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The purpose is to stimulate scholarship in the strategic management field that accounts for conditions implied by projected impacts of climate change.

Following conceptual logic, the article analyses how changes in the strategic environment brought about by climate change may challenge current strategic management theory. It develops avenues for theory development based on expanding the field’s scope and extending its limits of applicability.

The article highlights the extent to which the strategy field has evolved in a stable empirical context, despite its attention to dynamism and hence is less well aligned with potentially pervasive new pressures and impacts. It sets out a rationale for moving beyond symbolic environmentalism, possibilities to harness cognitive and behavioural insights, dilemmas in strategic innovation and the empirical potential of non-mainstream contexts.

Firms and organisations can expect widespread systemic effects from climate change that challenge established ways of operating. The article explores how strategic management could better support strategists in navigating these shifts such that firms can continue to thrive.

The article approaches the issue of climate change specifically from the perspective of strategic management of firms rather than as policy or social advocacy. It focuses on pressures and characteristics that distinguish climate change from other environmental and social impacts on firms.

Innovation is an essential process for growth and well-being of organisations and society in general but is difficult to manage successfully. Through a better understanding of the innovation mindsets as established strategists use them in practice, this paper aims to improve firms’ success rates of innovation.

To examine how innovation processes play out in dynamic environments, the authors undertook a longitudinal two-year multi-case study in the high-tech sector.

Strategists in this study showed distinct phases in their successful innovation journey with three dominant mindsets of curiosity, creativity and clarity. The curiosity phase includes actions focused on discovering and understanding the implications and significance of an opportunity. The creativity phase includes actions focused on creating and testing a wide range of options. The clarity phase consists of actions focused on resourcing and implementing change.

In adopting this framework for use in the field, the authors recommend strategists take time for discovering and getting to core understanding in the curiosity phase. They should then take action by creating and actively testing a broad range of solution ideas in the creativity phase. Finally, organisations need to take care with clear direction and communication when resourcing and implementing in the clarity phase.

This novel framework which emerged from the longitudinal field research describes the mindsets of innovation and how these are used at different phases in the innovation process.

The resource-based view and value-rarity-imitability-organisation (VRIO) method have diffused widely into courses aimed at managerial practice, but research has yet to verify whether they help managers analyse a firm’s resources. Following recent interest in the use of strategy tools, the purpose of this paper is to focus on what happens when VRIO informs strategy action.

The paper uses experimental method to evaluate directly users’ analysis guided by VRIO relative to analysis that is not. Systematic coding of the responses evaluates how users select resources to evaluate, in which areas they make recommendations, and what account they take of competitors, dynamic evolution, and resource disadvantages, risks and limitations.

VRIO encouraged users to evaluate resources relative to competitors and competitive dynamics, but resource selection difficulties and failure to evaluate resource disadvantages limited its value. In addition, it drew users to the existing operations and business model.

The study highlights a tendency for users to evaluate antecedents and outcomes of resources, and partly supports the view that VRIO elicits inward-looking descriptions. Field-based research is needed to show how using VRIO plays out in full strategy making context.

Highlighted limitations in VRIO analysis could be alleviated by better specifying resource selection and by addressing the positive-only tenor of VRIO materials.

Only a small number of published studies evaluate VRIO as a method of practical strategic analysis, and this paper is the first to look directly at users’ responses.

This paper aims to address the limited development of techniques to analyze firms' internal sources of competitive performance. It seeks to enhance the contribution of the widely diffused value‐rarity‐imitability‐organisation (VRIO) model to practical strategy making.

The paper draws on the resource‐based literature to assemble an integrated set of steps that evaluate a firm's resources and competence.

The paper proposes an expanded version of the VRIO model that represents resource and competence as a conditional outcome from attributes and asymmetries present in the firm. It shows how the conditions convert asymmetries between weaknesses, missed opportunities, rigidities and resources.

By synthesising resource‐based theory in a practice‐relevant form, the paper delineates a concrete set of practices that relate to firms' dynamic capability to manage resources and competence.

The paper details an approach to resource and competence analysis that leads directly to decisions about how a firm can manage the resources in question. The model gives a central role to the conditions under which a firm's attributes give rise to a resource or competence, and hence suggests active management of these conditions.

The paper presents resource‐based theory in a form that focuses on the doing of strategy, in contrast to the traditional focus of this literature.

The paper complements other published material on strategy tools by presenting a picture of how practicing managers use tools and concepts in strategy activity.

The paper draws on interviews with a diverse set of managers. The interviews explored how these managers used tools in a chosen strategy activity.

The paper presents a profile of how managers use tools that refines and challenges existing studies. Writing on strategy tools often implies strict application of the tools. In practice, managers take parts from different tools and mould them to suit pre‐existing business objectives and processes. This requires them to have a wide knowledge of tools and to reflect on them critically. Managers use tools as a source of inspiration as much as for communication or for facilitating initiatives. When looking to extend their knowledge, they seek new ideas, not packaged solutions.

The implication for managers is to focus on reconstructing tools to fit local needs. The paper argues that this does not mean corrupting tools and is more effective than seeking better tools that already fit.

Prior studies of strategy tools have focused mainly on the extent of tool use. This paper considers in more depth how managers enact these tools within their firms, and hence advances from the study of fads to the study of strategy practice. Its findings are relevant to those who devise and communicate tools as well as to managers.

The purpose of this research is to improve the success rate and quality of outcome when strategy tools are used in practical situations.

Draws on post‐experience teaching and uses conceptual reasoning to propose a typology of tool applications.

The paper finds that strategy tools need to be used differently according to the problem needs, and hence proposes five generic modes of tool application. These draw on seven dimensions to codify the functions and cognitive characteristics in a given tool application.

The modes of application are conceptually rather than empirically derived. The paper provides conceptual background that could be used in much‐needed empirical work on tool use in the strategy activity.

The typology could be used in teaching or facilitation to encourage and help with the design of tool adaptations that are coherent and well adapted to the situation. It provides a means for prior reflection on tool choice and application that could help reduce detrimental framing effects.

The paper highlights the centrality of user adaptation of tools and begins to codify the effects of tool enactment. It moves debate from the tools themselves to the application of tools, which has seldom been addressed in a systematic fashion. For practitioners it provides explicit guidance on the tool adaptation process.

Debates why and how some practices become universal – taking as a case in point closed‐chest massage (CCCM). Points out that CCCM was recognized in 1960 and its use generated heated debates, which altered the technique and reshuffled existing infrastructures. Claims that debates act as a catalyst for university. Investigates the emergence of CCCM, the debate on the merits (or otherwise) of closed versus open‐chested cardiac massage, and who could use the method of CCCM. Indicates that CCCM only became universally practised when it was incorporated into the infrastructure for dealing with emergency cases, and thus became taken for granted.

Catalogues that the amusement/recreation industry in the USA has around 99,000 establishments, from theme parks to fitness centres and three broad groups, sports, performing arts and amusement/gambling within the industry. Gives in‐depth information about the kind of workers and earnings, etc. Looks at the type of hiring practices involved, especially the new hiring developments. Discusses in‐depth three California amusement parts at: The Disneyland Resort; Universal Studios, Hollywood; and Knott’s Berry Farm, and voices concerns over hire procedures.

This is the first paper in a volume devoted exclusively to antitrust law and economics. It summarizes the other papers and addresses two issues. First, after showing that the federal courts generally view consumer welfare as the ultimate goal of antitrust law, it asks what they mean by that term. It concludes that recent decisions appear more likely to equate consumer welfare with the well-being of consumers in the relevant market than with economic efficiency. Second, it asks whether a buyer must possess monopsony power to induce a price discrimination that is not cost justified. It concludes that a buyer can often obtain an unjustified concession simply by wielding bargaining power, but the resulting concession may frequently – though not always – improve consumer welfare.