The Conduct of Strategy Research

The Conduct of Strategy Research

More than in any other field in management studies, the study of corporate strategy is the study of reason in action. What course of action a firm chooses to follow over time, with what effects; how such choices are made and put into action; and how continuity and novelty are interwoven in corporate behaviour, are some of the most important questions studied in strategic management (SM). As Mintzberg et al. (1998: 299) have aptly remarked, what distinguishes strategic management (SM) from other fields in management is ‘its very focus on strategic choice: how to find it and where to find it, or else how to create it when it can't be found, and then how to exploit it’ (emphasis added).

Focussing on strategic choice raises all sorts of interesting questions: What is choice and how is it explained best? To what extent can it be said that human choices are an expression of free will rather than a deterministic reflection of circumstances? How is thinking related to action? How are choices made at one point in time related to choices made at earlier points in time, and to what extent do they foreclose choices to be made at later points in time? Are there certain strategic choices that are systematically connected to creating competitive advantage? Do such choices already exist waiting to be discovered, or are they uniquely created? How are both corporate coherence and corporate renewal achieved over time?

Grappling with these questions, SM has been predominantly preoccupied with studying choice in different types of situations and finding optimal solutions that may be prescribed for these situations. In fact, much of the literature in SM that has its origin in economics (such as the ‘positioning school’ and ‘modern game theory’) starts from such a clear rational choice foundation. However, much of this literature seems to be limited to decision making situations that are relatively stable and repetitive, involving no surprises and few uncertainties (no changes). The development of the rational choice approach in economics has shown that there are strict limitations as to how complex a problem may be if it should have an optimal solution (March, 1994; Simon, 1983).

More recently, several SM scholars have been arguing for a better theoretical understanding of the change processes that are fundamentally transforming firms and industries in the contemporary global economy. However, attempting to conceptualize change processes, some researchers have tended to build models that reduce the element of human agency to a minimum, relying on selection forces rather than on human intentionality to design viable organizations and strategies. Within this stream of research, the process rather than the content of strategy is emphasized, and ‘emergent’ rather than ‘planned’ strategies are highlighted (Nelson and Winter, 1982).

[Page 412]The field of SM seems to be confronted with a dilemma: strategy thinkers have either drawn on theories that account for strategic choices but no changes, or they have drawn on theories that account for changes but no strategic choices. However, the crucial question is: how can strategy thinkers model change processes involving genuine uncertainties and non-repetitive situations and, at the same time, model individuals and organizations as being able to make strategic choices? Like in other fields, the existence of such a dilemma may motivate a thorough investigation of the philosophical foundations of SM. It is often by making more explicit the ontological, episte-mological and praxeological presuppositions of existing perspectives that we identify the reasons for the existence of a dilemma. Identifying the limiting constraints and presuppositions may also give us some idea of how to build a framework that would allow us to simultaneously model ‘strategic choices’ and ‘change processes’. That is, a theory of how individuals and/or organizations make ‘strategic choices’ by gradually building their ‘opportunity sets’ in fast changing and partly unpredictable ‘environments’.

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