Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

The Cognitive Perspective Comes of Age

Managing in times of disorder

Strategy as `content' versus strategy as process'

The nature and purpose of theory and research

The managerial and organizational cognition perspective

Origins of the managerial and organizational cognition perspective

The human information processing model of skilled performance

Heuristics and biases in strategic decision making

The non-rational escalation of commitment to a failing course of action

The conflict theory of decision making

Mental representations: schemata, cognitive maps and mental models

Enactment, sense-making and the enacted environment

Combining the computational and interpretive perspectives

Structure of the book

Organizational Learning

The learning organization

Providing a values proposition and a logic for managing and organizing

Requisite managerial competencies for a learning organization

Organizational learning

Cognitive change and commonly shared understandings

Tacit knowledge and the competent mindlessness of the individual

Eliciting tacit knowledge: organizational knowledge creation processes

Communities of practice and collective learning

The problem of collective forgetting

Competency traps and progressing organizational simplicity

Concluding remarks

Distributed Cognition, Organizational Memory and Knowledge Management

Team mental models

Group information sharing (sampling behaviours)

Transactive memory (and transactive knowledge)

Cognitive consensus

Distributed cognition: networks of people and technology

Organizational-level knowledge structures and organizational memory

Strategic analysis and organizational memory

Linking organizational learning to knowledge structures

Organizational learning as mindful performance

Communication and knowledge management in learning organizations

Intra-organizational information markets

The problem of information overload

Summary and conclusions

Competition and Cognition

Analysing the structure of business competition: insights from socio-cognitive theory and research

The nature and role of categorization processes in competitor definition

Competitive enactment and institutional isomorphism

Relational modelling, vicarious learning and social identification

Cognitive inertia

Challenges to prevailing wisdom: situated learning and the cognitive life cycle of market domains

Section summary

Mapping mental models of competition as a basis for exploring micro-processes of strategizing within and between firms

Methodological limitations of empirical studies supporting the emerging socio-cognitive theory of competitive industry structures

The case for studying individual and sub-group mental models of competitor definition: the processual school revisited

Empirical findings concerning the extent of individual and sub-group differences and homogeneity in mental models of competitor definition

Section summary

Towards fusion: exploring the relative impact of task and institutional influences on managerial mental models of competitive industry structures

Conclusions

Strategic Cognition in Top Management Teams

The upper echelons perspective on top management teams

Evidence for the upper echelons perspective

Empirical studies linking top team diversity and organizational performance

Executive succession, managerial learning and strategic reorientation

Criticisms of the upper echelons perspective

Increased statistical controls and conceptual refinements

Recent studies incorporating direct methods of cognitive assessment

Exploring the determinants of executives' perceptions and beliefs about strategy

Exploring the consequences of executives perceptions and beliefs

Summary and conclusions

Managerial Competencies and Individual Level Factors

Locus of control

Need for achievement and flexibility

Individual differences in the processing of information

Intuitive and creative cognition

Intuition and cognitive maps

Intuition and the intelligent unconscious

The role of intuitive decision making

Intuition and insight

Creative cognition

Key debates on creativity

Implications

Sense-making and sense-giving

The emotionally attuned manager

Concluding remarks

Knowledge Elicitation Techniques and Methods for Intervention

Varieties of knowledge

Causal cognitive mapping techniques

Methods for eliciting and representing causal maps

Memory errors in causal mapping

Comparing causal maps

Causal mapping techniques as a basis for organizational intervention

Mapping techniques for revealing dimensional and hierarchical relationships among conceptual stimuli

Hierarchical taxonomic interview techniques

Similarity-based scaling and clustering techniques

Repertory grid and related techniques

Scenario-based intervention procedures

Concluding remarks

Conclusions and Future Directions

Validating key components of strategic competence at the individual level

The strategic up-side of selective processing

Understanding the implications of new forms of work organization

Competence, trust and the paradoxical need to trust in competence

Understanding the nature and significance of emotion

Refining the assessment of actors' mental representations and the modelling of the strategic management process

Exploring strategic management processes beyond the top team

Further cross-fertilization with adjacent fields of study

Validating the notion of strategic competence at the organizational level

Final reflections

References

Author index

Subject index