Strategizing In The Polish Furniture Industry

The Element provides a broad overview of the Polish furniture industry. It tells the story of a sector that grew from a bundle of craftsmen into Europe's largest and the world's second-largest furniture exporter within three decades. This is also the story of a sector marked by a subordinate role in global value chains and a mediocre ranking in the global value capture game. Equipped with the methods of anthropology and the theoretical lenses of strategic management, the author guides the reader through the living world of the sector's strategists - their environment, resources, and dilemmas. The Element reconstructs how the strategists engage in creative dialogue with factors at the macro level (semi-peripheral economy, global value chain position), meso level (human capital, governmental programs) and micro level (family traditions, personal interests) to create their unique business models.

The Element provides a broad overview of the Polish furniture industry. It tells the story of a sector that grew from a bundle of craftsmen into Europe's largest and the world's second-largest furniture exporter within three decades. This is also the story of a sector marked by a subordinate role in global value chains and a mediocre ranking in the global value capture game. Equipped with the methods of anthropology and the theoretical lenses of strategic management, the author guides the reader through the living world of the sector's strategists – their environment, resources, and dilemmas. The Element reconstructs how the strategists engage in creative dialogue with factors at the macro level (semi-peripheral economy, global value chain position), meso level (human capital, governmental programs) and micro level (family traditions, personal interests) to create their unique business models.

This text consults seven variants of institutional theory to explore how these can be applied to strategic management. These variants are New Institutional Economics, Old Institutionalism, New Institutionalism, institutional entrepreneurship and change, intra organizational institutionalization, institutional logics, and institutional work. In doing so, three strategic management styles are distinguished: competitiveness based strategic management, legitimacy based strategic management, and performativity based strategic management. While the competitive based style sees institutional theory submitting to mainstream strategy research, offering additional variables and considerations to explain competitive advantage, the legitimacy based style makes institutional theory a strategy theory in its own right by providing an explanation for an organization's viability that emphasizes legitimacy over competitive advantage. The performativity based style is an even more radical departure from mainstream strategizing by purporting that a future is actively created with organizations making contributions as emerging issues are being dealt with.

Effectuation has become the basis for educating entrepreneurs and managers. Derived from cognitive and behavioral economic studies of expert entrepreneurs, effectuation shows how to cocreate value in highly uncertain situations. The framework of effectuation consists in techniques that minimize the use of predictive information and ways to turn control itself into strategy. In doing so, the effectual process opens up radically new ways to rethink a variety of fundamental concepts in all the social sciences. This ranges from risk and return to markets and governments in economics; attitudes toward ends and means in psychology; opportunism and altruism in social psychology; and even success and failure in strategic management. Effectuation theory inverts several older approaches in what Herbert Simon referred to as the 'sciences of the artificial'. These inversions suggest an entrepreneurial method based on non-predictive control that complements the predictive control techniques of the scientific method.

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,5 (A), University of New South Wales, Sydney (Faculty of International Business), course: International Business Strategies, language: English, abstract: The objective of this report is to evaluate the strategy and performance of Wilkhahn Asia Pacific (WiAP). The focus will be on the business-level strategy. An analysis will be conducted to identify if a match between the strategy pursued by WiAP and the internal and external environment exists. Subsequently, we will synthesize the information gained from the analysis in order to identify possible proble ms and generate alternative strategic solutions. Finally, we will offer recommendations to WiAP on future strategies based on an evaluation of the strategic solutions. WiAP is a subsidiary of the German multinational commercial furniture manufacturer Wilkhahn GmbH. WiAP started its operation in Australia in 1999 with its regional headquarters in Sydney and sales offices in Melbourne and Brisbane. The company has grown rapidly and has recently established a presence in Asia through sales offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur. After the first two very successful years, Wilkhahn Asia Pacific has recently experienced a decreased sales performance. We have considered Wilkhahn as an interesting firm for our report, given that it is a multinational company with presence in Australia. Given our own nationalities, German and Swedish, we found it interesting to evaluate the performance of a northern European firm operating in Australia. The reason we choose the office furniture industry is that one of us has previously worked in the industry in Europe. With the help of WiAP’s Managing Director, Michael Prenzlau, and his staff, we were able to collect valuable information about the office furniture industry (external environment) and the company itself (internal environment).