Strategic Management - Africa Business School

Strategic Management

Strategy at Africa Business School – S@ABS – has chosen three interrelated fields of inquiry as its scope:

Making Strategy Work, Sustainability at the Strategy Core, and Globalizing Morocco and Africa. As a young institution, we have consciously directed our research towards strategies related to societal challenges, using multidisciplinary perspectives within management studies and social sciences.
Societal challenges are well entrenched locally and, in the meantime, transcend national borders and often fail to be implemented in managerial practice.
We believe in original research that makes a difference in our teaching and practical applications to challenges faced by Moroccan and African businesses. We do so by articulating research, teaching and advisory interventions that inform and drive organizational learning and strategic transformation in real-life business settings.

Research Team

Marcio AMARAL-BAPTISTA

Laurent BEDUNEAU-WANG

Dirk BOEHE

Postdoc researchers:

Ahmed IRAQI

PhD candidates :

Ahmed OODAA

Sustainability at the Strategy Core

Making Strategy Work

Globalizing Morocco and Africa

In the past, philanthropy and corporate social responsibility have featured as common approaches to ‘give back to society, to showcase responsibility as an alternative marketing strategy or distraction from some laudable behavior, to genuinely cultivate relationships with key stakeholders, and even to protect the firms from broader business risk. Distinct from past thinking, S@ABS investigates why, in what way, and how successful firms put social and environmental sustainability at the core of their strategy. Considering the urgent challenges of developing economies (terrorism, tackling poverty, etc.), we strive to learn from practices implemented by Moroccan and African firms.

Making strategy work is a topic of paramount concern to firms worldwide. However, companies in developing countries face increased challenges implementing winning business strategies due to institutional voids, external shocks and uncontrollables, technological development constraints, historical commoditization, organizational and management capacity gaps. S@ABS contributes to the strategic success of emerging market firms by investigating how African and Moroccan companies can craft and execute their strategic initiatives to overcome the unique implementation barriers that characterize the region’s business landscape. We are also interested in developing strategy and management tools for emerging economies.

Africa is quickly transforming from the world’s natural resource powerhouse into an increasingly diversified economic ecosystem and a cradle of innovation-driven pan-African companies that can be uniquely positioned to address some of the grand global challenges. However, given the pressures of political instability, famine, and climate change, combined with lagging hard and soft infrastructures, foreign direct investment and trade within Africa and outward moves by African firms face distinctive issues. S@ABS seeks to understand the unique strategies that globalizing African and particularly Moroccan firms can adopt to succeed in this environment.

Current projects

Sustainability at the heart of a phosphate pipeline

We investigate how cost leadership and sustainability strategies combine in a way that the firm’s global competitive advantage and market position have been strengthened in the long term. We unravel the decision-making dilemmas and how interests of key stakeholders have been reconciled by adopting a historical longitudinal perspective.

Market creation for fertilizers in Africa

Markets often do not develop to their full potential due to the (partial) absence of hard and soft institutions. We examine how a firm has been internationalizing by developing markets where institutional voids have abounded combining sustainability with novel digitally enhanced business models across a range of African countries.

Current projects

Overcoming the strategy-execution gap in an African global company

In a longitudinal case study of a global African company, we investigate the determinants of the strategy-execution gap (SEG) affecting a large-scale transformation initiative at an international scale. The study adopts a multi-theoretical approach and seeks to identify new constructs, testable theoretical propositions, and practical recommendations, thus contributing to a richer explanation of the SEG phenomenon in the African context.

Digital transformation

Since the beginning of the 2000’s, the notion of digital transformation has gained significant impetus within the research landscapes on information systems and strategic management. However, simultaneously, its conceptualization remains equivocal. Instead of running after a single ideal definition of digital transformation which would fit researchers’ needs and, in contrast, ever-changing definition proposals from practitioners, a perspective change seems necessary. Inspired by the genealogical approach by Foucault, we assess the “conceptual adequacy” of digital transformation and provide avenues for future research.

Current projects

Internationalization of Moroccan Companies

Morocco has a strategic ambition to establish itself as a regional power at the forefront of the world’s major challenges. This ambition underpins a set of country-level policies and partnerships to open up to its regional and international environment, leveraging international trade and foreign direct investment. For instance, the country has committed to increasing its participation in world value chains by 40% until 2035, according to its New Development Model. Are Moroccan companies up to this challenge? This project will diagnose their readiness for internationalization, propose analytical benchmarks, and provide firm and policy-level frameworks and recommendations for the long-term success of the internationalization strategies of Moroccan companies.

Recent publications:

bullet BEDUNEAU-WANG L. (2014).
Financial Innovation in Sustainable Cities:
A Suggestion for the EU and China?, pp.165-172 in Men J. and Reuter E.
China-EU Green Cooperation, World Scientific, 217 p.

bullet Fu, L., BOEHE, D. M., Orlitzky, M. O. (2021).
Broad or Narrow Stakeholder Management? A Signaling Theory Perspective.
Business & Society,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00076503211053018 .

bullet Fu, L., BOEHE, D., Orlitzky, M. (2020).
Are R&D-Intensive firms also corporate social responsibility specialists? A multicountry study.
Research Policy, 49(8).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733320301608

bullet Lazzarini, S. G., BOEHE, D. M., Pongeluppe, L. S., Cook, M. L. (2020).
From instrumental to normative relational strategies:
A study of open buyer–supplier relations.
Academy of Management Proceedings.
Published online ahead of print.
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.122

Recent publications:

bullet Carvalheira, V., AMARAL-BAPTISTA, M., Esperança, J., Melo, M., Macedo-Soares, T. (2015).
Board Performance in Strategic Monitoring: Evidence from Portugal. Readings Book of the 17th. Annual International Conference of the Global Business and Technology Association (GBATA 2015), ISBN: 1-932917-11-X, 826:842

bullet AMARAL-BAPTISTA, M., Melo, M., Macedo-Soares, T. (2010).
Factors for Board Effectiveness from the Perspective of Strategy Implementation: Proposal of an Instrument, Corporate Ownership and Control, v.8, n.1, p.709-719.
https://doi.org/10.22495/cocv8i1c7p5 .

bullet BEDUNEAU-WANG L. (2017).
La valeur de l’eau à travers les processus d’évaluation et de valorisation de la qualité de l’eau, pp.399-413 in Pierron J.P., Harpet C. (dir.). Ecologie politique de l’eau. Rationalités, usages et imaginaires, Editions Hermann, Paris, 587 p.

Recent publications:

bullet Barakat, L., Pedersen, T., AMARAL-BAPTISTA, M., Cretoiu, S., Bento, P., (2022)
Too much of two good things: Explicating the limited complementarity between drivers of MNCs’ absorptive capacity, Management International Review, 62, 393–426.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-022-00474-1 .

bullet Barakat, L., Pedersen, T., AMARAL-BAPTISTA, M., Cretoiu, S., Bento, P., Rosa, A., Serrasqueiro, R. (2019)
International Reverse Knowledge Transfer and the Role of Multinationality. Academy of International Business (AIB) Annual Meeting, Copenhagen, Denmark

bullet Bento, P., AMARAL-BAPTISTA, M., Rosa, A., Serrasqueiro, R., Rogado, C., Barakat, L., Cretoiu, S., Costa, F., Silva, T., Alvim, F. (2017, 2016, 2015, 2014)
Ranking of Portuguese Multinationals (INDEG-ISCTE Executive Education. Lisbon)

bullet BOEHE, D. M. (2011).
Exploiting the liability of foreignness: Why do service firms exploit foreign affiliate networks at home?. Journal of International Management, 17(1), 15-29.

bullet IRAQUI, A. (2020).
Géopolitique des investissements marocains en Afrique: entre intérêt économique et usage politique, Editions L’Harmattan, 154p. (ISBN 978-2-343-19360-1)