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Research summary: This article brings together the competitive dynamics and strategy-as-practice literatures to investigate relational competition. Drawing on a global ethnography of the reinsurance market, we develop the concept of micro-competitions, which are the focus of competitors' everyday competitive practices. We find variation in relational or rivalrous competition by individual competitors across the phases of a micro-competition, between competitors within a micro-competition, and across multiple micro-competitions. These variations arise from the interplay between the unfolding competitive arena and the implementation of each firm's strategic portfolio. We develop a conceptual framework that makes four contributions to: relational competition; reconceptualizing action and response; elaborating on the awarenessmotivation-capability framework within competitive dynamics; and the recursive dynamic by which implementing strategy inside firms shapes, and is shaped by, the competitive arena. Managerial summary: Competition is often seen as war: \"attack,\" \"retaliation,\" and \"dethronement.\" Yet competition can also be relational, incorporating collaboration and reciprocity. We show these dynamics in a syndicated financial market, reinsurance, where multiple competitors get the same price for a share of the same deal. Our competitors have rivalrous motivations to win business and relational motivations to ensure buoyant pricing, maintain market health, and enable long-standing client relationships to persist. These motivations are grounded in the strategizing practices with which firms implement their strategic portfolios and compete on deals. Competitors' rivalrous or relational motivations are highly dynamic, shifting throughout the competition on any deal and across the multiple deals on which they compete. Cumulatively these practices shape the entire market for these volatile, uncertain financial products.

In this article, we outline a methodological framework for studying the inter-organizational aspects of paradoxes and specify this in relation to grand challenges. Grand challenges are large-scale, complex, enduring problems that affect large populations, have a strong social component and appear intractable. Our methodological insights draw from our study of the insurance protection gap, a grand challenge that arises when economic losses from large-scale disaster significantly exceed the insured loss, leading to economic and social hardship for the affected communities. We provide insights into collecting data to uncover the paradoxical elements inherent in grand challenges and then propose three analytical techniques for studying inter-organizational paradoxes: zooming in and out, tracking problematization and tracking boundaries and boundary organizations. These techniques can be used to identify and follow how contradictions and interdependences emerge and dynamically persist within inter-organizational interactions and how these shape and are shaped by the unfolding dynamics of the grand challenge. Our techniques and associated research design help advance paradox theorizing by moving it to the inter-organizational and systemic level. This article also illustrates paradox as a powerful lens through which to further our understanding of grand challenges.

Despite the importance and proliferation of ethnography in strategy and organization research, the central issue of how to present ethnographic findings has rarely been discussed. Yet, the narratives we craft to share our experience of the field are at the heart of ethnographic papers and provide the primary basis for our theorizing. In this article, we explain the \"textwork\" involved in writing persuasive findings. We provide an illustrative example of ethnographic data as it is recorded within fieldnotes and explain the necessary conceptual and writing work that must be done to render such data persuasive, drawing on published exemplars of ethnographic articles. This allows us to show how such texts, through various forms of writing and data representation, are transformed from raw fìeldnotes to comprehensible findings. We conclude by asserting the value of these specifically ethnographic ways of presenting evidence, which are at odds with the canonical methods of data presentation in management studies.

During post-merger integration, the realization of the benefits of potential synergies depends on managing the legitimacy of the merger. However, we still know little about how threats that change stakeholders’ assessments of a merger’s legitimacy are managed. This study is based on the merger case of Air New Zealand’s trans-national acquisition of Ansett Australia where a delegitimizing event occurred at Ansett relatively early after the integration had started. The study builds a framework of an evolving legitimation process depicting the oscillation between legitimation responses that maintain the coupling between the two organizations and a compartmentalization response used to manage diverse stakeholders’ legitimacy demands and illegitimacy spillover concerns. We explain how these legitimation responses can create an unproductive oscillation where stakeholder assessments of illegitimacy build up and ultimately become unresolvable. Our processual framework provides novel insights regarding when attempts to defend legitimacy can prove self-defeating, demonstrating how previous responses emphasizing integration or separation can affect the success of subsequent swings back to coupling or compartmentalization.

Purpose Organizational ambidexterity brings together the paradoxical tensions between exploration and exploitation. Embracing such paradoxical tensions depends on both separating the poles to appreciate their distinct elements and integrating them to appreciate their synergies. This paper explores integrative ambidexterity that focuses on the synergies between exploration and exploitation and theorizes these as a single, paradoxical mode of learning. Design/methodology/approach The authors provide conceptual commentary that aims to expand the attention within the ambidexterity literature from emphasizing separation to further accommodating integration. Findings The authors outline that attention to separating exploration and exploitation needs to be complemented with a focus on integration, hence, the notion of integrative ambidexterity. Research limitations/implications The authors surface three processes that advance integrative ambidexterity – novelty via memory; agility via focus; and the potential for improvisation. Together, these dynamics enable organizations to achieve an alternative approach to learning and adaptation. Practical implications Understanding “integrative ambidexterity,” stressing the synergies between exploration and exploitation, extends the understanding of the nature and approaches to creating learning organizations. The authors three practices offer a potential blueprint to do so. Originality/value Previous scholarship emphasized how leaders can separate exploration and exploitation by allocating these learning modes to distinct organizational units or addressing them in different time horizons. However, extant authors have less insight about the integration and synergies between exploration and exploitation, and the organizational factors that advance such integration.

This paper develops a practice approach to institutional ambidexterity. In doing so, it first explores the ‘promise’ of institutional ambidexterity as a concept to address shortcomings with the treatment of complexity in institutional theory. However, we argue that this is an empty promise because ambidexterity remains an organizational level construct that neither connects to the institutional level, or to the practical actions and interactions within which individuals enact institutions. We therefore suggest a practice approach that we develop into a conceptual framework for fulfilling the promise of institutional ambidexterity. The second part of the paper outlines what a practice approach is and the variation in practice-based insights into institutional ambidexterity that we might expect in contexts of novel or routine institutional complexity. Finally, the paper concludes with a research agenda that highlights the potential of practice to extend institutional theory through new research approaches to well-established institutional theory questions, interests and established-understandings.

Purpose - This paper seeks to demonstrate the value and critical importance of negotiating skills within the wider context of \"employability\". It posits that the intensity, rich context, and ambiguity of juxtaposing ancient and modern cases provides a creative, engaging format to stimulate learning about negotiating and power among parties.Design methodology approach - This paper is the culmination of teaching undergraduate and graduate business students, as well as continuing education courses, in the USA and New Zealand respectively. The authors developed a participatory, mixed-mode educational simulation. Using thematic analysis of student survey responses, they summarize learning points associated with the suggested teaching case.Findings - An analysis of post-exercise questions suggested six key themes identified by students: value of leadership, self-knowledge, maturity, and judgment; need for creativity, versatility, and adaptability in bridging differences; focus on settlement (rather than absolute win-lose scenarios); managing risk due to uncertainty and unidentified incentives among participants; dire consequences of inflexibility, self-righteousness, and unhealthy ego; and need for increasing negotiating skill proficiency is valuable and timeless.Practical implications - The outlined teaching case is put forward as providing a creative, interesting and rich format to stimulate learning about negotiating and power among parties, as well as team dynamics.Originality value - The paper outlines a novel teaching tool that allows students to learn and appreciate the dynamics of negotiating in complex environments.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of leading global multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms with respect to technology agglomeration patterns, proximity to alliance partners and firm performance for the period 1996–2006. Our findings suggest that multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology leaders are converging in terms of their technology agglomeration strategies; and increasingly competing over innovation from small biotechnology companies. Further, our analysis suggests that the absolute number of alliances is more than twice as important compared to proximity to partners in terms of firm performance defined as revenue, profitability and market valuation growth. Thus, for market leaders this study indicates a strategy of relentless pipeline building, with less regard to geographic proximity of alliance partners, appears to enhance relative and absolute performance of biopharmaceutical industry leaders.