“Force Majeure”: The Transformation of Cultural Strategy as a Result of Urban Shrinkage and Economic Crisis. The Case of Riga, Latvia

Cultural strategies have been commonly used to address the consequences of urban shrinkage, particularly in a post-industrial context. Proliferated growth-oriented models, such as “creative city,” have threatened the sustainable development of shrinking cities. Alternative cultural models that prioritize social inclusion, local sensitivity, and affordability are thus urgently needed. Using Riga as a case study, this paper explores the process of transformation to an alternative cultural strategy in a post-socialist shrinking city and identifies planning and governance tools that stimulate its development. Employing qualitative interviews and document analysis, the relations between emergent and deliberate cultural strategies are investigated. The results show how the organization of the European Capital of Culture 2014 during the severe shrinkage and economic crisis led to five elements of an alternative cultural strategy: (1) a shift from investing in cultural “hardware” to “software,” (2) a locally sensitive approach, (3) cultural decentralization, (4) strengthened civic engagement, and (5) inclusiveness. These elements of an emergent strategy were recognized by local authorities and stimulated changes in the deliberate cultural strategy. This study supports the idea that urban shrinkage offers municipalities an opportunity to reimagine traditional planning practices and emphasizes the important role of civic actors’ participation in coproducing public services and governance strategies.

The Mobile Thriving Respite With and for the Street Community

We report on our work with the street community of Pittsburgh, specifically, a community-based action initiative we call the Mobile Thriving Respite (Institutional Review Board approval was obtained from our university). For 5 years, student advocate ethnographers from Point Park University have gathered data (e.g., long- and short-term interviews, participant-observations generating fieldnotes). The data revealed and supported the need for thriving beyond surviving homelessness. The data endorsed the creation of the mobile thriving respite. In the first part of this work, we will discuss some critical concepts regarding homelessness as a phenomenon and then argue that while surviving as enduring is necessary, there are some for whom survival is a perpetual, lethal state of being. We will discuss the theoretical foundations to the respite and offer researchers’ ethnographic accounts of the respite’s process and progress (We had to temporarily end the respite during the Covid-19 pandemic. To date, the respite has returned with “pop up” events outside at various locations). We will outline how the mobile thriving respite is a praxis as site of resistance as well as an emergent strategy, and an instantiation of communitas. We will then revisit surviving as collectively bearing witness and testifying to the lived experiences of those living outside.

“When Henry Met Fritz”: Rules As Organizational Frameworks: For Emergent Strategy Process

Henry Mintzberg’s celebrated critique of the “design school” argued that strategy is the best thought of as adaptive, bottom-up, and based on dispersed knowledge and learning. Yet Mintzberg’s account lacks a clear and comprehensive theoretical underpinning, especially regarding how to guide emergent strategy in dynamic environments, and leverage it to exploit value creation. We provide this foundation by showing how Mintzberg’s critique of planning and design at the level of organizational strategy is in key ways anticipated by F.A. Hayek’s critique of planning and design at the societal level. Both writers are critical of rationalist epistemology and instead stress experiential knowledge, fallibility, and unanticipated social consequences. Hayek also extends Mintzberg’s work by showing how rules in the firm capture adaptive, experiential, tacit, and dispersed knowledge in the context of dynamic environments. A framework of rules thus creates inimitable and non-substitutable resources that enable the firm to fully exploit its competitive advantage.

The case of a management institute in India: recrafting the vision and mission

Theoretical basis The fundamental concepts in strategic management including vision, mission and setting objectives, external and internal environment analysis, SWOT, stakeholders in strategic management, deliberate and emergent strategy and strategic leaders have been addressed through the case. Research methodology The case was developed using primary data gathered from observations, interviews and the experiences of the authors at Chimanbhai Patel Institute of Management and Research (CPIMR) and published sources. Case overview/synopsis This case is about CPIMR, a management institute in Ahmedabad, India, which was required to recraft their vision and mission statements in light of the compliance requirements of the All India Council for Technical Education and the other challenges including new skills requirement especially because of Industry 4.0 changes and competition in the business education market. The case examines the external and internal environment challenges faced by the institute director and the emerging issues: how should CPIMR recraft the vision and mission? What could go wrong? How to make them actionable? How to disseminate them? The case would help the participants to understand the process of external and internal environment analysis, formulation of the vision and mission statements, their key purpose of informing stakeholders and setting objectives. The case also encourages the participants to put themselves in the position of the director for undertaking the process of recrafting the vision and mission statements of the management institute in the event of a strategic change. While the case setting is that of a management institute, it might also be useful for discussion in other organization settings. Complexity academic level Course: Strategic Management Level: Post Graduate Level.

Emergent Strategy from Spontaneous Anger: Crowd Dynamics in the First 48 Hours of the Ferguson Shooting

The fatal August 9, 2014, officer-involved shooting of a Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked a series of local protests that culminated in a national social movement: Black Lives Matter. In this study, through a minute-by-minute analysis of crowd dynamics, I find that the eventual social movement strategy emerged from spontaneous acts of anger in protest crowds within the first 48 hours of the shooting. This finding is surprising in light of social movement scholarship, in which strategy is thought to follow from rationality and decision making within formal organizations, not emotionality and spontaneous action within informal crowds. By coupling a historical analysis of protest and policing practices with a comparison of prominent theories of crowds, emotion, and strategy, I theorize how strategy can emerge from spontaneous acts of anger as part of a distributed sensemaking process in crowds, rather than conflating strategy with rationality and deliberate planning in organizations. Taken in sum, this study challenges prevailing ideas about the wisdom of crowds and exemplifies the immanent potential for change, in which our seemingly “micro” actions are not trivial but can influence even the most “macro” of strategic outcomes.