Call for Papers

Journal of International Management

Special issue on Strategic Agility for International Business Sustainability

Full Version of this Call

Guest editors

• Dr. Riad Shams, Ural Federal University, Russia; EuroMed Academy of Business, EU (Riad.Shams@urfu.ru)
• Professor Demetris Vrontis, University of Nicosia, Cyprus; EuroMed Academy of Business, EU (vrontis.d@unic.ac.cy)
• Professor Zhanna Belyaeva, Ural Federal University, Russia; EuroMed Academy of Business, EU (Zh.s.belyaeva@urfu.ru)
• Dr. Alberto Ferraris, University of Torino, Italy; Ural Federal University, Russia; EuroMed Academy of Business, EU (alberto.ferraris@unito.it)
• Professor Michael R Czinkota, Georgetown University, USA; University of Kent, UK (czinkotm@georgetown.edu)

Strategic agility is defined as the “ability of the organization to renew itself and stay flexible without sacrificing efficiency” (Doz and Kosonen 2008a; 2008b; 2010, as cited in Junni et al., 2015, p. 596), as well as “the ability of an organization to continuously adjust strategic direction and develop innovative ways to create value (Weber and Tarba 2014, as cited in Ivory and Brooks, 2017, p. 2). But, even though the notions of “renewal” and “adjustment” can be viewed from diverse perspectives of varied organizational settings, the focal point of agility still lies on a business’ competency to build and retain the flexibility to adapt to an array of factors and forces; including new ideas, technologies, socio-economic concerns and variables, target markets’ norms and values, as well as the concerns of different government and non-government organizations therein. The purpose of such strategic adaptation/renewal would be to become and remain agile enough to allocate/reallocate organizational resources and to structure/restructure organizational strategies and processes, focusing on the extant or latent socio-economic concerns and without sacrificing the core organizational policy and efficiency, in order to deliver stakeholder value in a way that would be expected and accepted by all stakeholders, so that either a new business opportunity would be explored or an extant business risk would be neutralized.

The timeline

• EVISE submission portal opens: November 08, 2018
• Manuscript submission deadline: February, 28, 2019 (earlier submission is highly encouraged);
• First comments (initial acceptance/rejection) on manuscripts: April, 15, 2019;
• Revision due: May 15, 2019;

Special issue workshop

In September 2018, a special issue workshop will be organized. The authors of the under review papers will be invited to discuss their own papers, as well as to comment on their colleagues’ papers. The purpose of this workshop is manuscript development, as well as to attract new submissions. The date and venue of this seminar will be announced in due time. Neither participating in this author workshop is a pre-condition to submit a paper to this special issue, nor participating in the workshop warrants the publication of a paper in this special issue.

The full and definitive version of this call be found on the Elsevier Web site.

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