Title: The structure and evolution of the strategic management field: A content analysis of 26 years of strategic management research
Authors: Furrer, Olivier., Thomas, Howard., Goussevskaia, Anna.
Subject: Strategic Management
Publish: 2008
Status: full text
Source: International Journal of Management Reviews; Mar2008, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p1-23
Preparation: Scientific Database Management Journal Articles www.SYSTEM.parsiblog.com
Abstract: This paper analyses 26 years of strategic management research published in Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly and Strategic Management Journal. Through a content analysis, it studies the relationships between the subfields of strategic management. A multiple correspondence analysis provides a map of keywords and authors, and a framework to track this literature over the 26-year period. A discussion of future pathways in the strategic management literature is also provided.     --Download Article

Introduction: The purpose of this paper is to study the evolution of the strategic management literature based on an analysis of the content of the past 26 years of strategic management research published in the leading journals in the field, namely, the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Academy of Management Review (AMR), Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) and the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ). The paper serves not only to assess the structure and past evolution of the content of the strategic management field and its different subfields, but also presents some conjectures about further developments in this literature. By helping strategic management scholars to understand better the direction in which the field is going and where the gaps are, the paper is intended to provide a guideline for scholars in positioning their future research efforts.
We therefore focus on two questions. First, what is the content and the evolution of strategic management research? Second, who has published most in the literature of strategic management and what was their contribution to the evolution of the field? The first question involves a classification of articles to evaluate disciplinary evolution and to determine the ex post facto priorities of authors, editors and reviewers. To address the first question, we examined the content of the different subfields of the strategic management research field and their evolution over time. The second question involves the identification of the most prolific authors in the field and the evaluation of the impact of their articles. To address the secondquestion, we counted the number of articles published per author and the number of citations these articles received. We then related the most influential papers to the different subfields of strategic management.
Our paper departs from recent studies of the structure and evolution of the strategic management field, such as Bowman et al. (2002), Herrman (2005), Hoskisson et al. (1999), Phelan et al. (2002) and Ramos-Rodriguez and Ruiz-Navarro (2004), on three important aspects: data, analysis and coverage. Unlike, the studies by Bowman et al. (2002), Herrman (2005) and Hoskisson et al. (1999), our analysis of the structure and evolution of the strategic management field is based on quantitative data rather than qualitative interpretation, which may reflect the subjective views of their authors. Both types of studies are valuableand complementary, and therefore our results may be used to validate or invalidate previous interpretations. Unlike, the study by Ramos- Rodriguez and Ruiz-Navarro (2004), we did not used bibliometric techniques based on citations to analyse the structure and evolution of the strategic management fields because, as these authors notice, it is impossible to distinguish the motives underlying the chosen citations. For example, a citation could be made either to enhance a theoretical framework or to criticize a document or approach. Instead, we developed a typology of keywords, which we used to classify articles. Finally, unlike the studies by Phelan et al. (2002) and Ramos- Rodriguez and Ruiz-Navarro (2004), we did not focus on articles published in a single journal, but extended the scope of our study to the four leading journals in the strategic management field.
The choice of AMJ, AMR, ASQ and SMJ, as the leading representatives of the strategic management literature is straightforward. Over the 26-year period of study, these journals have attained positions as the top strategic management journals as well as the top business journals. Evidence of this comes from many sources, such as the studies published by Ian Macmillan (Macmillan 1989, 1991; Macmillan and Stern 1987) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). Macmillan (1991) reports the results of a survey that was conducted among business policy scholars in order to rate key management journals with respect to their appropriateness as outlets for academic research in the business policy field. This study was performed in 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1990. Indeed, since 1986, it shows that these four journals are consistently positioned at the top of the list of strategic management research journals.
Evidence is also available from the SSCI, now incorporated into the Web of Science Internet library source. The SSCI measures the influence of business publications based on impact factors (defined as the frequency with which articles from a journal have been cited) that are calculated for all journals. Between 1990 and 2005, AMR, ASQ, AMJ and SMJ have consistently been positioned in the top ten of the most influential business journals with impact scores larger than 1.8, which is supported by recent studies by Tahai and Meyer (1999) and Podsakoff et al. (2005). The perspective developed here is important for several reasons. First, established influential journals such as AMJ, AMR, ASQ and SMJ tend to shape ongoing theoretical and empirical work by setting new horizons for inquiry within their frame of reference. As a consequence, it is important to identify and understand the current evolution in research presented in these journals and the underlying causes of his evolution. Second, these developments may also provide insights about the future of the strategic management literature by illuminating the nature and evolution of the current debates in the area of strategy and, more broadly, in organization science. They may also indicate the presence of new challenges and themes in the field. To achieve this aim, the paper is structured as follows. First, a brief overview of the development of strategic management is provided, and this is followed by a deion of the methods employed in the study. Second, the results of the analysis of the content of the strategic management literature and its evolution over time are presented. The analysis of the literature involves a classification of articles that allows an evaluation of disciplinary trends.
Third, the most published authors and the most cited papers in the strategic management field are examined and assessed. Finally, the conclusions offer a discussion about the future of the strategic management literature and provide some insights into the possible future development of the field.

Development of Strategic Management:
An Overview
In order to understand the future of strategic management research, it is important to provide a  istorical perspective on the origins of the observed changes and evolutions in the development of the field. Therefore, it is important to present a broad but non-exhaustive overview of the field’s development. Numerous textbooks (e.g. Grant 1991a; Hitt et al. 1999; Johnson et al. 2004; McGee et al. 2005) have also synthesized the field’s development as well as influential research-oriented volumes such as Rumelt et al. (1994) and Pettigrew et al. (2002). The brief overview here is based on three of these studies which are: Richard Rumelt, Dan Schendel and David Teece’s ‘Fundamental issues in strategy’ (1994); Robert Hoskisson, Michael Hitt, William Wan and Daphne Yiu’s ‘Theory and research in strategic management: swings of a pendulum’ (1999); and Edward Bowman, Harbir Singh and Howard Thomas’s ‘The domain of strategic management: history and evolution’ (2002). First, we present the historical development of strategic management until 1980. Following Rumelt et al. (1994), we divided this development into three periods: (1) the precursors; (2) birth in the 1960s; and (3) transition towards a research orientation in the 1970s. The ‘prehistory’ of strategic management as an academic field lies in studies of economic organization and bureaucracy (Rumelt et al. 1994). Among the numerous writers who started to investigate the role of management and possibilities for strategic choice, the most famous are Taylor (1947), who initiated a ‘science of work’, Barnard (1938), who tudied the roles of managers, Simon (1947), who developed a framework to analyse administration, and Selznick (1957), who introduced the idea of ‘distinctive competence.’ An important contribution of these authors is their linkage of the study of organization with economic ideas.
However, the birth of the field of strategic management in the 1960s can be traced to
the following three works: Alfred Chandler’s Strategy and Structure (1962); Igor Ansoff’s
Corporate Strategy (1965); and the Harvard textbook Business Policy: Text and Cases
(Learned et al. 1965), the text of which is attributed to Kenneth Andrews and was later
rewritten in a separate book The Concept of Corporate Strategy (1971) (Rumelt et al.
1994). With these authors, research shifts from a deterministic one-best-way approach
to a more contingent perspective where organizations need to adapt to their external
environment. However, these studies were managerially oriented, with an emphasis on
normative preion rather than on analysis. Based mainly on in-depth case studies of
single firms or industries, the results of these studies are hardly generalizable.
In response to this issue of generalizability, during the 1970s, a transition started towards
a research orientation. This period can be characterized by the development of a dichotomy between two sets of research based on very different ontological and epistemological
perspectives. One view pursued a ‘process approach’, which consisted essentially of
deive studies of how strategies were formed and implemented. This research based
on the observation of actual organizational decision-making led to more realistic conceptions
of process, in which strategies were arrived at indirectly and, to some degree,
unintentionally. Quinn’s (1980) ‘logical incrementalism’ and Mintzberg and Waters’s
(1978, 1985) ‘emergent strategy’ are examples of such studies.
At the same time, a stream of research seeking to understand the relationship between
strategy and performance also started to develop. Departing from the analysis of
case studies of a single firm or industry, this deductive and large-scale statistical research
developed and tested hypotheses based on models abstracted from the structure–conduct–
performance (S–C–P) paradigm (Bain 1956, 1964; Mason 1939, 1949) dominant in the
literature of industrial organization (IO) economics (Porter 1981). Porter (e.g. 1979,
1980, 1985) has made the most influential contributions to the field. Using a structural
approach, Porter (1980) outlines a framework that can be used in understanding the structure
of an industry and is a useful analytical tool for assessing an industry’s attractiveness and
facilitating competitor analysis. In this manner, the primary focus of strategic management
during this period was on the environment and its relationship with a firm.
However, from the 1980s onwards, strategy research started to change its direction once
more. Studies switched their focus from industry structure as a unit of analysis to that
of the firm’s internal structure, resources and capabilities. Because of their focus on firms’
internal organization, two streams of research in organizational economics have attracted
the interest of researchers in strategic management:
transaction costs economics (TCE) (Williamson 1975, 1985) and agency theory
(Fama 1980; Jensen and Meckling 1976). The initial purpose of TCE was to seek to explain
why firms exist (Williamson 1975, 1985). In strategic management, TCE’s contribution has
been mainly in three directions: TCE provided a theoretical rationale for the adoption of the
multidivisional structure by large diversified firms and highlighted the relationship between
the multidivisional structure and firm’s performance (e.g. Hoskisson et al. 1991). Transaction
costs economics has also been used to explain the functioning of hybrid forms
of organization (i.e. strategic alliances and joint ventures) as an intermediate form between
markets and hierarchies (Hennart 1988; Kogut 1988; Williamson 1991). Finally,
TCE has more recently been applied to explain the choice of international modes of
market entry (e.g. Hennart and Park 1983). Drawing from the property rights literature
(e.g. Alchian and Demsetz 1972) and TCE, agency theory explains that in modern
corporations characterized by separation of ownership and control, the interests of shareholders
and managers may diverge. In this context, managers will seek to maximize their
own interests at the expense of shareholders (Eisenhardt 1989a). Agency theory has been
applied to a variety of strategic management topics such as innovation, corporate governance
and diversification.
In parallel, a resource-based theory of competitive advantage was also developed.
The focus of the resource-based approach is on the relationship between firm resources
and performance. According to Wernerfelt (1984), a resource can be thought of as a
strength or weakness of a given firm. Following the seminal work of Penrose (1959), the
resource-based view conceptualizes a firm as a bundle of productive resources with different
firms possessing unique bundles of these resources. The resource-based theory includes
the resource-based view of the firm (Wernerfelt 1984), dynamic capabilities (Stuart and Podolny
1996; Teece et al. 1997), and a knowledgebased approach (Grant 1996; Powell and
Dent-Micallef 1997; Spender 1996; Szulanski 1996). Important theoretical developments have also come from Barney (1991) and Grant (1991b). This new emphasis in the strategic
management has even been seen as a paradigm shift (Rouse and Daellenbach 1999). The
research focus shifted from the S–C–P paradigm (Bain 1964; Mason 1939, 1949;
Porter 1980), where competitive advantage is primarily determined by environmental factors,
to the resource-based theory, which highlights how the possession of valuable, rare, inimitable
and non-substitutable resources may result in sustained superior performance (Barney 1991;
Mahoney and Pandian 1992). Two related streams have been developed in
parallel to the resource-based theory of competitive advantage (Barney and Arikan 2001),
namely, the theory of invisible assets (Itami 1987) and work on competence-based theories
of corporate diversification (Prahalad and Bettis 1986; Prahalad and Hamel 1990). Itami
(1987) argues that information-based invisible assets, such as technology, customer trust,
brand image, corporate culture and management skills, are the real sources of competitive
advantage because they are hard and timeconsuming to accumulate, can be used in
multiple ways simultaneously, and are both inputs and outputs of business activities.
With respect to competence-based theories of corporate diversification, Prahalad and his
colleagues (Prahalad and Bettis 1986; Prahalad and Hamel 1990) developed an approach to
corporate diversification, which emphasizes the potential importance of sharing less
tangible assets across businesses and the role that this sharing could play in creating value
through diversification.
This overview demonstrates how research in strategic management grew from rather
simple concepts of strategy intended to give practical advice to managers to a rigorous
search from a positivist perspective for intellectual foundations with explanatory and
predictive power. Four leading journals, AMJ, AMR, ASQ and SMJ have been crucial in
setting the academic tone for the field. A detailed study of their developments over the 26-year
horizon from 1980 to 2005 is now provided.

Method
To examine the content of the strategic management literature, trace its evolution and identify main streams of research, a content analysis was first performed of the papers focusing on strategic management published in AMJ, AMR, ASQ and SMJ. A content analysis provides a means for the ive, systematic and quantitative consideration of published articles. It also allows for an interpretation of the direction in which journal editors, reviewers and authors are taking the field as it reflects the evolution of their priorities over time.
The first step in our analysis was to select the articles to be analysed. Because of its specific focus on strategic management, we selected every article published between 1980 and 2005 in SMJ, with the exception of a few articles written by editors as well as introductions to special issues. For AMJ, AMR and ASQ, whose focus is broader than strategic management, we selected only those articles which were explicitly on strategic management topics by examining the content of each title and abstract. A total of 2125 articles were identified and selected. Table 1 shows the number of articles per journal and per year. SMJ is the dominant source of articles in strategic management with a share around 65%.

Coding
In order to code and analyse the content of the articles, a list of 26 major themes of research or keywords was developed. The creation of this list was necessary because of the large number of idiosyncratic keywords provided by the authors and journal databases. Indeed, among the near 1000 keywords retrieved from authors and databases such as ABI/Informs, a majority (more than 65%) were used only once. Such a number is too large to be analysed, and the fact that a large number of these keywords were used only once would have reduced the reliability of the analysis…

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