Call for Papers
Advances in Strategic Management, Volume 36
Geography, Location, and Strategy
Volume Editors:
Juan Alcacer, Bruce Kogut, Catherine Thomas, and Bernard Yeung
Submission Deadline: Dec 15, 2015
Changes in both technology and global political economy have vastly accelerated the pace of globalization in the last 40 years, eroding barriers that previously limited firms' geographic scope, and unleashing a seemingly unlimited set of new threats, challenges, and opportunities to create value globally. The same trends have created new consumers in emerging markets and boosted the capabilities of firms around the world, regardless of their country of origin. As a result, managers can divide and coordinate activities across locations in a way never seen before; consumers embrace similar trends culturally, creating increasingly homogenous markets; the number of potential competitors skyrockets; and new business models become economically feasible as new sourcing locations open and demand accumulates across national markets. In short, globalization presents managers with an environment to create value that is more complex, risky, and promising than ever before.
Despite recent advances in our understanding of how locations impact the creation and appropriation of value by firms, the speed of these changes has often surpassed the speed of research on the connections between geography and firms. This volume aims to draw together researchers working at the forefront of this area in a variety of disciplines-economics, geography, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and strategy-in order to explore the many ways that locations matter for firms.
Specifically, we welcome empirical and theoretical research exploring the many critical roles that locations can play in firm strategy: shaping a firm's initial business model, adapting that model as the firm diversifies geographically, boosting value appropriation by influencing competitive dynamics in the geographic space, and demanding continuous adjustment to changes in environment. Examples of potential topics for papers in these issues include:
• Imprinting and agglomeration: How does a firm's founding location impact its business model, for example, its vertical and horizontal scope? What drives firms to be multi-location at founding? What role do internal and external agglomerations play in a firm's performance as it diversifies geographically?
• Spatial networks and global markets: How are outsourcing /offshoring trends changing as more firms diversify geographically? What are the trends in insourcing/backshoring? What effect has the emergence of global market exchanges, such as oDesk for labor, or supply chain electronic markets, had on the global organization of firms?
• Competition: What drives the intensity of competition or cooperation across markets? What is the right timing and pace for geographic diversification? What are the internal and external drivers that impact the timing of entry?
• Institutions and governments: How do intellectual property regimes affect the geographic distribution of innovation and competitive outputs? What type of government incentives lead to strong, sustainable and innovative locations? What is the role of multiple, and sometimes competing, geographic centers of innovation? What is the effect on innovation of shifting manufacturing to low-cost locations?
• Organization: How does the spatial organization of firms matter to their innovative capabilities, evolution and performance? What types of spatial organization forms do firms follow? Can firms manage flexibly their activities over space and time to transfer learning? A related theme is how firms' activities, in turn, affect their institutional contexts.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Submissions are due no later than December 15, 2015. All papers submitted must represent original research not previously published elsewhere. All submissions will be subject to in-depth review, and editorial decisions and revision requests will be communicated to authors by February 15, 2016. The targeted publication date for the volume is January 2017.
To submit a paper, or to ask questions about the content of this AiSM volume or the editorial process, please contact volume editors Juan Alcacer (jalcacer@hbs.edu) or Catherine Thomas (C.M.Thomas@lse.ac.uk), or the AiSM series editor, Brian Silverman (silverman@rotman.utoronto.ca).
Further information about the series is available at:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/books/series.htm?id=0742-3322 or at
http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/~silverman/AiSM/asm_index.html.
Advances in Strategic Management is an ISI Web of Science indexed journal.
--Brian Silverman, series editor