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European strategy research is a relatively late entrant into the field of strategic management. This has put the European strategy researchers at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their American counterparts when it comes to competing for scarce publication space in "top" journals. Many European researchers have responded to the challenge by adopting research paradigms that are dominant in American strategy research, but others argue that Europe should maintain its own distinct research tradition. In this paper, I argue that European ambivalence toward market-based competition for scholarly reputation combined with centralized funding of research is responsible for this division of opinion. However, I also argue that institutional differences between Europe and the United States contribute to a diversity in strategy research that should be welcomed rather than suppressed.

Rules often develop in response to past catastrophes and in order to prevent those catastrophes from occurring in the future. In complex economic, technological and political systems rule-making without solid historical foundations must contend with intrinsically ambiguous relationships between present conditions and future predictions. This rule making in situations of ambiguity is explored through a study of rules governing the use of personal electronic devices in the aviation industry. It points to how the rules that currently govern the use of such devices result from prudential concerns about hypothetical futures rather than any statistical or technological certainty about the future. This point applies to business but also to political rule-making.

This volume brings together empirical and conceptual papers that investigate the Tensions and Paradoxes in Temporary Organizing. Temporary organizing is a widespread phenomenon that continues to grow in importance, and reflects the uncertainty resulting from competition in globalized markets.

The concept of strategic surprise has been used by writers on military strategy to explore the successful amplification of resources during battle. This paper applies the same concept to subcontracting relationships and develops a cognitive framework to explain the phenomenon of strategic surprises, using buyer-supplier relations as an example. We first examine the factors that produce vulnerability to strategic surprise in cooperative situations. Then, we explore the reasons why firms are caught by surprise in spite of their vigilance. We present a model representing false alarms and strategic surprises as judgmental errors. We argue that judgmental errors cause misinterpretation of evidence and a consequent sense of false security. Interactive norms, which exist in some industries and may be taken as proxies for enduring relationships, may increase the likelihood of misjudgment and strategic surprises.

In this paper we use new venture creation in Indian family firms to explore the family firm as an inter-institutional system. We argue that in societies where the traditional family dominates social and economic life, the relationship between the two institutions, the firm and the family, is managed via inter-institutional logics. These inter-institutional logics help reconcile the tensions that often arise in the family firms during strategic decision-making. We use archival and interview data on thirty-six new ventures in eight Indian family firms to identify these logics. Our analysis shows that the interaction between firm and family institutional logics in Indian family firms generates four sub-logics: Economic, Expertise, Reputation and Attachment. These four logics are used to frame and screen new venture opportunities and justify resource allocation.

In this introduction to the special issue we explore the main features of 'organizational ingenuity', defined as 'the ability to create innovative solutions within structural constraints using limited resources and imaginative problem solving'. We begin by looking at the changing views of the importance of ingenuity for economic and social development. We next analyse the nature of ingenious solutions. This is followed by a discussion of structural, resource and temporal constraints that face problem solvers. We next turn our attention to creative problem solving under constraints. We contrast 'induced' and 'autonomous' problem solving. The first arises when external stakeholders or top managers impose tasks that define problems for the individuals and groups that must solve them; the second arises when these individuals and groups recognize and define the problems for themselves. We argue that in both induced and autonomous problem solving, individuals and groups that wish to act creatively confront two types of constraint. The first are 'product constraints' that define the features and functionalities that are necessary for a successful solution. The second are 'process constraints' that stand in the way of creative problem solving in a given organizational context. We argue that both types of constraints can lead to organizational ingenuity, but that dealing with process constraints is crucial for organizational ingenuity, and hence for sustaining organizational ingenuity more generally. We provide an overview summary of the articles in the special issue, and conclude with suggestions for future research.