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Change is a fundamental component of contemporary restoration ecology. The environment, the research, and the ideas in this discipline are rapidly evolving and changing. The California Society for Ecological Restoration annual meeting was an inclusive, diverse meeting that significantly advanced new thinking in the field and provided an exemplar of the value of scientific discourse at meetings. The restoration work in this region also amplified and identified trends in the scientific community at large. A total of three future‐oriented strategic issues emerged from the discourse at this meeting. (1) Restoration ecologists need to consider alternative definitions of local for interventions within a region. (2) Restoration is never complete and must always incorporate people. (3) Indirect outcomes and the process of restoration have merit despite challenges of immediate identification of benefits. The science presented served as a platform for these advanced strategic issue examinations, and the grandest of challenges for restoration ecology necessarily includes people in every equation and embraces values and perceptions over longer time frames.

The balance between profit maximization and corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a strategic issue of considerable importance. A key factor in understanding this relationship is identifying consumer reactions to engaging in CSR. Prior literature suggests a gap between consumers' environmental attitudes and behaviors. This study examines this relationship and finds evidence that gender significantly influences this gap between attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, we find that for female segments of the consumer population, this gap is greatly reduced. We use social identity theory to explain this phenomenon of gender differences as they relate to CSR. Along with providing insight to CSR at the individual level with attitudes and behaviors, our findings also have implications at the firm- level for how organizations choose and strategically signal their CSR strategies toward specific consumer segments. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Climate change is a major strategic issue for firms that also has global environmental, social and economic implications. This paper draws upon quantitative survey research to examine the drivers and outcomes of corporate commitment to climate change action in European high emitting industry. More specifically, this research examines the significance of business drivers, sustainability drivers, and stakeholder pressure, in motivating corporate commitment to climate change action in such industry. It furthermore assesses relationships between commitment and actual corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) performance. It is found that in European high emitting industry, business drivers and stakeholder pressure, but not sustainability drivers, enhance corporate commitment to climate change action, and that higher commitment leads to improved GHG performance. This paper contributes to hitherto limited empirical work on the drivers and outcomes of corporate commitment to climate change action, particularly in European industry contexts. It also contributes to advancing methodology in the field.

The protection of property rights is a pressing strategic issue in the genetically modified soybean seed industry. Because the soybean plant is characterized by self-reproducibility, it is essential for biotechnology firms to establish strategies of property rights appropriation. To obtain new insights into this issue, we investigate in two directions. First, we propose a model of value appropriation in which property rights strategies are influenced by the institutional conditions and the monitoring technology in a given country. Second, we analyze three cases of property rights protection with respect to soybean seeds. We then present a comparative discussion of the cases and develop some propositions based on the theoretical framework and the case studies. We conclude with a discussion of our model's managerial implications.

Why would managers in the same firm differ in their attention to opportunity versus threat aspects of the same exogenous shock? Drawing on the attention-based view, strategic issue diagnosis theory, and construal level theory, we propose and test a theoretical model of differentiated attention among managers within a firm driven by desirability (shock distance) and feasibility (capability perception) considerations. Managers more distant from the locus of the shock and managers with stronger ex ante perceptions regarding organizational capabilities to address the shock paid more attention to opportunity aspects and less attention to threat aspects. We also found subordination effects between shock distance and capability perception, and a moderating role of domain-specific experience on the effects of capability perception.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Because the world with its markets, innovations, and customers is changing faster than ever before, the key to survival for businesses is the ability to detect, assess, and respond to changing conditions timely and intelligently. Understanding changes and reacting to or acting upon them therefore become a strategic issue not only for companies but also in many other domains. The corresponding need for knowledge has been answered by data mining research by proposing a multitude of methods for analyzing different aspects of change. This article provides an overview of recent works on methods for change analysis, thereby focusing on contrast mining and change mining, the two emerging subfields of contemporary data mining research. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov 2011 1 215–230 DOI: 10.1002/widm.27

Divestment is a major strategic issue in both the private sector (Ellsworth, 1979) and the public sector (Hafsi & Thomas, 1986). Using the findings of research on divestment in the private sector as a starting point and a hypothesis, this paper investigates the divestment decisionmaking process in the public sector. Three cases of divestment by the government of the province of Quebec in Canada are described then discussed to highlight some important patterns. First, the decision-making process is not significantly different from what can be seen in the private sector, especially where the firm has enough autonomy in making its strategic decisions. Second, in the strategic management of divestment, implementation is a key part of the process, while formulation takes a back seat. Finally, successful divestment occurs in those situations where the decision is prepared and developped by those who play a critical role in its implementation. The paper is concluded with some important implications for both research and practice. Resume Le desinvestissement est une question strategique de premiere importance dans le secteur prive (Ellsworth, 1979) comme dans le secteur public (Hafsi & Thomas, 1986). En prenant comme point de depart et comme hypothese les modeles de prise de decision de desinvestissement dans le secteur prive, cet article etudie le processus de desinvestissement dans le secteur public. Trois cas de desinvestissement par le gouverncment de la province de Quebec au Canada sont decrits puis discutes pour mettre en evidence quelques grandes regularites. Premierement, le processus de decision n'est pas tres different de celui qu' on observe dans le secteur prive, surtout si l'entreprise consideree est suffisamment autonome du gouvernement pour la prise de decisions strategiques. Deuxiemement, dans la gestion strategique du desinvestissement, la ele reside dans la mise en oeuvre alors que la formulation est moins importante. Finalement, le desinvestissement est un succes seulement Iaa ou la decision est preparee et portee par ceux qui doivent jouer un role ele dans son application. La conclusion met l accent sur des implications importantes pour la recherche et pour la pratique de la gestion.

Resume La gestion de 10 questions strategiques dans une organisation a ete etudiee en utilisant une demarche interpretative et ethnomethodologique de recherche. Les resultats suggerent un modele qui a comme base la relation intention-action et trois composantes de cette relation appelees contenu, social et emotion. Le modele explique comment les dirigeants gerent ces elements des processus et adoptent trois approches differentes selon la question strategique en cause. Ces approches dites technique, politique et expressive donnent aux processus organisationnels une dynamique et une configuration de caracteristiques particulieres a chaque approche. Abstract Management of ten strategic issues within an organization was studied, using an interpretive and ethnomethodological approach. The research results suggest a model based on the intention-action relationship and three components of this relationship - the content, social, and affective components. The model explains how managers dealt with these elements and adopted three different approaches, depending on the strategic issue. These approaches, termed technical, political, and expressive, each lend particular dynamics and patterns of characteristics to the organizational processes.

Anecdotal evidence, mostly from the United States, suggests that it has become increasingly difficult to find well-trained, entry-level ground water hydrologists to fill open positions in consulting firms and regulatory agencies. The future prospects for filling positions that require training in ground water hydrology are assessed by considering three factors: the market, the numbers of qualified students entering colleges and universities, and the aging of the existing workforce. The environmental and water resources consulting industry has seen continuous albeit variable growth, and demand for environmental scientists and hydrologists is expected to increase significantly. Conversely, students' interest and their enrollment in hydrology and water resources programs have waned in recent years, and the interests of students within these departments have shifted away from ground water hydrology in some schools. This decrease in the numbers of U.S. students graduating in hydrology or emphasizing ground water hydrology is coinciding with the aging of and pending retirement of ground water scientists and engineers in the baby boomer generation. We need to both trigger the imagination of students at the elementary school level so that they later want to apply science and math and communicate the career opportunities in ground water hydrology to those high school and college graduates who have acquired the appropriate technical background. Because the success of a consulting firm, research organization, or regulatory agency is derived from the skills and judgment of the employees, human resources will be an increasingly more critical strategic issue for many years.

Product recovery operations in reverse supply chains face rapidly changing demand due to the increasing number of product offerings with reduced lifecycles. Therefore, capacity planning becomes a strategic issue of major importance for the profitability of closed-loop supply chains. This work studies a closed-loop supply chain with remanufacturing and presents dynamic capacity planning policies developed through the methodology of System Dynamics. The key issue of the paper is how the lifecycles and return patterns of various products affect the optimal policies regarding expansion and contraction of collection and remanufacturing capacities. The model can be used to identify effective policies, to conduct various “what-if” analyses, and to answer questions about the long-term profitability of reverse supply chains with remanufacturing. The results of numerical examples with quite different lifecycle and return patterns show how the optimal collection expansion/contraction and remanufacturing contraction policies depend on the lifecycle type and the average usage time of the product, while the remanufacturing capacity expansion policy is not significantly affected by these factors. The results also show that the collection and remanufacturing capacity policies are insensitive to the total product demand. The insensitivity of the optimal policies to total demand is a particularly appealing feature of the proposed model, given the difficulty in obtaining accurate demand forecasts.

Managers need to make sense of emerging strategic issues that could significantly impact their businesses. While models of this sensemaking process suggest that information gathering affects interpretations (which affect action and performance), researchers have argued that our understanding of the role of information in changing interpretations is underdeveloped. This paper investigates the role of the time managers spend searching for information and the diversity of the information they find in changing managers’ perceptions that an equivocal, strategic issue represents a threat and opportunity for their businesses. The methodology involves a longitudinal research design in which managers recorded multiple, process-oriented measures of their information gathering activity. Results suggest that time spent searching for information leads to changes towards seeing the issue as more of a threat, while the diversity of information found leads to changes towards seeing it as less of a threat. We found no effect of information gathering on opportunity perceptions.

There exist two prominent accounts of how managers make sense of and take action in relation to strategic issues. The threat–opportunity (TO) and feasibility–urgency (FU) approaches primarily emphasize automatic/affective and active/deliberative strategic issue diagnosis processes, respectively. Current research, however, does not effectively integrate or fully explore the relationship between these two frameworks. We employ theory-building literature to develop a framework that highlights four distinct and increasingly integrative lenses through which such an exploration can be systematically carried out. Analyzing data from how firms reacted to the economic uncertainty of early 2003, the results of our study indicate that the FU approach is a better predictor of both intentions and actual responses than the TO approach. Our results also indicate that threat is positively related to urgency and negatively related to feasibility, while opportunity is positively related to feasibility and negatively related to urgency. Further, using the expectancy–instrumentality–valence (EIV) motivational theory as a framework, we factor analyze both TO and FU items, identifying three underlying constructs of favorability, urgency, and influence (which we dub FUI). FUI has a higher predictive efficacy than the TO approach alone. We highlight implications for theory building and research in the strategic issue diagnosis literature. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Corporate real estate is becoming an emerging priorityfor treasury departments. That's because real estate—traditionally an operational consideration-—is becoming a strategic issue. Treasury must play more of an active role in decision making here. But are treasury departments ready and equipped to deal with these new demands? And where is the strategic opportunity? © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The basic idea behind this editorial is that the routine recipes used by managers in the strategy process dull the intellectual palate and worse, divert attention from the principal strategic issue of business—namely, creating the future. To create the future requires three main ingredients: A creative act. An activity or series of activities where imagination, innovation and creation cause people to (want to) do something different or do the same thing significantly differently. An obsessive preoccupation with the future. An ability and inclination to look to the future rather than to the present or the past: an ability to be able to read the future (or a range of alternative futures), to feel the future, live the future and describe the future in ways which enable others to share and see the future with you. Involvement, energy and passion. Organization-wide commitment to the images of the future and understanding by individuals and teams, of their contributions to the shared imagined future. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Despite the strategic and competitive advantages possibly gained by developing sustainable water processes, many firms have not responded to the threat of impending water shortages. An integrated model of strategic issue diagnosis drawn from and extending previous models explains when managers will recognize a strategic issue and its ethical implications. When managers perceive that an issue (i) can be resolved, meaning that it is feasible, (ii) has implications for the organization that are important, meaning that it is urgent, and (iii) when significant harm is probable, meaning the issue has moral intensity, then managers are more likely to become committed to and exert effort to resolve the issue. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

Developing sustainable business models incorporating effects on people, profit, and planet is becoming an increasingly important strategic issue. Benchmarking with peer companies can assist a company in setting goals of improving its performance. As such, developing a methodology for effectively benchmarking sustainable business practices is an important step in the evolution of sustainability management. However, a company's sustainability performance is composed of many elements that may involve difficult tradeoffs, and its performance may vary over time. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach of innovatively adapting statistical process control charts, conventionally used in quality control, to simultaneously compare multiple performance measures and analyze variation in both trend and performance among companies in a given industry. We apply this approach to benchmarking the sustainability performance of companies in the US utility industry and demonstrate it is robust and reliable for benchmarking the performance of companies in virtually all industries. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Models of strategic decision-making and environmental scanning typically assume that decision-makers diagnose issues actively, using conscious and intentional effort to identify and to interpret potentially significant events, developments and trends. This article establishes that conditions in organizations put decision-makers ‘on automatic’in their diagnosis of strategic issues, with direct implications for the process and content of strategic action. Implications for theory and practice are established.

Perceptions of environmental uncertainty and organizational control influence strategic behavior. As national culture influences these perceptions we expect to find cultural differences in interpretation and response to strategic issues. Given a case describing an issue concerning deregulation of the U.S. banking industry, managers completed questionnaires rating interpretations and responses to that issue. National culture was found to influence interpretation and responses. In particular, Latin European managers when compared with other managers were more likely to interpret the issue as a crisis and as a threat. Latin Europeans were also more likely to recommend proactive behavior. This study indicates that different cultures are likely to interpret and respond to the same strategic issue in different ways. These differences may help to explain and predict different responses of European countries to ‘1992’.

We turn attention from describing surprising changes to a system for detecting, analyzing, and responding to them. This system is now receiving increasing attention from firms.

This paper calls attention to a central but neglected process in strategic decision making, i.e. strategic issue diagnosis (SID). A framework for discussing SID is presented in terms of three critical components: inputs, process characteristics and outputs. The framework is illustrated in the context of PIMS and BCG, two widely recognized strategy models. The major implications highlight the theoretical significance of SID for understanding strategic decision making.

This paper proposes that organizational decision-makers exist in a market for strategic issues where different internal and external trends and developments compete for decision-makers' attention. The paper describes how an organization's strategic planning process affects the set of strategic issues that do capture decision-makers' attention. It explains how characteristics of the strategic issue array translate into effective and timely initiation and implementation of strategic change.

This paper presents a model of how decision-makers interpret stategic issues. The model of strategic issue diagnosis identifies three critical events: activation, assessments of urgency and assessments of feasibility. The relationship of each of these interpretive assessments to the creation of momentum for change allows one to predict if and how organizations will respond to a changed decision environment. The paper further links strategic issue diagnosis to organizational responses by highlighting the systematic effect of two contextual variables—the organization's belief structure and its resources—upon the assessments in diagnosis. In this way, the model of issue diagnosis provides a framework for understanding how and why organizations respond differently to strategic issues.