-
Strategic Management JournalStrat. Mgmt. J., 28: 935955
(2007)
Published online 22 March 2007 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/smj.615Received 5 July
2005; Final revision received 23 October 2006
WHAT IS STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT, REALLY?INDUCTIVE DERIVATION OF A
CONSENSUSDEFINITION OF THE FIELDRAJIV NAG,1* DONALD C. HAMBRICK2
and MING-JER CHEN31 Sam Walton College of Business, University of
Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas,U.S.A.2 Smeal College of Business,
Pennsylvania State University, University Park,Pennsylvania,
U.S.A.3 The Darden School, University of Virginia, Charlottesville,
Virginia, U.S.A.
It is commonly asserted that the field of strategic management
is fragmented and lacks a coherentidentity. This skepticism,
however, is paradoxically at odds with the great success that
strategicmanagement has enjoyed. How might one explain this
paradox? We seek answers to this questionby relying first on a
large-scale survey of strategic management scholars from which we
derivean implicit consensual definition of the fieldas tacitly held
by its members. We then supplementthis implicit definition with an
examination of the espoused definitions of the field obtained from
agroup of boundary-spanning scholars. Our findings suggest that
strategic managements successas a field emerges from an underlying
consensus that enables it to attract multiple perspectives,while
still maintaining its coherent distinctiveness. Copyright 2007 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An academic field is a socially constructed entity(Hagstrom,
1965; Kuhn, 1962). In comparison toa formal organization, which can
be identified anddefined, for instance, by its web of legal
contracts(Williamson, 1979), an academic field has
sociallynegotiated boundaries and only exists if a criticalmass of
scholars believe it to exist and adopt ashared conception of its
essential meaning (Astley,1985; Cole, 1983). Such shared meaning is
farfrom assured, however, since various forces canserve to dilute
or blur consensus. These forcesmight include heterogeneity of
members training,
Keywords: strategic management; academic communi-ties;
linguistics*Correspondence to: Rajiv Nag, Sam Walton College of
Busi-ness, WCOB 468, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR72701,
U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected]
the intellectual pull and hegemony of adjacentfields, and an
ever-shifting body of knowledge andtheory (Astley, 1985; Whitley,
1984).
Strategic management represents a case of anacademic field whose
consensual meaning mightbe expected to be fragile, even lacking.
The fieldis relatively young, having been abruptly
recon-ceptualized and relabeledfrom business pol-icyin 1979
(Schendel and Hofer, 1979). Its sub-jects of interest overlap with
several other vigorousfields, including economics, sociology,
marketing,finance, and psychology (Hambrick, 2004), and
itsparticipant members have been trained in widelyvarying
traditionssome in economics depart-ments, some in strategic
management departments,some in organizational behavior, some in
market-ing, and so on. It comes as little surprise, then,
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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936 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
that the published, espoused definitions of strate-gic
management vary (as we shall review below).And we can anticipate
that asking strategic man-agement scholars to define the field
might elicit anarray of responses.
How, then, does the field of strategic manage-ment maintain its
collective identity and distinc-tiveness? The answer, we
anticipate, is that thereis a strong implicit consensus about the
essenceof the field, even though there may be ambiguityabout its
formal definition. This paradox is remi-niscent of the fabled quote
of U.S. Supreme CourtJustice Potter Stewart: Im not sure how to
definepornography, but I know it when I see it (Jaco-bellis v.
Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 1964).
Stewarts legendary remark captures a funda-mental challenge
facing the young, rapidly expand-ing field of strategic management.
Exactly what isit? There is a substantial need for discourse
andreflection regarding the very nature of the
field;scholarsespecially young scholarsneed ana-lytic signposts to
help them understand the scopeand meaning of the field. What does
it mean tobe doing research in strategic management? Whatdoes it
take to be seen as a strategic managementscholar? While prior
analyses have examined therise and fall of specific theories or
research top-ics within strategic management (e.g., Hoskissonet
al., 1999; Ramos-Rodriguez and Ruiz-Navarro,2004), in this paper we
pursue a more funda-mental objective: to identify the consensus
def-initionboth implicit and explicitor the verymeaning of the
field.
To achieve this objective, we conducted two dis-tinct but
mutually reinforcing empirical projects.In Study I, we asked a
large panel of strategicmanagement scholars to rate 447 abstracts
of arti-cles appearing in major management journals, asto whether
the articles were in strategic manage-ment or not. The raters
exhibited a very highlevel of agreement. Then, using automated
textanalysis, we identified the distinctive lexicon ofthe field,
which in turn allowed us to derive theimplicit consensual
definition of strategic man-agement, as held by its members. In
Study II,we surveyed key boundary-spanners, or scholarswhose recent
work is jointly in strategic manage-ment and adjacent fields, not
only for the purposeof validating the definition gained in Study I,
butmore importantly to derive their explicit defini-tions of the
field. We surveyed 57 such scholarswho had published in both
Strategic Management
Journal (SMJ, the leading journal dedicated to thefield) and
major journals in one of three adjacentfields: economics,
sociology, and marketing. Bysurveying boundary-spanners, we sought
to strin-gently test the validity of the implicit definitiongained
in Study I, as well as to derive an explicit,and perhaps inclusive,
definition of strategic man-agement. We conclude the paper by
discussingthe implications of our analyses for the field
andproposing further applications and extensions ofour
research.
CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
Past efforts to define the field
Since 1979, when Schendel and Hofer (1979)rechristened the field
of business policy as strate-gic management and proposed a new
paradigmcentered on the concept of strategy, scholars haveconducted
numerous analyses of the field.1 Theseworks primarily have
attempted to examine theintellectual ebbs and flows, research
trends, andtheoretical perspectives of the field (Rumelt,Schendel,
and Teece, 1994; Saunders and Thomp-son, 1980; Schendel and Cool,
1988). Amongthese various assessments, for instance, Hoskissonet
al. (1999) traced the pendulum-like swings inthe fields emphasis on
firms external environ-ments and internal resources. Summer et al.
(1990)analyzed the historical progression and status ofdoctoral
education in the field. Recently, Ramos-Rodriguez and Ruiz-Navarro
(2004) used citationanalysis to chart the intellectual progression
of thefield.
As important as all these prior analyses havebeen, they have
omitted any attention to a fun-damental question: just what is
strategic manage-ment? The fields lack of interest in
addressingthis basic question is noteworthy for two rea-sons.
First, the fields identity, by its very nature,is ambiguous and
highly contestable (Hambrick,1990; Spender, 2001). It intersects
with severalother well-developed fields, including economics,
1 Actually, the first documented proposal to change the nameof
the field may have been in an unpublished paper by DanSchendel and
Kenneth Hatten, Business Policy or StrategicManagement: A Broader
View for an Emerging Discipline,presented at the 1972 program of
the (then named) BusinessPolicy and Planning Division of the
Academy of Management.
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 937
marketing, organizational theory, finance, and soci-ology
(Bowman, Singh, and Thomas, 2002); with-out a clear sense of
collective identity and sharedpurpose, strategic management is
vulnerable tointellectual and practical attack (in terms, say,
ofresources, journal space, and tenure slots) fromthese other
fields.
Lack of attention to the essence of the fieldis noteworthy for a
second reason: the formallyespoused, published definitions of the
field arequite varied. The Appendix presents a selectedset of
definitions, including Learned et al.s (1965)definition of the
precursor field: business policy.2The definitions range widely.
Some refer to gen-eral managers (Fredrickson, 1990; Jemison,
1981;Schendel and Cool, 1988), while others do not.Some indicate
the overall organization or firm asthe relevant unit of analysis
(e.g., Learned et al.,1965), while others do not. Some refer to
theimportance of organizational performance or suc-cess (Bowman et
al., 2002; Rumelt et al., 1994;Schendel and Hofer, 1979), some to
external envi-ronments (e.g., Bracker, 1980; Jemison, 1981),some to
internal resources (e.g., Bracker, 1980;Jemison, 1981), some to
strategy implementation(Van Cauwenbergh and Cool, 1982), and
somerefer to none of these (e.g., Smircich and Stubbart,1985).
Although these definitions are not flatly incom-patible with
each other, they are sufficiently diverseas to convey ambiguity in
what the field of strate-gic management is all about, as well as
how itdiffers from other closely related fields. It is a puz-zle,
then, as to how the field can survive, much lessflourish. But
flourish it does. Strategic managementhas its own highly regarded
refereed journal, SMJ,and its members papers appear with
significantfrequency in other top-tier journals; the BusinessPolicy
and Strategy Division is the second-largestdivision of the Academy
of Management, receiv-ing far more submissions for its annual
meetingprogram than any other division; and strategicmanagement
scholars regularly qualify for tenureat top-tier research
universities. How can an aca-demic field that, by all appearances,
lacks a clearand agreed-upon definition maintain its momen-tum?
2 This set of definitions is merely illustrative and should not
beinterpreted as the most influential or most recognized. Indeed,we
are not aware of any particular published definition of thefield
that is singularly prominent in members minds.
This puzzle is answered if, as we anticipate,strategic
management scholars have an implicit(and perhaps even explicit)
consensus about themeaning of the field. Despite varied
theoreti-cal and methodological approaches, and despitean absence
of any agreed-upon extant definition,strategic management scholars
can be expected tohave a widely shared understanding, a
commonworldview, of what makes up their field. Thisimplicit
understanding, as we show in Study I, canbe used to impute a
consensual definition of thefield. It can also help us understand
the collectiveidentity of the field that its members
sharetheidentity that gives members a fundamental senseof who they
are as a community and how they dif-fer from other communities
(Dutton and Dukerich,1991), which we address in Study II.
STUDY I: DERIVING THECONSENSUAL IMPLICIT DEFINITIONOF THE
FIELD
The social and linguistic view of science
Our primary point of departure is the premise thata scientific
field is a community of scholars whoshare a common identity and
language. The rootsof this premise can be traced to the sociology
ofknowledge, in which science is seen as a funda-mentally social
enterprise (Kuhn, 1962; Latour andWoolgar, 1979; Merton and Storer,
1973). Somehave gone to the extent of describing
academiccommunities as tribes, or intellectual villages,replete
with their own peculiar cultures, norms, andlanguage (Becher, 2001;
Geertz, 1983).
Essential to Kuhns (1962) concept of paradigmis the existence of
commonly shared goals, values,and norms that demarcate the members
of the com-munity holding that paradigm, from other scientificand
non-scientific communities. The scope andboundaries of a scientific
community are stronglyinfluenced by the specialist knowledge and
techni-cal norms of its members (Shapin, 1995).
If we assume that scientific knowledge issocially constructed,
then language, in the formof scientific discourse, is the
fundamental mediumthat makes that social construction possible
(Bergerand Luckmann, 1966; Grace, 1987). Language pro-vides the
basis for the emergence of a distinctiveidentity shared by members
of a scientific com-munity (Whorf, 1956). Astley (1985) asserted
that
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938 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
scientific fields are word systems created andmaintained by
their members.
If it is through language that members of anacademic field
express their ideas, then it is alsothrough language that the very
essence, or implicitdefinition, of the field can be identified.
Membersof an academic field should be able to examine abody of
texteven out of contextand, usingthe language in that text,
conclude whether thetext represents work in their field. This is
not topresume that all members of the field will favor thesame
theories, methods, and styles of research, butrather that they will
be able to conclude whether agiven text is part of their shared
conception of thefield. Then, other analysts should be able to
workbackwards: using the members conclusions aboutwhether
individual texts come from their field, theanalysts should be able
to identify and assess thedistinctive language that gave rise to
the membersconclusions, thus imputing the members
implicitconceptions of what makes up their field. This isthe logic
we applied in conducting Study I.
Overview of methodStudy I involved multiple steps. First, we
askeda large panel of strategic management authors torate 447
abstracts of articles appearing in leadingmanagement journals, as
to whether the abstractsrepresented strategic management articles
or not.The raters exhibited a very high level of agree-ment.
Second, we divided those 385 articles thatreceived the most
consistent ratings into strate-gic management (SM) and
non-strategic manage-ment (non-SM) categories; then, using
automatedtext analysis, we conducted a lexicographic anal-ysis of
the abstracts, through which we identifiedthe distinctive
vocabulary of the field of strategicmanagementa set of 54 words
that appeared inSM abstracts with significantly greater
frequencythan in non-SM abstracts. Then, moving iterativelybetween
prior definitions of the field and our owninterpretation of how the
54 words could be placedinto conceptual categories, we identified
six ele-ments that constitute the implicit consensual defi-nition
of strategic management. Finally, we testedthe validity of this
classification schemeboth onthe original sample and on an
additional sampleof abstracts of articles published in SMJ.
Thesetests indicated that the six elements of the
implicitdefinition of the field allow the highly accurateassignment
of articles as SM or non-SM.
Identifying strategic management textsAs noted earlier, it is
widely held that the field ofstrategic management has amorphous
boundaries.Our first step, therefore, was to present a panel
ofstrategic management scholars with a set of arti-cles and ask
them to rate each, essentially asking,Is this a strategic
management article? We askedthe panel (which we will describe
momentarily) torate a total of 447 articles. To generate this
poolof articles, we selected every article that mighteven remotely
be considered a strategic manage-ment article (liberally including
any article thatfocused on the overall organization as the unit
ofanalysis or that addressed any of the roles typi-cally associated
with general managers (Mintzberg,1973), from the Academy of
Management Journal(n = 186), Academy of Management Review (n =153),
and Administrative Science Quarterly (n =108), for the years
198081, 198586, 199091,199596, 200001. Some brief explanations
ofthis sampling are warranted.
We excluded SMJ articles from our initial poolbecause we
anticipated that raters would see theSMJ imprint on an article as
providing prima facieevidence that it was an SM article.3 Because
ASQ,AMJ, and AMR publish papers on a wide arrayof management and
organization topics, the raterswould need to focus on the content
of each articleto make their determinations. As will be seen,
weexamined a large body of articles published in SMJas a subsequent
corroborative step in our project.
We used a 20-year time-span to allow a broadperspective on the
fields research domain, and toavoid the problem of overemphasis on
the researchof a more limited era. Again, we were interestedin
identifying the fundamental definition, not themomentary fashions
or cycles, of the field.
Our approach to selecting the pool of articlesto be coded (i.e.,
all those that might very liber-ally, or remotely, be considered as
SM) yieldedtwo benefits. First, it helped to minimize raterfatigue
or annoyance, which would have occurredif raters had been asked to
code random samples ofarticles from the focal journals (since only
about1020% of the articles in these journals are inthe SM domain).
Second, our skewed pool of arti-cles required raters to make
relatively more fine-grained discriminations than they might have
if
3 We did not include Organization Science, the only other
top-rated refereed journal that regularly publishes strategic
manage-ment articles, because it started publication only in
1990.
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 939
they were also asked to code, say, a large num-ber of micro-OB
or human resources articles. As aresult, the raters evaluations of
the extent to whichthe articles were SM, and in turn our extraction
ofthe distinctive lexicon of SM, can be consideredrelatively
conservative.
Still, we should acknowledge three limitationsof the pool of
articles we asked our panel to rate.First, we drew articles
strictly from managementjournals, in an effort to distinguish
strategic man-agement from other subfields of management; butsuch
an approach omits any consideration of howstrategic management
differs from, or relates to,other academic fields such as
economics, market-ing, or sociology. We would have liked to
includestrategy-oriented articles in journals from theseother
related fields, but they are too rare to allowthe type of analysis
we conducted. Second, ourpool of articles was drawn strictly from
U.S.-basedjournals, while omitting journals based in otherparts of
the world. (As will be seen, however,a substantial proportion of
our raters were basedat institutions outside the United States).
Third,we examined only those journals with the high-est academic
impact (i.e., ASQ, AMJ, AMR, andsubsequently SMJ ) as judged by
citations trackedby Social Science Citation Index, while omit-ting
the managerially influential Harvard Busi-ness Review, less
influential academic journals, andbooks. These limitations provide
opportunities forfuture research, which we will discuss below.
By e-mail, we invited to participate in our panelall 585 authors
of papers presented in the BusinessPolicy and Strategy (BPS)
Division program at the2002 and 2003 annual meetings of the
Academyof Management. Of those, 269 completed useablesurveys (a
response rate of 46%).4 All the panelistscan be presumed to have
some familiarity with thefield of strategic management by virtue of
beingauthors of accepted papers on the BPS program;therefore, they
are knowledgeable raters. At thesame time, they are diverse, in
terms of stage ofcareer (25% professors, 19% associate
professors,36% assistant professors, and 19% doctoral can-didates),
type of institution (evenly split betweennondoctoral- (51%) and
doctoral-granting (49%)),doctoral study area (74% received their
PhD in
4 Using a random sample of 50 non-respondents, we testedfor
non-response bias based on two demographic variablesdoctoral
student vs. faculty and U.S. vs. non-U.S.and found nosignificant
differences between respondents and non-respondents.
strategic management, and the remainder in othermanagement
subfields, economics, or sociology),and geography (20% teach at
institutions outsidethe United States).
Each panelist was presented with a web-basedsurvey that
contained the titles and completeabstracts of 18 randomly generated
articles fromour pool of 447.5 Each panelist was asked torate the
18 titles/abstracts on a four-point scale:1 = clearly not a
strategic management (SM) arti-cle; 2 = probably not an SM article;
3 = probablyan SM article; 4 = clearly an SM article. The raterwas
also presented with the abstracts/titles of twoarticles that were
definitely not strategic manage-ment articles (the same two for
every panelist);these fillers were included to safeguard and
testfor the problem of panelists lapsing into a patternof rating
all the articles highly. Over 95 percentof the ratings for these
two filler articles were 1s(clearly not SM), and the remainder were
2s; thusthe raters discriminated in their ratings.
Through the randomization process, every oneof the 447 articles
was rated by at least eightpanelists, and over 90 percent were
rated by 10or more panelists. The panelists exhibited
strongagreement in their ratings, with an intraclass cor-relation
coefficient (ICC) of 0.50 (p < 0.001).
We retained for further analysis any article thathad a standard
deviation (among raters scores) ofless than one, for a total of 385
(or 86% of theoriginal 447). These 385 articles, then, were theones
for which the panelists exhibited particularlystrong agreement as
to whether they were strategicmanagement articles or not.
The mean ratings for the 385 articles could beconsidered as
providing a scale of the degreeto which an article was rated as SM.
Such anapproach, however, would have the unnecessaryand unfortunate
result of drawing distinctionsbetween every increment of the scale,
includingbetween articles with mean ratings of, say, 1.2 andthose
of 2.0, which clearly was not our purpose.Instead, we used a
categorical distinction, treatingall articles with mean ratings
above 3.0 as SM arti-cles (a total of 200 articles) and those with
meanratings of 3.0 or lower as non-SM (185 articles).As a way to
illustrate how the articles were rated,
5 Authorship information for all articles was omitted from
thesurvey to control for the possibility that certain authors might
befamiliar as strategic management scholars. There was, of
course,no way to control for the possibility that some of the
authors,while not indicated, were known by the panelists.
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 28:
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940 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
Table 1. Selected examples of article titles, arranged by mean
ratings
Scale anchor Meanratings
Article titlesa
Coded as SM4.0 (Clearly SM) 4.0 Causal ambiguity, barriers to
imitation, and sustainable competitive advantage
(Reed and DeFillippi, 1990)b4.0 Excess resources, utilization
costs, and mode of entry (Chatterjee, 1990)3.5 Architectural
innovation: the reconfiguration of existing product
technologies
and the failure of established firms (Henderson and Clark,
1990)3.5 Interorganizational collaboration and the locus of
innovation: networks of
learning in biotechnology (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983)3.1
Organizational differences in management compensation and
financial
performance (Gerhart and Milkovich, 1990)3.1 Crisis and the
content of managerial communications: a study of the focus of
attention of top managers in surviving and failing firms (DAveni
andMacMillan, 1990)
Coded as non-SM3.0 (Probably SM) 3.0 Organizations unfettered:
organizational form in an information-intensive
economy (Child and McGrath, 2001)2.9 Political influence:
strategies employed by organizations to impact legislation
in business and economic matters (Aplin and Hegarty, 1980)2.1
Isomorphism and external support in conflicting institutional
environments: a
study of drug-abuse treatment units (DAunno, Sutton, and Price,
1991)2.0 (Probably not SM) 1.9 Cross-functional project groups in
research and new product development:
diversity, communications, job stress, and outcomes (Keller,
2001)1.1 Impact of work experiences on attitudes toward sexual
harassment (Konrad
and Gutek, 1986)1.1 Recruiters and applicants reactions to
campus interviews and employment
decisions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983)1.0 (Clearly not SM) 1.0
Fairness perceptions as a moderator in the curvilinear
relationships between
job demands, and job performance and job satisfaction (Janssen,
2001)a Ratings were based on panelists interpretations of titles
and abstracts. Here, abstracts are omitted because of space
constraints.b Names of authors were omitted in the surveys.
Table 1 provides the titles of several articles at dif-ferent
mean rating levels.6
Extracting the distinctive lexicon of strategicmanagement
We used content analysis of the abstracts to iden-tify the
distinctive lexicon of the field (Stone et al.(1966). In recent
years, computer-aided text analy-sis (CATA) has been used to
process large amounts
6 It is important to emphasize that the scale we asked
thepanelists to use was worded strictly in terms of whether an
articlewas SM or non-SM (on a four-point continuum). They were
notasked to rate the apparent quality or significance of the
articles.Indeed, one could imagine a given SM researcher deriving
greatusefulness or insight from an article rated as non-SM by
ourpanel.
of text for systematic investigation of a range ofsocial
phenomena, including managerial and orga-nizational cognition
(Gephart, 1993; Porac, Wade,and Pollock, 1999), team mental models
(Carley,1997), and institutional isomorphism (Abraham-son and
Hambrick, 1997). Using CATA software,Concordance (Watt, 2002), we
analyzed all 385abstracts to identify the frequently recurring,
dis-tinctive lexiconor vocabularyof the field ofstrategic
management.
We chose to examine individual words (andtheir various forms)
rather than entire phrases orword relationships. Analysis of
individual wordsis a common approach to automated text cod-ing,
including for studies in the organizationalsciences. For example,
Abrahamson and Ham-brick (1997) used counts of individual words
in
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 941
companies letters to shareholders in constructingtheir measure
of attentional homogeneity (or uni-formity of managerial attention)
within indus-tries. Recently, Walsh, Weber, and Margolis
(2003)counted a set of key words in Wall Street Jour-nal articles,
over a 100-year period, to determinewhether American business had
become morefocused on competitive behavior for economicadvantage
than on the contributions of businessto social welfare.
The alternative of examining groups of wordsor phrases has the
advantage of considering thecontext within which words are used,
but it alsohas notable drawbacks (Halliday, 1961; Singleton,2000).
A focus on word strings or word pairs eitherleads to such a great
number of combinations asto be analytically intractable, or it
requires theresearcher to inject a priori judgments as to whatkinds
of word combinations might be sought out.For example, we might
anticipate that such phrasesas top management team, capital
intensity, andmarket structure are commonly used in
strategicmanagement, but the very act of predeterminingsuch phrases
introduces significant bias to the ana-lytic endeavor. Therefore,
to minimize such biases,we examined the appearance of individual
words,or lexemes, as our primary analytical approach.
There were of course thousands of unique wordscontained in all
the abstracts. To make this largebody of text analytically
tractable, we needed toimpose some restrictions on the words we
wouldexamine, but in a way that would not bias theresults. The most
significant restriction was that weexcluded all words that appeared
less than 10 timesamong all the 385 abstracts; these words were
usedso rarely that they could not be thought of aspart of any
distinctive lexicon.7 Next, we excludedproper nouns, prepositions,
and articles, and cer-tain common descriptors such as very,
much,and many. Finally, we consolidated all varia-tions of a root
word and treated them collectively.
7 We also encountered acronyms such as RBV, SBU, andKBV. To
process these, we adopted a rule that, if the absolutefrequency of
a given acronym in the entire corpus was greaterthan or equal to
10, then we would use the acronym as a stand-alone root term and
add the frequency of the words in theacronyms expanded form to the
frequency of the root acronym.For example, the acronym CEO had an
absolute frequencygreater than 10. We therefore adopted a rule that
every timethe expanded form Chief Executive Officer(s) occurred in
anabstract, we would count it as a CEO term. On the other hand,the
acronym RBV did not occur more than 10 times in the entirecorpus,
so we counted an RBV occurrence as a form of the wordresource.
For example, the words financial, financed, andfinance were all
treated as the same word; wereport them by referring to the most
common vari-ant (in this case, financial). This multistage pro-cess
yielded a total of 223 root words, or lexemes,which became our
basis for analysis.
Our objective, again, was to identify the dis-tinctive lexicon
of the field of strategic manage-mentthe vocabulary that is used by
SM scholars,but not used, or rarely used, by non-SM scholars.As our
next step, then, we sought to identify wordsthat were much more
prevalent in those abstractscoded by our raters as strategic
management (rat-ings >3) than in abstracts rated as not
strategicmanagement (3). For each word, we calculatedthe biserial
correlation between (a) the numberof times the word appeared in an
abstract and(b) whether the abstract was coded SM or
non-SM.Biserial correlations are appropriate for examiningthe
association between an interval variable anda dichotomous variable
(Nunnally and Bernstein,1994; Tate, 1955).
A total of 54 words had significant (p < 0.10)positive
correlations, indicating that they appearedappreciably more
frequently in SM than in non-SM abstracts. The words with the
highest positivecorrelations were strategy (biserial r = 0.38)
andfirm (0.38). Other words that had significant pos-itive
correlations included diversification (0.12),CEO (0.10), and risk
(0.12). (We will report theentire list shortly.)
Imputing the implicit definition of the fieldThe 54 words
generated from the text analysisformed the basis for imputing a
consensual def-inition of the field of strategic management.
Weconducted this inductive exercise in an iterativemanner. First,
we developed some tentative cate-gories, based upon conceptual
clusters of words.For example, several of the words dealt withan
organizational unit of analysis (e.g., firm,SBU, company); some
dealt clearly with ini-tiatives taken by organizations (e.g.,
acquisition,alliance, investment); some referred to the peo-ple who
are involved in such initiatives (e.g.,CEO, top, board); and other
words fell intoother tentative categories.
Next, we turned to existing definitions of strate-gic
management, including those presented in theAppendix, as a way to
observe the conceptual ele-ments that recur when scholars define
the field.
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942 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
Despite the variety among these definitions, ashighlighted
earlier, they do carry some commonelements. For example, several
refer to generalmanagers, several refer to performance or
success,several specify the firm or overall organization asthe unit
of analysis, and so on. By examining theseexisting definitions and
comparing them to our ten-tative conceptual categories, we were
able to takethe third step in this inductive process: identify-ing
the major elements that constitute the implicit,consensual
definition of the field.
We three authors engaged in multi-way discus-sions to assign the
54 words to conceptual cate-gories, seeking to balance several
considerations.We attempted to use the conceptual nomenclaturefrom
existing definitions whenever possible; at thesame time, we did not
want to be constrained byprior definitions. For the sake of
parsimony, wewanted to develop as few definitional elementsas
possible, but it was also important that all thewords assigned to a
category genuinely cohere andfit together. Finally, as a way to
maintain simplic-ity, we only allowed a given word, or lexeme, tobe
assigned to one category, even though its var-ious forms might
reasonably belong in additionalcategories.
This multistep process led us to the follow-ing definition of
strategic management, as imputedfrom the distinctive lexicon of the
field: The fieldof strategic management deals with (a) the
majorintended and emergent initiatives (b) taken by gen-eral
managers on behalf of owners, (c) involvingutilization of resources
(d) to enhance the perfor-mance (e) of firms (f) in their external
environ-ments. Table 2 shows the assignment of the 54distinctive
words to these six elements.8
These six elements make up the implicit consen-sual definition
of the field of strategic management.This definition differs
fundamentally from others,because it represents, de facto, the way
members
8 As a corroborative step, we asked three other strategic
man-agement scholars (who teach at three different schools and
holddoctorates from three different institutions) to assign the 54
lex-emes to the six conceptual categories. For each lexeme,
thecoders were asked to rank the three most appropriate
conceptualcategories. The coders were told they could indicate that
a worddid not fit with any of the categories; one coder designated
twosuch words. To measure the level of agreement with our
assign-ments of words, we examined only the conceptual category
thatthe coders designated as best fitting for each word (those
cate-gories that were ranked 1). The average Cohens kappa
statistic,measuring agreement between our assignments and those of
thethree independent coders, was 0.68, indicating substantial
agree-ment (Landis and Koch, 1977).
think about the field, rather than the way theyshould or might
or want to think about the field.By asking our panel to distinguish
between strate-gic management and non-strategic managementresearch,
and then examining the differences inlanguage appearing in the two
groups of abstracts,we have been able to impute the panels latent
con-ception of what the field is. (We should acknowl-edge that this
imputed definition is not elegantlyworded or graceful in its
syntax. Rather, it repre-sents our best effort to integrate the six
elementsinto sentence form.)
The first definitional element, the majorintended and emergent
initiatives, as shown inTable 3, is represented by words such as
strategy,acquisition, and diversification, which refer to
Table 2. The distinctive lexicon of strategicmanagement
Distinctive wordsa Definitional elements(The field of
strategic
management deals with . . .)
Strategy (0.38) . . . the major intended andInnovation (0.14)
emergent initiativesAcquisition (0.14)Investment (0.12)Operation
(0.12)Diversification (0.12)Learning (0.12)Entry (0.11)Activity
(0.10)Alliances (0.10)Transaction (0.10)Top (0.15) . . . taken by
general managersIncentives (0.12) on behalf of ownersBoard
(0.12)Director (0.12)Compensation (0.11)CEO (0.10)Succession
(0.10)Agency (0.09)General (0.08)Ownership (0.08)Stock (0.15) . . .
involving utilization ofCapability (0.14) resourcesAssets
(0.13)Technology (0.12)Competency (0.10)Financial (0.10)Product
(0.10)Ties (0.10)Slack (0.09)Knowledge (0.09)Resources (0.08)
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 943
Table 2. (Continued )
Distinctive wordsa Definitional elements(The field of
strategic
management deals with . . .)
Growth (0.16) . . . to enhance the performanceAdvantage
(0.11)Returns (0.11)Decline (0.10)Dominance (0.10)Performance
(0.08)Firm (0.38) . . . of firmsBusiness (0.13)Company
(0.12)Corporate (0.09)Enterprise (0.09)Multibusiness (0.09)SBU
(0.09)Subsidiary (0.09)Industry (0.27) . . . in their
externalCompetition (0.21) environments.Market (0.17)Environment
(0.17)Contingency (0.15)Uncertainty (0.14)Threats (0.14)Risk
(0.12)
a We include all words that appeared significantly (p <
0.10)more frequently in SM abstracts than in non-SM
abstracts.Numbers in parentheses are biserial correlations between
thefrequency of use of a root word (including its various forms)and
the binary variable indicating whether an article was SM ornon
SM.
relatively deliberate, planned initiatives; but it alsoincludes
such words as learning and innova-tion, which represent the more
emergent activitiesthat occur in a firm.9 The second element of
thedefinition, taken by general managers on behalfof owners,
concerns the key actors who are thefocus of attention in strategy
research. Terms suchas CEO, top, directors, and boards repre-sent
the upper echelons and governing bodies ofcompanies; and words such
as agency and own-ership represent a focus on owners, rather thanon
any other stakeholders. The third definitionalelement, involving
utilization of resources, per-tains to the resources that managers
use in theirstrategic initiatives; words such as capability
andknowledge represent the resources that are pri-marily internal
to the firm, whereas terms suchas ties signify resources that link
the firm toits environment. The fourth element, to enhancethe
performance, conceptualizes the key objec-tives or outcomes that
are of interest to strate-gic management scholars; words such as
growth,performance, and advantage align with this def-initional
element. Terms such as firm, company,and SBU signify the fifth
definitional element, offirms, which reflects the focal unit of
analysis of
9 We recognize that innovation and learning sometimes occur asa
result of very deliberate philosophies and processes. At thesame
time, however, they are widely seen as emergent, bottom-up
activities (e.g., Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel, 1998).
Table 3. Logistic regression analysis: using the presence of
words in each definitional element to differentiate
betweenstrategic management and non-strategic management
abstracts
Element of the consensual implicit definition SM abstracts(from
AMJ, AMR, and ASQ)
vs.non-SM abstracts
SM abstracts(from SMJ )
vs.non SM abstracts
The field of strategic management deals with. . .
S.E. S.E.
. . . the major intended and emergent initiatives 2.09 0.29 2.55
0.40. . . taken by general managers on behalf of owners 1.14 0.33
0.94 0.44. . . involving utilization of resources 0.87 0.33 1.16
0.41. . . to enhance the performance 0.34 0.31 0.68 0.41. . . of
firms 1.32 0.29 1.30 0.40. . . in their external environments. 1.77
0.28 1.03 0.40Constant 3.06 0.34 3.58 0.512log-likelihood 321.10
170.50Sample size 385 224Percentage of cases correctly classified
82.34 82.58
p < 0.10; p < 0.05; p < 0.01; p < 0.001
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944 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
strategic management. Finally, the sixth element,in their
external environments, is represented bywords such as market,
competition, and indus-try, which refer to the immediate
environment ofa firm, as well as by words such as
environment,uncertainty, and contingency, which indicate
apotentially broader external context.
Validating the imputed definition
To determine the validity of our imputed defini-tion of SM, we
examined whether the six ele-ments themselves (rather than the
individual lex-emes used to induce the elements) would
allowsignificant discrimination between SM and non-SM abstracts. To
conduct this test, we used logisticregression (LOGIT) in which the
dependent vari-able was whether an abstract was SM or non-SM.The
independent variables were six binary vari-ables, each representing
one of the elements of theimputed definition, coded to 1 if there
was at leastone appearance of one of the words we assigned tothat
element. For example, if an abstract includedany of the words that
comprise the sixth elementof our definition, . . . in their
external environ-ments, then the dummy variable for that elementwas
coded 1. If none of the words in that ele-ment appeared in the
abstract, the binary variablewas coded 0. This approach puts our
categoriza-tion scheme (and our assignment of words to
thedefinitional elements) to a direct and stringenttest.
The LOGIT results are reported in the left-handcolumn of Table
3. The overall model is highlysignificant and correctly
distinguishes 82 percentof the articles (as SM vs. non-SM). All the
def-initional elements are highly significant in distin-guishing
between SM and non-SM abstractswithone exception. The element, to
enhance the per-formance, was not a significant differentiator.This
is a noteworthy result, since it is com-monly asserted that an
interest in performanceis a distinctive feature of the field of
strategicmanagement (Rumelt et al., 1994; Summer et al.,1990). Such
an assertion, however, overlooks thefactapparent from the LOGIT
resultthat otherfields of management, including
organizationalbehavior and organizational theory, are also
con-cerned with performance, albeit at individual, job,team, and
societal levels. Overall, though, theLOGIT results provide
substantial validation of
our imputed six-element definition of the field ofstrategic
management.
As a further validation, we expanded our scopeto include a
sample of articles published in SMJ.We selected a matched sample of
112 SMJ arti-cles to correspond to the distribution of publica-tion
years of 112 non-SM articles from our initialsample. This matching
ensured that we had thesame time periods represented in the SMJ
andnon-SM samples. We assumed that all the SMJarticles were indeed
strategic management arti-cles (and would have been coded as such
by ourpanelists) and proceeded to test them against thematched
sample of NonSM articles. We used thesame LOGIT procedure as
described above; resultsare shown in the right-hand column of Table
3.As can be seen, the results are essentially identi-cal to those
obtained from the comparison basedon SM articles drawn from AMJ,
AMR, and ASQ.The model correctly classified 83 percent of
theabstracts; all the definitional elements were sig-nificant,
including the performance element atp < 0.10, and the individual
coefficients were verysimilar to those generated from the other
sam-ple of SM articles. Thus, across two samples ofstrategic
management abstracts, we find validat-ing support for our imputed
definition. In sum-mary, the implicit consensual definition of
thefield of strategic managementas based upon ourpanels ratings of
abstracts in leading U.S.-basedjournalscan be stated as: The field
of strate-gic management deals with the major intended andemergent
initiatives taken by general managers onbehalf of owners, involving
utilization of resources,to enhance the performance of firms in
their exter-nal environments.
STUDY II: EXPLICIT DEFINITION OFTHE FIELD
Our second study considers the explicit, orespoused, conceptions
of the field, as held byscholars who were selected for their
paradigmaticdiversity. Explicit definitions reflect an
intention-ality and deliberateness that may be missing inimplicit
definitions such as we have imputedabove. A scholars explicit
definition of the fieldmay reflect his or her strongly held views,
con-scious assertions of what strategic management is(and is not),
and even hints of where the fieldshould be headed.
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 945
We report on an analysis of the explicit defini-tions of the
field of strategic management, obtainedfrom 57 scholars who are
recent authors in majorjournals. Again, our emphasis in this
inquiry wason paradigmatic diversity, so as to put to a strin-gent
test the consensus that we saw in Study 1.Specifically, our sample
of 57 consisted of foursubgroupsscholars who are active at the
inter-section of SM and economics, SM and sociology,SM and
marketing, and SM and mainstream man-agement. Thus, we sought to
determine the defini-tions of the field, as held by four distinct
groupsof scholars, including three groups of boundary-spanners.
As discussed earlier, by its very nature the fieldof strategic
management resides at the intersec-tion of numerous other fields,
including economics,sociology, finance, and marketing.10 This
overlap-ping diversity can be thought of as a source ofmulti-way
intellectual exchange, stimulation, andadvancement for the field
(Merton, 1996). But thisvariety could also cause harmful
fragmentationand splintering, as scholars of diverse stripes tryto
exertconsciously or subconsciouslyvariousforms of hegemonistic
pulls on the field (Ham-brick, 2004). Sharing terrain with more
estab-lished, high-stature fields can be a source of intel-lectual
enrichment and legitimacy for strategicmanagement, or it could lead
to its co-optationand, ultimately, its disappearance. This was
essen-tially the fate of the field of international business,which
emerged as a distinct and vigorous academiccommunity in the 1960s
and 1970s, only to besubsequently subsumed by other business
disci-plines.
By surveying boundary-spanners, or scholarswho are active both
in SM and other fields, wehave an opportunity to obtain
insightsfrom thosedirectly involvedas to whether the perspectivesof
diverse strategic management scholars reflectenough commonality to
sustain the coherence ofthe field, or instead suggest an impending
frag-mentation. We should emphasize that by studyingscholars who
have differing disciplinary orienta-tions, we are examining only
one form of diver-sity. One could also consider the heterogeneityof
perspectives that arises due to age or rank,
10 Strategic management is not alone in its eclectic nature,
asother subfields of management, such as organizational behaviorand
organizational theory, similarly intersect with the fields
ofpsychology (House and Singh, 1987; Pugh, 1969) and
sociology(Perrow, 2000), respectively.
national culture or region, or type of employinginstitution.
Still, the diversity that exists becauseof discipline-based variety
is widely seen as espe-cially salient for the trajectory of the
field (Whit-ley, 2000).
Identifying boundary-spannersWe identified a set of informed
boundary-spanningscholars who had recently published both in
theleading journal in strategic management (SMJ )and in one of
three adjacent fields that inter-sect with SM: economics,
sociology, and market-ing. We focused on these three fields because
oftheir long-standing and pronounced influence onSM, both as
evidenced by a series of seminalarticles in 1981 that addressed
their intersectionwith SM (Biggadike, 1981; Jemison, 1981;
Porter,1981) and by the recent ratings of over 900 SMscholars who
were asked to indicate which non-management fields have had the
greatest influenceon SM (Michel and Chen, 2004).
Our sampling pool consisted of authors whopublished both in the
SMJ during the period200105 and in at least one leading journal
inone of the three adjacent fields during the samerecent period.
The leading journals we consid-ered included American Economic
Review, RandJournal of Economics, and Journal of
IndustrialEconomics for economics; American Sociologi-cal Review,
American Journal of Sociology, andSocial Forces for sociology; and
Journal of Mar-keting, Journal of Marketing Research, and
Mar-keting Science for marketing. We used multiplesearch engines,
such as the Social Science CitationIndex, Google Scholar,
ABI-Inform, and JSTOR toidentify our sample scholars. We sought to
iden-tify every author who met our joint-publishingcriteria, but we
may have missed some who qual-ified. We contacted, by e-mail, a
total of 40boundary-spanning scholars. Of those, 37 agreedto
participate, a response rate of 92.5 percent.Of our respondents, 12
work in economics, 17in sociology, and eight in marketing.11 Once
ascholar had agreed to participate, we sent him/hera brief
e-mail-based survey (several respondentspreferred to be surveyed by
phone). Our main
11 Although the profiles of these boundary-spanners varied
con-siderably, our review of their records in SSCI (Social
ScienceCitation Index) suggests that most of them had their main
affili-ations with the fields outside SM and occasionally published
inSM (particularly in SMJ ), rather than the reverse.
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946 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
questionand the one we report on herewas:What is your definition
of the field of strategicmanagement?12
12 We would have liked to include psychology and
financeboundary-spanners, since these fields (especially finance)
havehad considerable influence on SM, but there were too few
indi-viduals who met our criteria of publishing both in SMJ and
thetop journals of these respective fields during the period
200105.By our count, there were fewer than five such individuals
ineach of psychology and finance. Among our
economics-orientedboundary-spanners, however, were three
individuals who hadpublished in both mainstream economics journals
and top financejournals (e.g., Journal of Finance or Journal of
Financial Eco-nomics). Because their explicit definitions of
strategic man-agement were not distinctly different from those of
the othereconomists, we decided to keep them combined.
For comparative purposes, we also selected agroup of 20
mainstream management scholars,who published both in the SMJ and in
other lead-ing management journals such as the Academyof Management
Journal, Academy of Manage-ment Review, and Organization Science
during theperiod 200105but not in any journals outsidethe field of
management. These scholars were ran-domly selected (provided that
they met the abovemainstream management criteria) from among agroup
of scholars who had provided us their defini-tions of the field of
strategic management as partof a separate project. Hence, in total
we presentdata from 57 academics representing four
distinctscholarly orientations.
Table 4. Representative definitions espoused by four sets of
boundary-spanning scholars
Adjacent field Espoused definitionsEconomics 1. The strategic
management field ispositivelythe scientific study of the plans that
firms build
and implement in order to achieve and maintain competitive
advantage, andnormativelytheattempt to identify optimal plans for
achieving and maintaining competitive advantages
2. A field aimed at understanding competitive heterogeneity3.
Strategic management is the interdisciplinary field that studies
the behavior of companies and other
market parties, in terms of their strategic behavior, the
choices they make with regard to organizingtheir production, their
interrelationships, and their competitive positioning. All of this
is set againsta thorough understanding of the broader environment
in which companies have to operate
Sociology 4. The study of firms performance from a platform of
tangible and intangible resources in anevolving environment that
includes their market and value network
5. I think of the field relatively broadly. I would say that it
encompasses the definition andimplementation of an organizational
course of action. Central to the determination of those actionsis
an understanding of the relationship between choices available to a
manager and firmperformance (which I would define far more broadly
than profitability to include dimensions suchas innovation and
survival). Hence, most research in the field either concerns
understanding thelinks between organizational actions (routines)
and performance outcomes, or considers how oneactually goes about
changing these routines
6. The study of how organizations create value, including not
only the plan but also theorganizational configuration that it is
combined with
Marketing 7. It is a field about what drives performance of
certain businesses and which strategy works8. I view the field of
strategic management as eclectic, involving all the various
business functions
such as finance, marketing, supply chain, economics, psychology,
statistics, etc. More specifically,it involves firm boundaries,
market and competitive analysis, strategic positions and dynamics,
andinternal organization
9. The field looks at substantive and process issues such as
strategy content, governance mechanisms,strategy choices, market
driven strategy, choices of markets, advantage, value
propositions,configuration, reacting to markets, and structure,
Governance, CEO, leader, strategic choices
Management 10. Developing an explanation of firm performance by
understanding the roles of external andinternal environments,
positioning and managing within these environments and
relatingcompetencies and advantages to opportunities within
external environments
11. Strategic management is the process of building capabilities
that allow a firm to create value forcustomers, shareholders, and
society while operating in competitive markets
12. The study of decisions and actions taken by top
executives/TMTs for firms to be competitive inthe marketplace
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 947
Integration of implicit and explicit definitions
Table 4 gives a representative sample of definitionsfrom the
four groups of respondents, showing vari-ety in the range of
constructs that were included.For example, Respondent 2, an
economics-orientedSM scholar, defined the field in concise terms,
asunderstanding competitive heterogeneity; in con-trast, Respondent
9, a marketing-oriented scholar,referred to an array of
constructscontent, pro-cess, governance, leaders, structure, and
espe-cially markets (mentioned three times). Of course,it might be
said that these two definitions arenot incompatible, but instead
differ merely intheir specificity: Respondent 9 simply gave
aninventory of the major factorsin his or hermindthat give rise to
the competitive hetero-geneity referred to by Respondent 2.
Indeed, despite their differences, the definitionsprovided by
our respondents showed substantialcommonality, or at least
frequently recurring useof a certain set of conceptual elements. As
away to systematically examine the conceptual ele-ments that made
up these definitions, we con-ducted content analysis (as we did
earlier on articleabstracts), in which we identified and
assignedwords to the six elements of the implicit defi-nition we
generated above. On the basis of ourpreliminary examination of the
respondents def-initions, however, we added a seventh elementthat
referred to internal organization, becausewe noted that a number of
respondents referredin various ways to structure, internal
organiza-tion, decision processes, and organizingallof which we
included in this seventh element.For the other six elements, we
assigned the rootwords identified in Study I to their
respectiveelements (as shown in Table 2). (Of course, notall the 54
words used in generating our earlierimplicit definition appeared in
the respondentsexplicit definitions.) We also included some
wordsthat were used by our respondents but that didnot appear in
our earlier analysis. For example,the word leader was included in
the defini-tional element that refers to managers and own-ers.
Table 5 shows the root words in the respon-dents definitions that
we assigned to the sevenelements.
We coded a respondent as referring to a specificelement if
her/his definition included one or moreof the words that comprised
that category. Thenwe aggregated these counts for our entire
sample
Table 5. Explicit definitions of strategic management:major
conceptual elements and their component wordsa
Conceptual elements Member words Incidence ofappearance
indefinitions (%)
Strategic initiatives Actions 45Plans
StrategyChoices
PositioningInternal organization Process 30
InternalBehavior
ImplementationPractices
OrganizingRoutines
Managers and owners CEOs 30Managers
TopLeaders
ExecutivesResources Resources 14
CapabilitiesPerformance Performance 86
AdvantageValue
SuccessOutcomes
SustainabilityProfits
Firms Firm 64Organization
BusinessCompany
Environment Competition 43Environment
MarketExternal
a Based on explicit definitions obtained from 57 scholars.
of respondents, as well as for each subgroup. Thelast column of
Table 5 reports the percentage ofall respondents who referred to
each of the sevenelements. As can be seen, the two most
prevalentdefinitional elements were performance (appear-ing in 86%
of all definitions) and firms (64%).The least common element of the
respondentsexplicit definitions was resources (14%).
We next sought to determine whether the foursubgroups differed
in their inclusion of the vari-ous elements in their definitions.
We report these
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948 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
Managers and Owners
Economics-Oriented Scholars
050
100
Strategic Initiatives
Resources
PerformanceFirms
Environment
Internal Organization Managers and Owners
Sociology-Oriented Scholars
050
100
Strategic Initiatives
Resources
PerformanceFirmsEnvironment
Internal Organization
Marketing-Oriented Scholars
050
100Strategic Initiatives
Managers and Owners
Resources
PerformanceFirms
Environment
Internal Organization
Management-Oriented Scholars
050
100Strategic Initiatives
Managers and Owners
Resources
PerformanceFirms
Environment
Internal Organization
All Respondents
050
100Strategic Initiatives
Managers and Owners
Resources
PerformanceFirms
Environment
Internal Organization
Figure 1. Images of strategic management. Note: The scales
indicate the percentage of respondents who included agiven
perceptual element in their definitions of the field of strategic
management
results schematically in Figure 1, as a set of con-cept webs.
Each web consists of the seven ele-ments, scaled from zero (no
appearance of an ele-ment) to 100 (100% of all respondents referred
toan element). In the middle of Figure 1, we showresults for the
full sample (graphically portrayingthe tabular results from Table
5).
As can be seen, the four groups of respon-dents exhibited
striking similaritybut some dif-ferences as wellin their inclusion
of the variouselements in their explicit definitions of
strategicmanagement. All four groups heavily emphasizedperformance
in their definitions, and all four sub-stantially noted firms as
the unit of analysis forthe field. Mention of the environment was
alsorelatively uniform, appearing in 4050% of thedefinitions of all
four groups.
The economics-oriented SM scholars tendedto have the most
restricted conceptions of thefield. As a group, they made very
little mentionof resources, managers and owners,
strategicinitiatives, or internal organization. The collec-tive
portrayal from this group, then, was highlycongruent with the
prevailing logic of industrialorganization economics, often
described as thestructureconductperformance (S-C-P)
paradigm(Porter, 1981; Scherer and Ross, 1990).
At the other extreme, the management-oriented
SM respondents had the most expansive, multi-faceted definitions
of the field. All seven elementswere substantially represented,
including the threeelements that had the lowest representation
acrossthe total sample: resources, managers and own-ers, and
internal organization.
The sociology-oriented and marketing-orientedgroups were largely
similar in their relative men-tion of the various elements in their
definitions.They particularly emphasizedmore than theother two
groupsthe strategic initiatives ele-ment, often referring to
choices, actions, and deci-sions, or the volitional aspect of the
strategic man-agement framework. Coming from the sociology-oriented
respondents, this relatively heavy empha-sis on volition or
purposive action could be seenas ironic, since two of the major
strands ofsociological theory that bear on strategic
manage-mentpopulation ecology and institutional the-oryaccord
little role for strategic choice or dis-tinctive managerial action
(at least in their originalarguments; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983;
Hannanand Freeman, 1989).
Despite these differences between subgroups,the fact remains
that the similarities were great.None of the seven elements
exhibited statisticallysignificant differences across the four
groups (asjudged by chi-square and KruskalWallis tests),
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 949
and there was especially equal and heavy emphasisplaced on
performance and firms.
In asking four distinct subgroups of scholarsfor their explicit
definitions of the field, we wereanticipating the possibility of
divergent views, butwholesale differences did not appear. Instead
allfour groups overwhelmingly defined the field byits unit of
analysisthe firmand by a primaryoutcome of interest: performance.
Even on thelesser-represented elements, such as resourcesand
internal organization, the four groups did notdiffer significantly
in their mentions. Indeed, onecould reasonably argue that the
definitions differedprimarily in their specificity, or in their
tendency tonote individual elements of the strategic manage-ment
framework, rather than in their fundamen-tal assertions of what the
field is all about. It isentirely possible, even likely, that we
would haveseen stark differences among the subgroups if wehad asked
about their preferred theories, methods,or causal logics. But on
the fundamental questionwe asked abouttheir definition of the
fieldthefour types of strategic management scholars exhib-ited
considerable agreement.
Perceived differences between strategicmanagement and adjacent
fieldsAs a secondary part of our survey of boundary-spanners, we
asked how they viewed the differ-ences, or demarcations, between
strategic manage-ment and the adjacent fields of economics,
soci-ology, and marketing. Their responses were wideranging, but
some overarching themes emergedfrom each of the three groups of
scholars.
Those active at the intersection of SM and eco-nomics
particularly emphasized that the two fieldsdiffer primarily in
their degree of interest in thechallenges facing practicing
managers. Several ofthese respondents indicated, in various ways,
thateconomics tends to be epistemologically-driven,according
primacy to deductive reasoning andmodeling, but without involving
the intricacies oforganizations. These respondents described SM
asmore phenomenologically-driven, with a concernfor generating
practical insights. This compari-son of the two fields is
particularly reflected ina comment by one respondent: Economics
tendsto study firms as fixed effects whereas strategicmanagement
thrives on firm-level idiosyncrasies.
The boundary-spanners at the intersection of SMand sociology
emphasized differences in the pri-mary causal logics of the two
fields. According tothese respondents, strategic management
primarilyfocuses on logics of rationality, technical supe-riority,
and economic fitness. In contrast, theserespondents said,
sociologyor the sociologicalvantage on SMfocuses on the less
rational, ormore socially propelled aspects of
organizations,including issues of status, power, contagion,and
identity. One of the respondents illustratesthis difference in his
comment: While economistic[sic] thinking is the central strand of
strategicmanagement, sociologists tend to emphasize howsocial
relations and cultural elements affect organi-zational outcomes.
Sociologists also conceptualizeorganizational performance more
broadly than domost strategic management researchers, to encom-pass
legitimacy and survival and not only share-holder returns.
Finally, those respondents at the intersectionof SM and
marketing emphasized a theme thatstands in contrast to the comments
from the SM-economics boundary-spanners. As noted above,this latter
group consistently indicated thateconomists primarily operate
outside of, or above,the details of the individual firm. The
marketing-oriented boundary-spanners, however, said recur-ringly
that marketing is more specifics-oriented,detail-oriented, and
operational than strategicmanagement. As one of these respondents
said,The marketing perspective is rooted in under-standing
customers, customer value propositions,tradeoffs, and channel
intermediaries. Strategicmanagement has a somewhat remote,
simplisticview of these matters.
In sum, then, these boundary-spanners high-lighted important
distinctions between SM andthree adjacent fields. Because these
respondentsreside at paradigmatic intersections, each strad-dling
SM and another field, none of themperhaps understandablyspoke of
the superior-ity or correctness of one view over another. Infact,
their comments consistently indicated that SMcoexists in a
complementary, symbiotic relation-ship with the other fields. And
as our earlier anal-ysis of their explicit definitions of SM
indicates,these boundary-spannerseven though intellectu-ally
diversehave a generally shared conceptionof the field of strategic
management.
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 28:
935955 (2007)DOI: 10.1002/smj
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950 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
Kuhn (1962) asserted that a scientific communitydoes not need a
unifying paradigm in order toexist, but that it does need a shared
identity.Our research contributes to an understanding ofwhat
constitutes the shared identity of the fieldof strategic
management. Indeed, the fact that ourlarge panel of strategic
management scholars inStudy I, and the diverse boundary-spanners
inStudy II, exhibited a high level of agreement intheir assessments
of the fields implicit and explicitdefinition suggests that a
relatively strong commonbond exists within the field, which perhaps
helpsto account for the success the field has enjoyed.
But the vitality of strategic management is alsoprobably due to
the fact that the fields intellec-tual content consists of numerous
conceptual ele-ments, thus allowing exploration of a wide arrayof
theoretical and practical issues. According toour analysis, the
consensual definition of the fieldconsists of six elements, each
with several sub-elements. In our examination of explicit
defini-tions, we included a seventh element, the inter-nal
organization. These components, then, can beexamined in various
combinations, which allow forexceedingly fertile research
opportunities. More-over, as our analysis of boundary-spanners
indi-cates, scholars who are active in the field of strate-gic
management bring diverse but complementaryconceptual lenses and
tools to their study of SMissues. Thus, strategic management
benefits fromthe combination of a fundamental consensus aboutthe
meaning of the field and substantial variety inhow SM issues are
framed and explored.
This dualityagreement on the basic definitionand essence of the
field, but coupled with con-siderable intellectual diversityis
reminiscent ofDurkheims (1933) concepts of mechanical andorganic
solidarity, as applied to academic commu-nities. According to
Durkheim, communities basedon mechanical solidarity are driven by a
strongdogmatic collective conscience and shared beliefs.Members are
driven primarily by what is heldas sacrosanct and fundamental by
the community,and no room is given for deviance from the
basictenets. In contrast, communities bound by organicsolidarity
are based on division of labor, and with-out an overpowering
collective conscience. Indi-vidual members are free to express
their peculiarapproaches; solidarity and cooperation are
main-tained through a system of interdependence, in
which the specialized functions symbiotically worktogether.
Applying Durkheims framework to the study ofacademic
communities, Hagstrom (1964) arguedthat the field of mathematics is
bound predomi-nantly by mechanical solidarity: despite the
exis-tence of various mathematics specialties, there isa consensus
about the core propositions and cri-teria for judging research
validity and quality. Onthe other hand, Hagstrom asserted that
sociologyis bound primarily by organic solidarity, as there isno
single, widely accepted theory of social behav-ior or agreement on
research methods. Sociolo-gists, compared to mathematicians, find
it rela-tively easy to engage in new research domainsand to accept
the differences in approach and coreassumptions held by the
different specialties intheir field. It seems, from our analysis,
that strate-gic management is much more like the organicfield of
sociology than the mechanical field ofmathematics. It is held
together by agreement onbasic definition and purpose, but is also
engaged ina wide and ever-shifting range of theoretical
andpractical explorations.13
Our results also call to mind Mertons (1996)analysis of the
interplay between insiders andoutsiders, or differing intellectual
camps, in anacademic field. Contrary to the popular belief
thatinsiders and outsiders follow completely incom-mensurate
approaches to research in a field (andthereby talk past each other
or, worse, end upin conflicts and battles for control), Merton
con-cluded that the interchange and syntheses thatoccur between the
two groups actually lead toeach one adopting some of the others
perspec-tive. Thus, according to Merton, the boundariesbetween
insiders and outsiders are far more per-meable than often thought
to be. This interchangeof ideas, however, does not occur without
somecompetition and conflict. Rather, it is in the pro-cess of
competing over ideas that the two groupsadopt perspectives and
procedures from each other(Merton, 1996: 261). The upshot of
Mertons argu-ments is that the same forces that create dissensusin
a field also paradoxically provide the groundsfor consensus and
commonality.
13 In the early 1990s, the broader field of management
wit-nessed a significant debate about the advantages of
paradigmaticconsensus vs. pluralism, precipitated by Pfeffer (1993)
and coun-tered most notably by Cannella and Paetzold, 1994).)
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 28:
935955 (2007)DOI: 10.1002/smj
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What Is Strategic Management, Really? 951
Having extracted a consensual definition of thefield, the
obvious question is, So what? Per-haps the greatest benefit of
having this definitionis that it allows strategic management
scholars toframe the debate about what they want the fieldto
become, or how they want it to change. In thisvein, for example,
the consensus definition of thefield appears to give primacy to
financial share-holders (owners) rather than other
stakeholders,such as customers or employees. Similarly,
thedefinition emphasizes profit-seeking firms, ratherthan other
types of organizations such as not-for-profits or public
institutions. Indeed, we informallynoticed a clear pattern in our
panels ratings ofabstracts in Study I: no matter how strategicthe
overall topic of an abstract, it received lowerratings, or simply
mixed ratings, if it involvednon-financial performance outcomes or
not-for-profit settings. With the consensus definition nowin front
of us, members can ask whether suchimplicit biases about the field
are desirable and/orinevitable.
At the most basic level, the consensus defini-tion we have
extracted could serve either as ascreen or as a magnet for future
research. If thefield of strategic management adheres to its
ownconcept of distinctive competence, then the exist-ing definition
might be seen as a screen or filter;and scholarly work that does
not fit this defini-tion would be treated as outside the field,
beyondthe realm of strategic management. If, however,we treat the
current definition as a magnet, whichattracts or invites related
work, then the shape ofthe fieldincluding the definition
itselfmightchange over time. Under this perspective, one ofthe
distinctive competences of the field might beseen as its abilityand
willingnessto broker,reconcile, and integrate the works of multiple
otherfields (Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Meyer, 1991).
Future research
Our study indicates a number of opportunities forfuture
research. We will note four such possibili-ties. First, the field
of strategic management couldbe examined from different vantages.
We based ouranalysis on the lexical distinctions between strate-gic
management and other areas of management,as revealed in article
abstracts in mainstream man-agement journals. But strategic
management alsomight meaningfully be contrasted with economics
or sociologyif suitable source materials couldbe obtained in
sufficient quantity.
A second research possibility is to replicate ourassessment of
the field of strategic managementin the future, in essence
exploring how membersmight have altered their conceptions of the
fieldover time. We have purposely avoided any type oflongitudinal
analysis, because we gathered mem-bers perceptions at a single
point. The scope andessence of a field, however, can evolve and it
mightbe very interesting to examine how members viewthe field, say,
in 5 or 10 yearsin terms of whatis inside, what is outside, and
what their implicitconsensus definition is of the field.
A third research opportunity is to examine theintersection of
the consensual definition of a fieldand the amount of influence
that individual schol-ars (and their works) have within that field.
Usingcitation analysis, for example, one could explorewhether works
that adhere closely, or centrally, tothe definition of a field are
likely to have the great-est influence; or whether, in contrast,
works thatreside on the periphery of a field are most influen-tial
because of their novelty and deviance from themainstream. Or
researchers could work the otherway, by exploring how highly cited
works shapethe basic definition and language of a field. In
thisvein, for instance, one could reasonably surmisethat one of the
elements of our consensus definitionof strategic
managementinvolving utilization ofresourceswould not have been
nearly as promi-nent in our findings if not for the highly
influentialworks of Wernerfelt (1984) and Barney (1991)in launching
the now well-known resource-basedview of the firm.
Fourth, our methodology could be applied toother academic
fields, including those in the admin-istrative sciences. For
example, our empiricalapproach, based on the systematic
measurementand analysis of community members views, couldbe used to
comprehend the distinctions betweenindustrial/organizational
psychology and humanresource management, between economic
soci-ology and organizational theory, and betweenentrepreneurship
and strategic management. Thus,our study not only sheds new light
on the field ofstrategic management as a social entity, but
alsoprovides an analytic roadmap for conducting suchinquiries in
other fields.
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 28:
935955 (2007)DOI: 10.1002/smj
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952 R. Nag, D. C. Hambrick and M.-J. Chen
CONCLUSION
Some strategic management scholars havelamented the fields
disparate, ambiguous nature.But how can such concerns be reconciled
withthe substantial success that strategic managementhas
experienced over the past quarter-century orso? Strategic
managements apparent weaknessseems to be its strength. Its
amorphous boundariesand inherent pluralism act as a common
groundfor scholars to thrive as a community, withoutbeing
constrained by a dominant theoretical ormethodological
strait-jacket. Our study suggeststhat strategic management acts as
an intellectualbrokering entity, which thrives by enabling
thesimultaneous pursuit of multiple research orien-tations by
members who hail from a wide vari-ety of disciplinary and
philosophical regimes. Atthe same time, however, these diverse
commu-nity members seem to be linked by a fundamentalimplicit
consensus that helps the field to cohere andmaintain its identity.
The success of strategic man-agement thus suggests an alternative
view of aca-demic communitiesas entities that are dynamicand
malleable, yet at the same time held togetherby a common,
underlying, but permeable core.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors are indebted to all those individualswho
participated in the survey. The authors thankSteven Boivie,
Hao-Chieh Lin, Girish Mallapra-gada, John Michel and Tieying Tu for
their helpin this research. We acknowledge financial supportfrom
the Batten Institute and the Darden Founda-tion, University of
Virginia. A note of thanks toTim Pollock, Wenpin Tsai, and two
anonymousreviewers for their extremely useful comments onearlier
versions of this manuscript.
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