Reasons for the Fragmentation in the Strategy Field

Zusatztext

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: A+, Trinity College Dublin (BESS), course: Advanced Strategic Management, language: English, abstract: The question to examine in this essay has evolved from a statementmade by Elfring and Volberda (2001, p.1) which reads as follows: In theevolution of strategy research, a diversity of partly competitive and partlysupplementary paradigms have emerged. The task is now to look behind thestatement and to ask why this fragmentation happened and how we canmake sense of all these different perspectives. Firstly, it is important toexamine the roots of the strategy field in order to understand why strategymatters at all and why academics spend so much time and effort on definingtheir view of the right corporate strategy. Following this, I will give anoverview of the most common perspectives and schools which emergedalong the way. Finally, I will conclude with the reasons behind thisdiversification and give an outlook into the future of the strategy research.Before starting up it is essential to underline the fact that there is nosuch thing as the one and only strategy which has developed over time butthat with practically every new decade (starting with the 1960s) there was anew focus and a new way of seeing strategy. The field of strategy is one ofthe most integrated research areas which exists and for that reason scientistsfrom many different academic backgrounds contributed to the mainstreamsof strategy. The point that Elfring and Volberda (2001, p.2) argue is to walkaway from inventing new directions and rather look back to pull ideastogether for creating a new academic basis to build on.

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