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In this article, we investigate whether environmental capabilities influence firms' corporate strategies, a topic that has received little attention to date. We hypothesize that firms are more likely to acquire facilities when ownership facilitates the transfer of capabilities either to or from the facility. Using a panel from the U.S. government's Toxics Release Inventory Program, we find firms with superior environmental capabilities are significantly more likely to acquire physically proximate facilities with inferior environmental capabilities and vice versa. Our results extend theories of both corporate and environmental strategy.

Unlike problems requiring new-to-the-world solutions that combine knowledge from multiple sources, operational problems can often be solved by repurposing existing knowledge from other contexts into new-to-the-firm solutions. Firms that seek new-to-the-firm solutions to operational problems face a cost-benefit tradeoff when deciding how many knowledge sources to use. With less need for knowledge recombination than for new-to-the-world solutions, greater knowledge breadth incurs greater screening and implementation costs without concomitant benefits. We study how U.S. manufacturing facilities from 1991 to 2005 improve operational performance by reducing their rate of annual output of toxic chemical waste (i.e., improvements to operational effectiveness). Results show that search involving fewer knowledge sources in a given year is associated with greater improvements in operational performance (greater waste reduction). At the same time, however, using multiple knowledge sources over time helps improve operational performance, suggesting that avoiding satiation from a single source and learning across sources play temporal roles in toxic chemical waste reduction. Overall, the results suggest that the greatest improvements in operational performance arise with a focused search for new-to-the-firm solutions within periods while also exploring multiple sources over time.

Research summary: Scholars and policy-makers have tended to assume that asset sales have a negative effect on stakeholders, but quantitative evidence to inform the debate has been scarce. In our research, we explored one way such sales could be beneficial: by facilitating the transfer of specialized capabilities used for environmental improvement. Employing quantitative data from a longitudinal sample of U.S. manufacturers, we find evidence consistent with the transfer of capabilities to or from acquired assets. Our results inform theories of ownership change and the conditional flow of capabilities among operations. They provide evidence as well of the existence of environmental capabilities. For policy-makers they provide needed evidence and insight on the merits of regulations designed to limit asset sales. Managerial summary: It is often assumed that acquisitions harm environmental performance-acquisition leads to greater emphasis on efficiency, while focusing on environmental performance is driven by managerial discretion. We propose instead that acquisitions might lead to improvement in environmental outcomes; the key is in knowing where to look for improvement. We studied thousands of facility-level acquisitions and find that when a clean firm buys a facility from a dirtier firm, that facility's environmental performance improved. When a dirtier firm buys from a cleaner one, however, it is the dirtier firm's other facilities in the same industry of the target that improved. These results, along with extensions we undertook, suggest that managers and policy-makers should view acquisitions as conduits rather than impediments in transferring environmental capabilities.

The first issue of the year is an occasion for the co-editors of Strategic Organization to present our annual awards, and make other announcements about ongoing and future special issues, as well as general information on the progress of the journal. Strategic Organization publishes conceptual and empirical articles at the intersection of the fields of strategy and organization theory. Empirical articles may draw, of course, on a wide variety of methods, ranging from experiments and simulations to archival studies and surveys to qualitative research. The current issue of the journal focuses specifically on qualitative studies with two empirical articles and a special So!apbox Forum on ‘Navigating the Tensions of Quality in Qualitative Research’. This set of six essays offers a wonderful resource for qualitative researchers. Entirely coincidentally, the two award-winning papers for 2021 announced next are also highly relevant to the theme of qualitative research, confirming the leadership of Strategic Organization in this area, as well as the potential for qualitative research to contribute significantly to the field.

It is generally recognized that firms' innovative performance can be enhanced by collaborating with remote partners. However, remote collaborations are not without challenges, as geographical distance may frustrate tacit knowledge transfer and inter-organizational learning. We investigate the moderating role of absorptive capacity by proposing that the higher firms' R&D intensity, the stronger the relationship between remote collaboration and their share of new product revenues. Drawing on survey data of 250 Dutch high-tech small firms, it is confirmed that remote collaboration is associated with innovative performance, but at low values of R&D intensity this relationship disappears.

This study explored the influence of different counter movement jump (CMJ) goals on performance, kinetics, and kinematics between 56 highly-trained and elite track and field (T&F), football, and futsal athletes. Within and between-sport difference were compared when aiming to: (a) \"jump as high as possible\" (CMJ ) and (b) \"jump as fast as possible\" (CMJ ), using a mixed MANOVA and follow-up univariate mixed ANOVAs. Movement goals had a significant main effect on all variables (p < 0.001). Comparatively, CMJ elicited higher mean propulsive power normalized to body mass (MPP , η  = 0.794) and reactive strength index modified (RSI , η  = 0.755), alongside lower jump height (η  = 0.782), contraction time (ConT, η  = 0.857), propulsive displacement (η  = 0.751), and countermovement velocity (CM , η  = 0.600). Sport interaction analyses revealed that T&F athletes consistently outperformed the other sports in RSI across both movement goals (d = 1.105 - 1.598). MPP and ConT differed significantly between T&F and football (d = 0.947 - 1.324). A Movement goal × Sport interaction for CM indicated that T&F and football athletes increased CM under CMJ (d = 1.242 - 1.635, p < 0.001) compared to CMJ , whereas futsal players maintained similar downward motion across goals (p = 0.938). In conclusion, movement goals significantly modify CMJ performance variables in such athletes, and these effects are further influenced by sport specialization. Clear and goal-specific verbal instructions should be standardized in CMJ testing to ensure reliable athlete monitoring and performance evaluation.

Considerable evidence through self-reports and behavioral data suggests that the facilitating effects of strategic, instructional self-talk can be attributed to attentional mechanisms. Nonetheless, the psychophysiological underpinnings of such mechanisms have been scantly explored. The aim of this pilot study was to provide preliminary evidence regarding the attentional mechanism of instructional self-talk by analyzing the readiness potential during the motor planning phase of a pistol shooting task. A within-subject, noncontrolled design was used involving nine novice participants who completed five sessions. These included familiarization with the task and preintervention assessment, three training sessions, and postintervention assessment. The SCATT shooting system was used to record and assess shooting performance and aim stability. A 32-channel EEG cap was used for the acquisition and analysis of the readiness potential. The analysis showed a positive trend for performance improvement from pre- to postintervention assessment. In parallel, considerable in effect size amplitude changes in the readiness potential before movement initiation were observed. These preliminary findings provide indications that the effectiveness of strategic, instructional self-talk in pistol shooting may be partly attributed to the amplitude changes in the readiness potential, highlighting an attention-based mechanism that reflects a potential effortless neurocognitive preparation of action effect.