مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد پاسخ نامتقارن تکرارهای وقفه دار در مدیریت استراتژیک – Sage 2018

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.

Introduction

Competition and cooperation are fundamental attributes of animal and human societies at all levels of analysis (Axelrod, 2006; Fjeldstad et al., 2012; Simpson and Willer, 2015). They are carried out by a changing mix of actors, with a changing mix of concerns, enthralled into cascades of action and response to one another’s moves, which in turn sustain an interactional, highly contingent, social field (Abbott, 2001, 2016; Fligstein and McAdam, 2011; Simandan, 2017). Competition and cooperation are often imbricated with each other, which means that their identification in a given context is a function of one’s research focus and theoretical background (Bowles and Gintis, 2011; McNamara, 2013; Miekisz, 2008). An intuitive example of imbrication would be that of two soccer teams competing in a game. From the standpoint of aiming to win the game, the two teams are competing; from the higher standpoint of publicizing the beauty and interestingness of soccer to a social audience, the two teams are cooperating, by, for example, giving their best, playing by the rules, and so on. Each team is constituted by a collection of players who must cooperate with one another in order to have a chance at winning the higher order competition with the other team. At the same time, within each team, there is also competition among players on various performance metrics, such as who scored the most. From an evolutionary standpoint, rank and status are important concerns, and humans are motivated to preserve and improve their social standing on a variety of evolutionary-relevant dimensions (attractiveness, peer respect, social dominance, financial resources, etc.). As social comparison theory argues, the relentless preoccupation with monitoring one’s social standing makes humans highly sensitized to moves that threaten it and thereby triggers ‘‘competitive behavior to protect one’s superiority’’ (Festinger, 1954: 126). The extent of prior interaction makes a difference in how competition is carried out. A growing research literature (Converse and Reinhard, 2016) distinguishes between merely incidental competitors (with no shared history of competing with each other) and rival competitors. Rivalry appears only when there is a history of competition between the two actors and when both of them subjectively identify each other as such. Unlike incidental competitors, rivals perceive the current competition as connected to the past ones, they put more effort and eagerness into their competitive performance, they are less prudent, and they tend to be concerned with their long-term legacy, that is, with how the broader social context will judge the whole history of competition between them and a particular rival (Converse and Reinhard, 2016).