Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the "art of the general", which included several subsets of skills including military tactics, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in Eastern Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word "strategy" came to denote "a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills" in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.
Empowerment is the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in communities. This enables them to represent their interests in a responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority. It is the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. Empowerment as action refers both to the process of self-empowerment and to professional support of people, which enables them to overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, and to recognize and use their resources.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
In a corporation, a stakeholder is a member of "groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist", as defined in the first usage of the word in a 1963 internal memorandum at the Stanford Research Institute. The theory was later developed and championed by R. Edward Freeman in the 1980s. Since then it has gained wide acceptance in business practice and in theorizing relating to strategic management, corporate governance, business purpose and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The definition of corporate responsibilities through a classification of stakeholders to consider has been criticized as creating a false dichotomy between the "shareholder model" and the "stakeholder model", or a false analogy of the obligations towards shareholders and other interested parties.
Organizational behavior or organisational behaviour is the "study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself". Organizational behavioral research can be categorized in at least three ways:
Environmental resource management or environmental management is the management of the interaction and impact of human societies on the environment. It is not, as the phrase might suggest, the management of the environment itself. Environmental resources management aims to ensure that ecosystem services are protected and maintained for future human generations, and also maintain ecosystem integrity through considering ethical, economic, and scientific (ecological) variables. Environmental resource management tries to identify factors between meeting needs and protecting resources. It is thus linked to environmental protection, resource management, sustainability, integrated landscape management, natural resource management, fisheries management, forest management, wildlife management, environmental management systems, and others.
Marketisation or marketization is a restructuring process that enables state enterprises to operate as market-oriented firms by changing the legal environment in which they operate.
Organizational effectiveness is a concept organizations use to gauge how effective they are at reaching intended outcomes. Organizational effectiveness is both powerful and problematic term. The strength of it is that it may be used to critically evaluate and improve organisational activities. It is problematic since it means various things to different individuals. And there are other alternative methods for measuring organizational performance. Organizational effectiveness embodies the degree to which firms achieve the goals they have decided upon, a question that draws on several different factors. Among those are talent management, leadership development, organization design and structure, design of measurements and scorecards, implementation of change and transformation, deploying smart processes and smart technology to manage the firm's human capital and the formulation of the broader Human Resources agenda.
The resource-based view (RBV), often referred to as the "resource-based view of the firm", is a managerial framework used to determine the strategic resources a firm can exploit to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
William Richard Scott is an American sociologist, and Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, specialised in institutional theory and organisation science. He is known for his research on the relation between organizations and their institutional environments.
In organizational theory, dynamic capability is the capability of an organization to purposefully adapt an organization's resource base. The concept was defined by David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen, in their 1997 paper Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management, as the firm’s ability to engage in adapting, integrating, and reconfiguring internal and external organizational skills, resources, and functional competences to match the requirements of a changing environment.
Jeffrey Pfeffer is an American business theorist and the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and is considered one of today's most influential management thinkers.
In economics, nonmarket forces are those acting on economic factors from outside a market system. They include organizing and correcting factors that provide order to markets and other societal institutions and organizations, as well as forces utilized by price systems other than the free price system.
Geoffrey P. Chamberlain's theory of strategy was first published in 2010. The theory draws on the work of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Kenneth R. Andrews, Henry Mintzberg and James Brian Quinn but is more specific and attempts to cover the main areas they did not address. Chamberlain analyzes the strategy construct by treating it as a combination of four factors.
Human resource planning is a process that identifies current and future human resources needs for an organization to achieve its goals. Human resource planning should serve as a link between human resource management and the overall strategic plan of an organization. Ageing workers population in most western countries and growing demands for qualified workers in developing economies have underscored the importance of effective human resource planning.
Resource slack, in the business and management literature, is the level of availability of a resource. Resource slack can be considered as the opposite of resource scarcity or resource constraints.
Jay R. Galbraith was an American organizational theorist, consultant and professor at the International Institute for Management Development, known for his work on strategy and organization design.
Gerald R. (Jerry) Salancik was an American organizational theorist, and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is best known for his work with Jeffrey Pfeffer on "organizational decision making" and "the external control of organizations."
Joseph Galaskiewicz is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, known for his work on interorganizational relations and social network analysis.
The composition-based view (CBV) was recently developed by Luo and Child (2015). It is a new theory that explicates the growth of firms without the benefit of resource advantages, proprietary technology, or market power. The CBV complements some existing theories such as resource-based view (RBV), resource management view, and dynamic capability – to create novel insights into the survival of firms that do not possess such strategic assets as original technologies and brands. It emphasizes how ordinary firms with ordinary resources may generate extraordinary results through their creative use of open resources and unique integrating capabilities, resulting in an enhanced speed and a high price-value ratio that are well suited to large numbers of low- to mid-end mass market consumers. The CBV has been commented as “a new view with significant application” for emerging market firms and for small and medium sized enterprises in many countries. The view cautions though that composition-generated advantages are temporary in nature and that composition itself mandates special skills in distinctively identifying, leveraging, and combining open or existing resources inside and outside the firm.
