and uncertainty because of the current ongo-ing internationalization of firms and their willingness and need to expand and invest in emergent markets in order to survive gain profits. The ongoing revolution and upcoming research stream called Industry 4.0, which is highlighting the importance for and the influ-ence of the internet (e.g. the Internet of Things) on firms, is just one of the examples that shows how firms have to cope with and adapt to the complex environments. Since, for example, the internet improves the information gathering process concerning environmental and internal organizational issues, the actual scarce resource within the firm becomes the managers’ amount of attention that they allocate to “searching for, sorting through, and interpreting the available information.” [...]
Inhaltsverzeichnis (Table of Contents)
- Introduction
- Literature Review Strategic Management
- Definitions
- Definition of Strategic Management
- Definition of Strategy
- Definition of Strategic Change
- Definition of/Differences between Strategic Process and Strategic Content
- Definition of Strategy Formulation and the Concept of Corporate Strategy
- Strategic Choice Under Conditions of Bounded Rationality
- Deliberate and Emergent Strategies
- Consensus in Strategy Formulation
- Issue Selling to Top Management and understanding Strategic Agenda Building
- Preliminary Conclusion
- Definitions
- The Contribution of the Attention-Based View of the Firm to Strategy Formulation
- Definition of Attention
- The Carnegie School: Assumptions and Theoretical Pillars
- Bounded Rationality
- Specialized Decision-Making Structures
- Conflicting Interests and Cooperation
- The Attention-Based View of the Firm
- The Three Principles of the ABV of the firm
- A Model of Situated Attention and Firm Behavior
- An Attention-Based Theory of Strategy Formulation
- Strategic Framework and Specific Research Questions
- Empiricism
- The Contribution of the Focus of Attention to Strategy Formulation
- Cognition, Capabilities, and Incentives: Assessing Firm Response to the Fiber-Optic Revolution (Kaplan 2008)
- Cognition and Renewal: Comparing CEO and Organizational Effects on Incumbent Adaptation to Technical Change (Eggers & Kaplan 2009)
- Competing for Attention in Knowledge Markets: Electronic Document in a Management Consulting Company (Hansen & Haas 2001)
- An Attention-Based View of Service Orientation in the Business Strategy of Manufacturing Companies (Gebauer 2009)
- Environmental Context, Managerial Cognition and Strategic Action: An Integrated View (Nadkarni & Barr 2008)
- The Contribution of Situated Attention to Strategy Formulation
- Competition and Beyond: Problems and Attention Allocation in the Organizational Rulemaking Process (Sullivan 2010)
- Attention Allocation to Multiple Goals: The Case of For-Profit Social Enterprises (Stevens et al. 2014)
- Commanding Board of Director Attention: Investigating How Organizational Performance and CEO Duality affect Board Members' Attention to Monitoring (Tuggle et al. 2010)
- International Attention and Multinational Enterprise Performance (Bouquet et al. 2009)
- The Contribution of the Structural Distribution of Attention to Strategy Formulation
- How Global Strategies Emerge: An Attention Perspective (Bouquet & Birkinshaw 2011)
- Weight Versus Choice: How Foreign Subsidiaries Gain Attention from Corporate Headquarters (Bouquet & Birkinshaw 2008)
- The Plurality of Institutional Embeddedness as a Source of Organizational Attention Differences (Hung 2005)
- Attention as the Mediator between Top Management Team Characteristics and Strategic Change: The Case of Airline Deregulation (Cho & Hambrick 2006)
- Toward a Theory of Intraorganizational Attention Based on Desirability and Feasibility Factors (Baretto & Patient 2013)
- Polychronicity in Top Management Teams: The Impact on Strategic Decision Processes and Performance of New Technology Ventures (Souitaris & Maestro 2010)
- The Integration Journey: An Attention-Based View of the Merger and Acquisition Integration Process (Yu et al. 2005)
- Additional Empirical Studies
- The Contribution of the Focus of Attention to Strategy Formulation
- Discussion (Including Limitations and Implications)
Zielsetzung und Themenschwerpunkte (Objectives and Key Themes)
This master's thesis examines the contribution of an attention-based view to the formulation of strategic change. It aims to explore the role of attention in shaping strategic decision-making processes and to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of strategic change.
- The concept of attention in strategic management
- The attention-based view of the firm and its implications for strategy formulation
- The influence of attention on strategic choice under conditions of bounded rationality
- The role of attention in the emergence of deliberate and emergent strategies
- Empirical evidence on the contribution of attention to strategic change
Zusammenfassung der Kapitel (Chapter Summaries)
The thesis begins with a comprehensive literature review of strategic management, exploring key concepts such as strategic management, strategy, strategic change, and strategy formulation. It also examines the concept of bounded rationality and its influence on strategic choice.
Chapter 3 introduces the attention-based view of the firm, defining attention and exploring its theoretical foundations in the Carnegie School. It examines the three principles of the attention-based view and presents a model of situated attention and firm behavior. The chapter concludes by developing an attention-based theory of strategy formulation.
Chapter 4 presents an empirical analysis of the contribution of attention to strategy formulation, drawing on a range of case studies and research findings. It explores the influence of focus of attention, situated attention, and the structural distribution of attention on strategic decision-making processes.
Chapter 5 discusses the findings of the empirical analysis, addressing limitations and implications for future research. It highlights the importance of considering attention as a key factor in understanding strategic change.
Schlüsselwörter (Keywords)
The main keywords and focus topics of the thesis include strategic change, attention-based view, strategy formulation, bounded rationality, situated attention, structural distribution of attention, empirical research, and case studies. The thesis explores the role of attention in shaping strategic decision-making processes and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of strategic change.
- Citar trabajo
- Florian Körner (Autor), 2015, Conceptualizing Processes of Strategic Change. The Contribution of an Attention-Based View to Strategy Formulation, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/302469
