دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی پاسخ نامتقارن تکرارهای وقفه دار در مدیریت استراتژیک و برنامه ریزی بلند مدت - Sage 2018

Abstract

Actors in competitive environments are bound to decide and act under conditions of uncertainty because they rarely have accurate foreknowledge of how their opponents will respond and when they will respond. Just as a competitor makes a move to improve their standing on a given variable relative to a target competitor, she should expect the latter to counteract with an iterative lagged asymmetric response, that is, with a sequence of countermoves (iteration) that is very different in kind from its trigger (asymmetry) and that will be launched at some unknown point in the future (time lag). The paper explicates the broad relevance of the newly proposed concept of ‘‘iterative lagged asymmetric responses’’ to the social study of temporality and to fields as diverse as intelligence and counterintelligence studies, strategic management, futures studies, military theory, and long-range planning. By bringing out in the foreground and substantiating the observation that competitive environments place a strategic premium on surprise, the concept of iterative lagged asymmetric responses makes a contribution to the never-ending and many-pronged debate about the extent to which the future can be predicted.

Discussion and conclusion

Given that the responder’s countermove is aimed at redressing the equilibrium upset by the initial move, it is useful to think of iterative lagged asymmetric responses as negative (balancing) feedback loops constitutive of the system that includes the initiator–responder pair (Richardson, 1999). Interestingly, computer simulations that implement the principles of systems dynamics have revealed that systems underpinned by lagged negative feedback loops very often display wild, destabilizing, and unexpected oscillatory behaviors, such as cycles of boom and bust in real estate, commodity prices, or financial markets (Borshchev and Filippov, 2004; Calvert and Simandan, 2010; Sterman, 2000). These phenomena occur (a) when actors engage in excessive restorative actions because they fail to take into account the long time it takes for those restorative actions to bear fruit (Rahmandad et al., 2009) and (b) when various actors do not properly evaluate what the other actors are doing (e.g. they may overestimate their competitors, underestimate them, or ignore them altogether; Elster, 2007).