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Marketing and flexibility: debates past, present and future
Edited by Ian Combe [Aston University, Birmingham, UK]
Processes are iterative. Crafting strategy is an iterative, real-time process; commitments must be made, then either revised or stepped up as new realities emerge ([16] Bower and Gilbert, 2007, p. 72).
Introduction and background
Product-market strategy concerns the basis by which the firm is to compete in its chosen markets ([98] Morgan et al. , 2003), be it through product- or service-based offerings. The high velocity conditions that most firms face today render strategies increasingly temporal. Globalisation efforts, economic changes, rapid technological advancement, and the emergence of new competitive models are some of the factors that have created a context in which critical contingencies need to evolve. As a result, the need for effectively adapting organisational policies and practices has taken on increased prominence followed by the factors that affect a firm's ability to be flexible ([73] Hitt et al. , 1998; [54] Geletkanycz and Black, 2001; [100] Nadkarni and Narayanan, 2007).
According to [83] Levinthal and March (1993), most firms regularly face the need to engage in sufficient exploitation in order to ensure current financial and product success but at the same time to also enable exploration in order to ensure future product and financial performance. Stemming from this realisation, some extant research streams have considered "organisational ambidexterity" as encapsulating two opposing ends of a continuum (exploration vs. exploitation) in need of balancing ([87] March, 1996; [88] 2006). Other studies however, have proposed and supported that exploration and exploitation may be simultaneously pursued and result in positive performance outcomes ([131] Tushman and O'Reilly, 1996; [61] Gupta et al. , 2006). We adopt the latter perspective and consider organisational ambidexterity as encapsulating dualities of elements that can be pursued simultaneously. Furthermore, research on organisational ambidexterity has traditionally solely focused on the elements of exploration and exploitation, while the notion of firm ambidexterity may also be extended in order to describe the simultaneous pursuit of strategic flexibility ([59] Grewal and Tansuhaj, 2001) and commitment to product-market strategy ([102] Noble and Mokwa, 1999).
Flexibility is a broad term reflecting a firm's general ability to adapt or change ([37] De Toni and Tonchia, 2005). Within the managerial field, flexibility has been considered...