Trends and Patterns in Turnaround Strategies

The paper aims to examine the publications on turnaround strategies and identify scientific gaps. Hence, bibliographic couplings of countries, institutions, journals, publications, authors, and co-occurrences of the author keywords were analyzed. Bibliographic methods were employed to examine and visualize the characteristics of the publications with the aid of VOSViewer software. Using 174 articles from the Scopus database, the results revealed that corporate distress, turnaround, organizational decline, turnaround strategies, corporate strategy, financial distress, retrenchment, turnaround strategy, and turnarounds were among the most studied key concepts in this area, The “Journal of Strategy and Management” and “European Management Journal” were the top journals. United States, United Kingdom, and India were the most influential countries. The Fort Hays University and McMurry University were top research institutions. Notably, Huang, Y., Reddy, K.S., and Xie, E. were the most influential authors in this research area. These results will help academicians and practitioners.

The Rise and Fall of Japan’s New Far Right: How Anti-Korean Discourses Went Mainstream

Why has right-wing activism in Japan, despite its persistence throughout the postwar era, only gained significant traction recently? Focusing on the Zaitokukai, an anti-Korean movement in Japan, this article demonstrates how the new Far Right were able to popularize formerly stigmatized right-wing ideas. The Zaitokukai represents a political group distinct from the traditional right and reflective of new Far Right movements spreading worldwide. In Japan, concerns about the growing influence of South Korea and China in the 1980s as well as the decline of left-wing norms opened up a discursive opportunity for the new Far Right. By framing Korean postcolonial minorities as undeserving recipients of social welfare benefits, the Zaitokukai mobilized perceptions of threat that has continued to powerfully influence public perceptions of Koreans even following the group’s organizational decline. While past research has focused on the new Far Right’s political influence, this article stresses their roles as ideological entrepreneurs.

Revitalization and Resurrection? Confronting Decline and Change in Religious Organizations

We draw on interviews with 22 religious leaders to develop a model that highlights how these individuals confront organizational change. Our model provides insight into the perceptions of leaders who are negotiating change in an unusual and turbulent organizational context. It also expands knowledge of how change is confronted in situations where organizational decline is exacerbated by widespread shifts within the larger institutional environment. We find religious leaders are attuned to the pressures facing their organizations and that in general, they embrace change. Leaders highlighted the need to encourage change not only in others, but also described a need for personal change; according to our interviewees, bringing about such transformation requires an ability to frame contextual demands for change in constructive ways, adapt and respond to the forces pressing on religious life, and balance tradition with innovation.

A Strike against the Left: General Strikes and Public Opinion of Incumbent Governments in Spain

Political links between labor unions and leftist political parties have weakened over the last four decades in Western Europe, reducing the former’s influence on the latter. Unions’ prolonged organizational decline suggests that their capacity to pressure left parties should become more limited. We examine whether unions can use general strikes to influence public opinion when left parties in government pursue austerity policies. Executing a distributive lag time series analysis of quarterly public opinion data from 1986 to 2015 in Spain, we find that Socialist governments incurred significant public opinion penalties in the wake of a general strike. Not only did PSOE prime ministers lose confidence from the public, but they also witnessed a significant reduction in voting intentions. In contrast, Spain’s conservative governments incurred no such public opinion penalties in response to general strikes. We conclude that general strikes carry significant political costs for left governments that stray from union ideals.

Why Rebels Stop Fighting: Organizational Decline and Desertion in Colombia's Insurgency

Desertion, or the unauthorized exit from an armed group, has major implications for counterinsurgency, war termination, and recruitment dynamics. While existing research stresses the importance of individual motivations for desertion, organizational decline, in the form of military and financial adversity, can also condition desertion. Organizational decline undermines a group's instruments to channel individual preferences into collective action. These instruments include selective incentives, ideological appeal, and coercion. When the binding power of these instruments diminishes, individual desires start to dominate behavior, making desertion more likely. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency is used to examine this argument with a multimethod approach. First, a quantitative analysis employs unique data on more than 19,000 reported FARC deserters from 2002 to 2017, provided by the Colombian Ministry of Defense. Guarding against threats to causal inference, statistical analysis indicates that organizational decline drives desertion. Second, a qualitative analysis uses a large body of detailed reports on interviews with deserters conducted by Colombian military personnel. The reports demonstrate that organizational decline weakens selective incentives, group ideology, and a credible coercive regime, and fosters desertion through these mechanisms. These findings provide key insights for policymakers, given that desertion can both contribute to ending conflict and accelerate the recruitment of new combatants.

Risk-managing the business model: locating tripwires at the start

Purpose This paper aims to address risks inherent in business model innovation. The authors make the case that entrepreneurs and managers, in relying on sources of innovation when designing business models, need to pay heed to these hidden risks – or tripwires – that can prevent the venture from efficiently, effectively and profitably scaling. The authors provide a guiding framework to help entrepreneurs and managers identify four distinct tripwires in their business model underlying the sources of innovation. Design/methodology/approach The authors build a systematic framework of the four tripwires – structure, scaling, systems and strategy – underlying offer-driven, customer-driven, finance-driven and resource-driven business model innovations. By relying on academic research, the authors’ scholarly work on organizational decline, innovation and corporate turnaround and the authors combined experiences and observations in industry, this study makes explicit and highlights problem areas in the business model, providing examples of representative companies to illustrate the challenges and consequences of failing to identify and manage its tripwires. Findings The authors demonstrate that awareness and attention to the tripwires underlying sources of innovation can mitigate a business model’s future challenges. Business model innovations can and often do conceal hazards that become apparent only as a venture begins to grow. As such, it is essential that entrepreneurs and managers attend to these potential problem areas in the early stages of designing their business models. In bringing awareness to innovation-related tripwires, the authors offer a risk-management “patch” for managers and entrepreneurs when developing their business models. Originality/value Business model innovation is a powerful tool to help in identifying growth opportunities. Yet in launching, scaling or transforming their business models, entrepreneurs and managers can encounter unforeseen challenges. While sources of innovation in the business model prioritize the discovery of growth opportunities, this has often come at the expense of the potential risks underlying them. The authors provide a means to identify four distinct tripwires that may be triggered when implementing business model innovations.

Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd: Searching Its Glorious Days

This case explores the phenomenon of organization decline and the dilemma around the different paths that may be traversed by Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd. There are multiple theories of organizational decline, and mostly they encompass both the external environment and the internal aspects of the firm, including the context of decision-making. Moreover, the organization decline-and-turnaround model highlights the different causes of decline, response factor, firm action and outcomes in a unified and comprehensive manner. To that end, based on secondary data sources and the study of the phenomenon of organization decline in a pharmaceutical industry setting, this case depicts the application of one of the organizational decline-and-turnaround models. The case highlights the company’s trigger for the decline, industry structure, market dynamics, current threats, the competitive landscape along with the fall and the way forward. The case attempts to trigger discussion in the classroom on why organizations decline from their seemingly high standards and what paths can be explored during the decline to enable turnaround.

Agentic Misfit: An Empirical Demonstration of Non-Matching Human Agency amid Complexity

Alignment of organizations with external imperatives is seen as a sine qua non of proper organizing and strategizing by many fit and complexity scholars. Any deviation from this management mantra engenders organizational decline and, ultimately, mortality. We put this axiomatic principle under empirical scrutiny and use the law of requisite variety as our organizing principle to do so. The law is an iconic cornerstone of this matching contingency logic and it has served to legitimize a wide range of fit decisions in, e.g., leadership, organizational learning and corporate governance. Inspired by organizational vignettes inhabiting antithetical complexity regimes, we introduce a novel concept, which we label ‘agentic misfit’. In this way, we deconstruct deterministic assumptions related to environmental fittingness, we challenge teleological orientations in the fit literature, and we flesh out the viability of non-matching human agency amid complexity.

Leadership in times of organizational decline: a literature review of antecedents, consequences and moderators

Purpose Despite the recent increase in scholarly interest on organizational decline, the theoretical and empirical inquiry into this topic remains largely disintegrated. Therefore, leaders in corporate settings who are confronted with critical strategic management challenges are ill equipped for orchestrating successful turnaround attempts to secure the revival of their organizations. The purpose of this paper is to bridge this gap in the organizational decline literature. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the authors undertake a systematic review of the specialized literature with the purpose of providing an updated account of the extant knowledge base and assisting top managers in their efforts of corporate recovery. Findings Drawing upon the insights from a number of prior literature reviews and the evidence provided in the sampled studies, this research framework offers an in-depth discussion of major antecedents, consequences and moderators of organizational decline. Originality/value The authors seek to make a discerned contribution to the field by advancing a multi-domain agenda for future research that may animate the continuous debate on the most effective strategies and leadership practices for surviving firm decline.