Organizations and Markets

Raising the Bar: The Strategy Research Initiative

2 August 2009 at 4:31 am Nicolai Foss 2 comments

| Nicolai Foss |

The Business Policy and Strategy Division is the largest and arguably dominant division of the Academy of Management. Strategy’s leading journal, the Strategic Management Journal, consistently ranks among the top-5 management journals. What is being done in strategy clearly matters to the rest of the Academy.

Strategy has a general reputation for being a relatively rigorous management field (whether this is well deserved or not is another matter), something that is often ascribed to the heavy influence of economics on the development of the field over the last three decades. And yet, strategy also exhibits a plethora of different approaches; there is still no agreement on the nature of the key dependent variables; and the field unabashedly employs key explanatory constructs (e.g., capabilities, dynamic capabilities, absorptive capacity, etc.), the nature, operationalization, and measurement of which are still unclear. It may also be noted that although strategy does rely quite a lot on economic reasoning in comparison to other management fields, the formal way of reasoning of modern economists seldom finds its way into the pages of the leading strategy journals.

Prompted, apparently, by similar observations and frustrations, a group of Young(er) Turks (“mid-career scholars,” to use their own words) has gathered under the banner of the Strategy Research Initiative.

The stated aim of SRI is to serve as “an action-oriented community — we seek to build institutions and disseminate resources that help strategy researchers raise the bar of scholarship.” Membership in SRI is by invitation and so far includes an impressive roster of 22 mainly US-based top strategy scholars, including Nick Argyres, Witold Henisz, Jan Rivkin, Michael Ryall, Olav Sorenson, and Anne-Marie Knott. These scholars and the rest of the list are, of course, all very well published and highly influential, and there is little doubt that taken together they have the potential of changing the frontier of strategy research, not to mention the organization and agenda of the BPS division.

The SRI credo is here. In operational terms, and as indicated by the above names, it seems to translate into a call for strategy research to rely heavily on empirical industrial organization economics, cooperative game theory, analytical sociology, and state of the art econometrics. SRI offers an extremely useful Strategy Reader and a (more rudimentary) Empirical Primer.

The Reader presents overviews of select areas in strategy, is written in a Handbook-like format, and lists the contributors’ preferred references/contributions to various strategy research areas (the contributors are relatively modest with respect to including their own research papers).

There is no doubt that that the work reported in the Reader all satisfies the standards of rigor, cumulative theory development, reliance on state of the art empirical methods, etc. However, while satisfying such criteria regarding form, the listed contributions do not seem to add up in the content dimension: it is unclear what unites, for example, Klepper-style studies of industry evolution, McDonald & Ryall-style cooperative games, and the TCE approach favored by e.g. Oxley, Argyres, and Henisz. To be sure, providing theoretical unification is not the purpose of the SRI initiative. But it means that SRI may not lead to less theoretical diversity in the strategy field, only to more rigorous and well-founded diversity. Perhaps that is just as it should be.

At any rate, we at O&M applaud the SRI initiative and look forward to witnessing the SRIs raise the bar of scholarship in strategy research!

Entry filed under: - Foss -, Strategic Management.