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WITH THE OBJECTIVE OF IMPROVING POLICY MAKING, EFFORTS HAVE RECENTLY INTENSIFIED TO INTEGRATE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, COST-EFFECTIVENESS ANALYSIS, AND RELATED DISCIPLINES INTO AN EVOLVING FIELD THAT HAS BEEN TERMED "POLICY SCIENCES." THE PAPER DISCUSSES AN APPROACH, CALLED SITUATIONAL NORMATIVISM, BY WHICH THE COMPONENTS OF POLICY SCIENCES MAY BE PUT TO WORK EFFECTIVELY ON REAL DECISION PROBLEMS.

This special issue originated with the 1996 Organization Science Winter Conference (OSWC), which set out to explore the implications of the science of complexity for the field of organization studies. Following the OSWC, a formal program organized by the Organization Science section of INFORMS took place in Atlanta. The vast potential for complexity theory to inform and transform research in organization studies became evident from the discussions of 22 papers that were presented at that meeting. In response to the call for papers issued after the Atlanta meeting, 56 papers were submitted to Organization Science, of which seven make up this issue. Interest in complexity has grown dramatically since the 1996 OSWC first explored this idea. The purpose of this special issue is not to declare that a new era in organization studies and strategic management is at hand, but to explore the boundaries and links between the science of complexity—with its origin in evolution and biology—and the field of strategy and organization. The issue explores the implications of complexity research for organization studies in the context of new ways of modeling dynamic, nonlinear complex systems for advancing theoretical and empirical research in organization studies (e.g., theorizing within coevolutionary frameworks, decomposition of nested phenomena, multidirectional causalities).

The 1996 annual report of the LEGO Corporation featured the top management team decked out as a jazz ensemble with the CEO, Kjeld Møller Pedersen, playing the saxophone. The CEO of LEGO used the occasion to highlight his belief and expectation that improvisation is an art form that needs to become the hallmark of all levels of management, beginning at the top.

Hitotsubashi University and Organization Science cosponsored a conf erence on Asian Research in Organizations, which was held on the Hitotsubashi campus on October 19–22, 1995. Thirty papers were invited for presentation, out of more than 70 that were originally proposed. The conference was run in a format designed to maximize feedback to authors as a way to speed up and intensify the developmental process of each paper. The objective of the conference was to identify and develop papers for a special issue of Organization Science featuring Asian Research in Organizations.

The paper explores a unique phenomenon in the context of the strategic interaction of activists and their corporate targets. We explore a unique phenomenon - how less targeted firms leverage activists-focal firm rivalry in the context of instituting emission controls in Japan. We find that less targeted firms employ social value-based strategies against market rivals by capitalizing on the opportunity structure created by the conflicts between activists and their primary targets in non-market environments.We contribute to the literature by developing a more fine-grained argument on how dynamic interactions between multiple players (activists, primary targets, and non-targets) can lead to a different path for movement activists to achieve their goals. We also draw attention to the proactive strategic actions taken by non-target firms when their market rivals are under attack by social activists. We add to the previous arguments by revealing social value-based strategies that can serve as an alternative for corporate targets to exert influence on non-market environments.

The Management Organization Review 'Forum on Resilience' was kicked off by the editors' perspective on the lingering new normal (Välikangas & Lewin, 2020). We conclude the forum by reflecting on the persisting – perhaps hopeful, perhaps disturbing – take-aways. Not surprisingly, some companies have demonstrated resilience capabilities in quickly seizing opportunities even when faced with what initially looked like the end of business. Such determined agility represented, for example, improvising an emergent-opportunity-fitting strategy or it may have been manifested by government action (e.g., China, New Zealand, and Finland). Most famously, Zoom, the by-now ubiquitous video communications company, benefited from being in the right place at the right time, but also effectively dealt with issues such as 'zoom bombing', a security breach, including an upgrade of its encryption. Such successful growth strategy requires being ready for an opportunity. But the backward-looking depiction of successes also highlights the absence of a developed science of organization design underlying resilience and management practices (Lewin & Välikangas, 2020). In addition, building cognitive and stakeholder preparedness, as Zhang, Dong, and Yi (2020) and Liu and Yin (2020) point out, may be important, as well as considering leadership implications discussed by Giustiniano, Cunha, Simpson, Rego, and Clegg (2020) in the context of coping with the paradoxes unleashed by resilience. Emergency management systems become sorely tested (Cai & Ye, 2020). Do we have a new buzzword for uncertain times (Cai, 2020) or something to learn from that will help in coping with future crises or understanding the renaissance of resilience? Some themes rise above others.

The central focus of this paper is a largely unexplored research domain relating to how low-power for-profit actors can shape their political and regulatory environment and create economic opportunities that affect their survival and growth. The paper builds on and extends the concept of "negotiating the environment" and on how organizations create their environment, with an emphasis on low-power actors. Resource dependence theory (RDT) has been very influential in exploring the many ways in which firms can decrease or overcome resource vulnerabilities in their environment with a focus on high-power actors (large companies, resource-rich companies, industrial associations, and political power of highly endowed companies). However, whether and how low-power actors can shape their political, regulatory, and economic environment was not central to RDT analysis, which is the focus of this paper. The empirical context for this research is the emergence and enactment of automobile emissions standards in Japan following the adoption in the United States of the Clean Air Act in December 1970. The focal firm is the Honda Motor Company, which, at that time, was a negligible competitor in the Japanese automobile industry and had no legitimate political or institutional standing. Yet the company was successful in undoing the cartel-like dominance of the two largest Japanese automobile manufacturers and the Japanese Environmental Protection Agency. The focus of this paper is describing the phenomenon and developing new theoretical insights relating to how low-power for-profit actors are able to negotiate their environment.

In this paper, we set out to investigate whether strategic leadership matters at a moment in the life cycle of the firm when a change is made in the top leadership. By far, most of the conceptual and empirical literature on the consequences of CEO succession involves United States companies. Therefore, in this paper, we set out to investigate the impact of CEO succession on strategic and organizational changes in Japanese companies.The empirical study consisted of a matched control group design involving 81 Japanese companies experiencing a CEO succession event and 81 companies with continuity of their CEO leadership. The results of the study can be summarized as follows. Overall CEO succession was not associated with radical strategic and organization changes. Japanese companies did engage in evolutionary organization and strategic adaptations during the five year period of the study but independent of CEO succession. The governance structure moderates organization changes (independent of CEO succession) in particular when the firm was affiliated with a main bank and the firm was experiencing severe financial pressure.

This perspective paper addresses the issues of rigor and relevance in organizational studies in the context of idea migration and journal evolution. We argue that creeping parochialism can happen to any journal, which reflects an evolving narrowness within boundaries of academic subcommunities. Evidence suggests that ideas do migrate across academic subcommunities, although the underlying process is not well understood and the idea flow is not symmetrical. Two kinds of knowledge relevance are discussed—the value for end users such as managers in organizations, and the value for one's own or other academic subcommunities. We argue that the most important mission of Organization Science (OS) is to be a "source" journal for academic subcommunities in organization studies by attracting and publishing new theories and ideas that increase the varieties of knowledge about organizations.