MDE Special Issue, “Frontiers of Strategic Management Research”

7 March 2008 at 8:50 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

The March-April 2008 issue of Managerial and Decision Economics features a special issue on “Frontiers of Strategic Management Research,” edited by Catherine Maritan and Margaret Peteraf. Contributors include Mary Tripsas, Bill Hesterly, Jeff Dyer, Kyle Mayer, Janet Bercovitz, Ranjay Gulati, Bob Hoskisson, Jay Barney, Kathy Eisenhardt, Michael Jacobides, and many others. From the introduction:

Scholars working in the field of strategic management are fundamentally concerned with developing an understanding of how firms compete and how they can create competitive advantage. In addressing this overarching issue we ask questions about such diverse topics as the relationship between firms and industry conditions, the origins and consequences of heterogeneity among firms, how the scope of a firm’s activities affects how it competes, and factors that affect inter-organizational relationships.

Strategic management research is characterized by eclecticism in approach, both theoretical and methodological. Scholars draw theory and methods from economics, sociology, behavioral science, and to a lesser extent, other social sciences. Our own bias is toward an approach that draws on economic theory for its underpinnings because, in our view, economic reasoning provides a strong basis for addressing many issues related to how firms compete. The concepts and language of economics lend themselves to framing problems and questions about competition and to defining outcomes in competitive terms. The papers included in this issue reflect that bias. Having said that, and as some of the papers here demonstrate, it can be beneficial to supplement economic reasoning with perspectives drawn from other theoretical domains to better address the complex issues that strategy scholars tackle. For many strategic management problems, both market and social environments are germane; accordingly, carefully combining multiple perspectives can generate richer insights.

In this issue, we present a sampling of research that covers a broad swath of terrain within the strategy field. The topics are among those attracting the most attention from strategy scholars working at the research frontiers. There are papers that examine environmental change and its impact, recognizing the interplay between factors outside the firm and firm-level choices and outcomes (Tripsas; Peteraf and Reed; Chacar and Hesterly). Another set of papers considers different aspects of economic exchange among cooperating firms (Dyer, Singh and Kale; Mayer and Bercovitz; Gulati and Sytch; Hansen, Hoskisson and Barney). There are also papers that focus on the role of firm-level differences in the determination of competitive outcomes, drawing a link between firm heterogeneity and rent generation (Folta and O’Brien; Maritan and Florence; Bingham and Eisenhardt). Finally, there are papers that examine competition in a global context and the effect of that context on outcomes (Jacobides; Sakakibara and Yamawaki). A brief introduction to these topic domains and the papers included in this special issue follows.