Value incongruity and strategic choice
Article Abstract:
Research addressing how values held by individuals in organizations influence strategy choice and implementations is as yet fragmented. Different strands of this research have yielded contradictory prescriptions for strategy. This paper examines how values affect strategy, by focusing on the social control they exert. Social control manifests itself through the behaviours permitted and proscribed by given values. We call a value a core value when the social control it exerts supersedes that of most other values in a value system. When the social control a value exerts is itself superseded by that exerted by most other values in a system, we call the value a peripheral value in that system. Strategies could be depicted as containing implicit values, in that they too entail prescriptions for behaviour. Thus, core values implicit to strategies enable behaviour essential for the success of strategies. Values seemingly peripheral to strategies enable behaviour peripheral or even tangential to their success. This paper discusses several contingencies - clashes between core values of decision makers and values implicitly at the core of strategies, core and peripheral values, as well as clashes between peripheral values - in the context of both corporate and competitive strategies. Finally, some factors that might mitigate these clashes, are also discussed. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)
Publication Name: Journal of Management Studies
Subject: Business, general
ISSN: 0022-2380
Year: 1998
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The adoption of the multi-divisional form in large Czech enterprises: the role of economic, institutional and strategic choice factors
Article Abstract:
In the Czech Republic and elsewhere in the region, researchers have noted the widespread adoption of the multi-divisional form (MDF) by the former state-owned enterprises. In contrast to the accepted explanations in western capitalist societies, the spread of the MDF in post-Communist economies has had little or nothing to do with growth strategies such as diversification. Developing ideas from the existing western literature, the paper examines the role of economic, institutional and strategic choice factors in three large, former state enterprises within the Czech post-Communist context. The findings suggest that all three factors are theoretically important, but neither equally or independently so. In particular, economic factors acted as a major constraint on structural choice only under extreme conditions, while institutional factors and strategic choice are best understood as interdependent moments in a recursive process of structural enactment. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)
Publication Name: Journal of Management Studies
Subject: Business, general
ISSN: 0022-2380
Year: 1999
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