What is strategic management, really? A consensus view on the essence of the field

Rajiv Nag, Donald C. Hambrick, Ming Jer Chen

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

What is strategic management really about? In spite of 25 years of vibrant growth, the essence of the field of strategic management is highly ambiguous. It is commonly asserted that the field is fragmented and lacks a distinct identity. These skepticisms and concerns, however, are paradoxically at odds with the great success that strategic management has enjoyed in recent years. How might one explain this paradox? We argue that strategic management scholars share a common albeit implicit understanding of what their field is all about- a consensus that is reflected in the language they use. In this paper, we adopt a linguistic perspective to extract the distinctive lexicon of the field, and through that lexicon we impute the consensual definition of the field of strategic management. We hope that our efforts will help consolidate the gains of the field as well as promote new introspection about what our field is, compared to what we want it to be.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalAcademy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings
StatePublished - 2005
Event65th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, AOM 2005 - Honolulu, HI, United States
Duration: Aug 5 2005Aug 10 2005

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Information Systems and Management

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