ABSTRACTThe importance of thinking strategically is often glossed over when academics try to apply this concept to themselves. This frequently results in research or articles that are not very insightful or useful either to other academics or to practising managers. To overcome this problem and to explore the future needs of the field of strategic management, this article proposes topics for a research agenda for strategic management in the 1990s that is based on the forecast of ‘experts’ in the field.
ABSTRACTSensemaking in crisis conditions is made more difficult because action that is instrumental to understanding the crisis often intensifies the crisis. This dilemma is interpreted from the perspective that people enact the environments which constrain them. It is argued that commitment, capacity, and expectations affect sensemaking during crisis and the severity of the crisis itself. It is proposed that the core concepts of enactment may comprise an ideology that reduces the likelihood of crisis.
ABSTRACTThe crisis management of disasters does not follow automatically from disaster planning. Research has shown that successful disaster management results primarily from the activities of emergency organizations. In particular, there are management problems with respect to the communication process, the exercise of authority, and the development of co‐ordination.There are at least five different areas of difficulties in the communication process, namely, intra‐ and inter‐organizational behaviours between organizations, from organizations to the public, from the public to organizations, and within systems of organizations. Exercise of authority difficulties stem from losses of higher echelon personnel because of over‐work, conflict regarding authority over new disaster tasks, and clashes over organizational jurisdictional differences. Co‐ordination difficulties come from lack of consensus among organizations, working on common but new disaster‐related tasks, and difficulties in achieving overall co‐ordination in any community disaster that is of any magnitude. Prior planning can limit these management difficulties but cannot completely eliminate all of them.
ABSTRACTAn approach to collecting data about managers’ experience of their work is described, involving having them ‘think aloud’ while doing their work, and ‘re‐live’ episodes soon afterwards. Some of the epistemological and methodological issues relating to this research approach are discussed.Examples of data are given, and 37 episodes of managerial work are analyzed for evidence relating to the question of how managers learn naturally from everyday experience.The analysis suggests that the concept of levels of learning proposed by Bateson (1973) is useful. An initial categorization of processes of learning, arising from the data, are presented. Some evidence that the profounder forms of learning are incremental rather than sudden is presented, and the issue of the functionality of profounder versus more superficial forms of learning in relation to everyday managerial work is raised.