STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 2(1): 9198

DOI: 10.1177/1476127004040915
Copyright 2004 Sage Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com

S O ! A P B OX
E D I TO R I A L E S S AY

The disintegration of strategic

management: its time to consolidate
our gains
Donald C. Hambrick Pennsylvania State University, USA

What an irony. Strategic management, the field that documented the virtues of core
competences (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990), relatedness (Rumelt, 1974) and dominant
logic (Prahalad and Bettis, 1986), is on the verge of losing any semblance of these
qualities in its own intellectual affairs. If Dick Rumelt were to draw one of his diagrams depicting the relatedness among the many strands of theory and research in the
field of strategic management today (instead of among lines of business in a corporation, as he originally did), the result would be a picture with long tentacles, the
thinnest of linkages and no apparent core or center. If a bibliometrician were to analyze the reference lists of a random sample of recent strategic management articles, he
or she would find little commonality in the works cited, or few recurring intellectual
touchstones. Our field is rapidly being pulled apart by centrifugal forces. Like a supernova that once packed a wallop, our energy is now dissipating and we are quickly
growing cold.
Granted, the natural tendency is for an academic field to drift toward specializations, and even subspecializations, as it matures and accumulates a body of knowledge.
But this does not mean that it must lose its core underpinnings, as has happened and
is increasingly happening in the field of strategic management. When such dissolution occurs, the field ceases to be a field. It loses its distinctiveness, and its various elements become indistinguishable from adjacent fields and are eventually absorbed by
them. Just as in the world of business, unless the field of strategic management can
regain some amount of coherence, its disparate research agendas will be taken over by
microeconomics, organizational sociology, marketing and psychology. In turn, our purpose as a field, the study of the roles and responsibilities of general managers, will cease
to have a place on the academic landscape. Future general managers and their constituents including employees, customers, shareholders, and society at large will be
the worse for it.
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Our 25-year trajectory

Mind you, I am not longing for the good old days. When I started my academic career
in 1978, business policy, as it was then called, was thought of more as a capstone course
than as an academic field. Policy faculty were being hired primarily because of regulatory fiat (specifically due to an AACSB requirement of an integrative course for undergraduate and MBA students), which did not endear us to deans or colleagues in other
fields. There were no respectable journals ready to publish our work. Of the 741 articles
published in Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review and
Administrative Science Quarterly during the period 19759, fewer than 20 were what we
would call policy or strategy articles (even with liberal counting). And, as of 1979, no
professor who had presented himself or herself as a policy scholar had been granted
tenure at any top-tier business schools except Harvard, the ancestral home of the
field.1
But things quickly started looking up. In an intriguing instance of academic rebranding, the field was rechristened in 1979 as strategic management and serious
scholarly work was pledged (Schendel and Hofer, 1979). Strategic Management Journal
was launched in 1980 and quickly became well-rated (MacMillan, 1987). By 1982,
strategy articles were appearing in almost every issue of AMJ, AMR and ASQ. And by
the mid-1980s, strategic management professors were qualifying for tenure at premier
universities.
The floodgates were open, and the field of strategic management quickly grew and
flourished. It prospered in great part because it adopted the conventions of the more
established social sciences, particularly the trappings of normal science. But events did
not turn out quite the way they are supposed to under conventions of normal science.
Instead of developing a handful of rival theories and then amply testing them to
determine which were the most worthy, strategic management scholars engaged in a
theoretical free-for-all which continues to this day. Loads of theories some lifted from
other fields, some home-grown are invoked in strategy articles, often with the sole
purpose of being able to claim that the articles are theory-based. But each of these
articles is usually an application or illustration of a theory, not a test, per se, of the
theory.2
Without comparative tests, no theories are weeded out. So, over the last 20 years,
strategic management researchers have drawn upon a vast profusion of theoretical frameworks, including at a minimum: industrial organization, contingency, game, tournament, resource dependence, upper echelons, agency, transaction cost economics,
population ecology, institutional, resource-based view, knowledge-based view, evolutionary economics and the dynamic capabilities view. Naturally, these theories are
almost always supported no matter how modestly, because that is a precondition for getting the articles published. But we have no real idea about the rank order or any other
gauge of relative strength of the predictive power of these theories.
Let me describe a very typical situation. A researcher sets out to test institutional
theory (I could have picked another one) by exploring whether firms imitate other
exemplar firms in their strategic behaviors. The researcher finds from multivariate

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analysis that a number of control variables yield an R2 of about .25, and the addition of
several measures of exemplar behavior (for testing imitation) increases the R2 (significantly) to about .30. Now, in our current world, the researcher declares success for himself and for institutional theory. But how potent is the theory really? After all, 70
percent of strategic behavior is still unexplained. Do you suppose that each firms level
and mix of resources, its managers experiences and biases, its ownership profile or other
theoretically plausible factors might lie behind the still vastly unexplained puzzle?
Actually, these other explanations are sometimes included among the control variables
but then largely ignored, even though they may explain far more variance than does the
theory under scrutiny. We need some careful and fair tests between theories, not simply
tests of isolated theories.
Our wild proliferation of theories is only half of the problem, though. The other
half arises because of the wide array of phenomena that researchers seek to explain
through these various theoretical lenses. Strategic management is a big subject. There
are vertical integration, diversification, pricing, capacity expansion, international strategy, product line breadth, governance, executive succession, executive compensation,
alliances, restructuring, human resource policies just to name a few and, beyond
those, of course there is all manner of performance variables. The number of possible
combinations of theoretical lenses and interesting phenomena is staggering; and we are
well on our way to trying them all. As a result, we possess a proliferation of unconnected
tidbits of insight, but few, if any, grand insights.
As a further complication, more and more strategic management scholars seem to
believe that their own preferred tack is going to yield the big insight, largely unaware
of the contributions and promise of other strands, and especially unaware of the distinct possibility that the big insights, the big breakthroughs, may only arise if and
when multiple perspectives are reconciled or integrated. Alas, strategy content and
strategy process researchers operate in very different spheres, as do economics-based
and behaviorally-based researchers, as do those who subscribe to assumptions of
strategic rationality and those who favor assumptions of bounded rationality, as do
those who study corporate-level strategy and those who study business-level strategy.
I could go on and on. In my 25 years in the field of strategic management, I have
observed a distinct trend toward separateness; beyond that, parochialism; and beyond
that, dogmatism.

What to do? Lets start filling in

In order to overcome the debilitating fragmentation that has occurred in the field of
strategic management, researchers need to start filling in, or adding depth, texture and
linkages to our many disparate nuggets of insight about the work of general managers.
It is time to start taking stock of what we already know, as well as to examine the interconnections and implications of what we know. I can think of at least four promising
thrusts that would help us proceed with this new philosophy of consolidation.

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First, the field of strategic management needs to renew its once strong interest in
strategic processes and strategy implementation. More specifically, there needs to be a
better integration among strategy content, strategy process and implementation.
Strategy content researchers, who are centrally interested in the question, What should
the firms strategy be?, overwhelmingly pursue their research without any attention to
such crucial questions as What are the organizational challenges in executing such a
strategy? and What can business leaders do to enhance the likelihood that such smart
strategies will be proposed and endorsed by those in the organization who have the best
understanding of market, technological, and competitive realities?. One of the nice
things about being able to ignore issues of implementation and processes is that no
strategic idea is too far-fetched or implausible. Unfortunately, actual managers do not
have that luxury. We need to re-kindle our commitment to understanding complex
strategic processes, as was once done so successfully by such researchers as Bower (1970),
Burgelman (1983), Fredrickson (1984) and Eisenhardt (1989).
Second, and related to the first proposal, we need to reintroduce the human element to our research. During the last two decades, human beings have been largely discarded from a great part of strategic management research, as scholars have sought to
anthropomorphize organizations, treating them as willful, purposive entities. It is commonplace to read passages of articles that refer to how companies change, organizations
perceive, firms innovate and so on. It conjures up an image of events in Armonk, New
York, in 1993: IBMs articles of incorporation pry their way out of a file cabinet and start
floating through the hallways, shrieking, Hell, no. Were not going to break up this
company, no matter what all the so-called experts say. Were going to find a way to
finally benefit from our wide array of products. But, no, it was Lou Gerstner who made
and communicated those choices.
It wont always be the CEO. Sometimes it will be the whole top management team,
sometimes middle managers, sometimes lower-level employees, and often the interactions and dynamics among all these groups, that account for the development, weighing
and selection of strategic alternatives. But it will always be people complete with
biases, hopes, fears, fatigue, jealousy and other human foibles who make strategy
something other than a calculative, technoeconomic endeavor. For example, the tenure
of a top management team affects strategic behavior (Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1990),
and the personality of a CEO influences organizational structure (Miller and Droge,
1986). Researchers who fail to incorporate into their studies any understanding of
human limits and preferences and especially the fact that they can vary widely from
one person to another, from one management team to another, from one CEO to another,
and from one board to another are missing a grand research opportunity, but also barking up the wrong tree.
Third, in order to consolidate our understanding, the field of strategic management
needs to get over its fetish about novelty. Our major journals will not publish anything
that is not new or fresh. No wonder we keep pushing in new directions without comprehending where we have already been. And no wonder we do not know very much for
sure. We are not allowed to study the same thing even twice. By comparison, more
secure and established fields allow and encourage a constant regimen of replications,

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extensions and minor refinements, all as a way to gain understanding of which theories
really hold water. In the field of social psychology, for instance, the concept of escalating
commitment has been examined numerous times, from various vantages, with an array
of sensitivity tests (summarized in Brockner and Rubin, 1985); as a result, a lot is
known about escalating commitment. Our field has heaps of theories and hypotheses,
but we have structured our norms in such a way that we literally are not allowed to
develop any confidence in their true merits.
Granted, the greatest acclaim will come to those who develop novel and bold theoretical breakthroughs; but the field of strategic management will advance truly
advance only if there is room and encouragement for researchers also to engage in the
incremental. We need to bear in mind the business parallel that we are fond of pointing
out from time to time: grand strategic initiatives may be the glamorous, exciting part of
the executives job; but it is in the mundane task of execution, more often than not, that
organizational success is won or lost. For us to succeed, we need tests and then more
tests.
Fourth, and more fundamentally, our field needs to get over its fetish about theory.
It is essentially impossible to get a paper published in one of our major journals if it does
not make a significant theoretical contribution. What a shame. After all, our objective is
to understand what general managers do and how they might do it better. Theory is a
means to this end, but it is not the end.
Our foolish insistence on theoretical advances in every article has caused two unfortunate results. The first is that potentially very instructive research that merely
describes organizational phenomena or reports associations between phenomena, but
without any theory, cannot be issued for consumption. With these ground rules, an epidemiologist in the 1920s who detected a strong association between cigarette smoking
and severe health problems would have been prevented from reporting his results, all for
lack of a theory. This loss, in turn, would have stymied any awareness that a theory was
even needed; and it would have caused even more human tragedy than actually
occurred. Indeed, other fields, those more secure about themselves than we are, including the natural sciences, medical sciences, and even the business fields of finance and
marketing, regularly publish articles that report descriptions of complex phenomena, as
well as unexplained associations between phenomena. It is simply not clear why we
should not do the same, for the sake of moving knowledge forward.
I was recently reminded of the folly of our ways when a young colleague asked me
to look at a manuscript that had been rejected by one of our major journals. The article
was, yes, short on theory. What it did, though, was examine a widely debated company
behavior (for my friends sake, we will disguise the topic) and found, in a large sample,
that adoption of the behavior was associated with a significant subsequent drop in company performance (operationalized in multiple ways). The author controlled for all the
obvious things, including prior performance and industry performance. The magnitude
of the performance drop was economically momentous; the increment in R2 from
including the variable of interest was about .08, which is quite a lot by our standards;
and a hold-out sample generated similar results. The author discussed speculated,
really why this company behavior might be leading to such unhappy consequences.

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But he did not have the data to explore the possible reasons; nor did the reasons fit into
one of our grand pre-existing theories, so the attempted explanations struck the reviewers as atheoretical. All that my friend was able to say was our equivalent of Gee, I dont
know why. What I do know is that smokers tend to get sick and die. If his results could
be published, other researchers could then dig into the whys and wherefores.
I am not advocating mindless data-mining. What I am saying is that we should
have room for researchers who pursue questions of great practical consequence and find
substantial and clear patterns in their data, but who lack an explanation for those patterns. Other fields allow such research all the time. Those of us who think of ourselves
as theorists ought to love to see such research published, because it gives us something
new to puzzle over.
The other unfortunate result of our obsession with theory is that authors are under
pressure to wedge their research into a theoretical framework, no matter how ill the fit.
It is now exceptionally common to read or try to read empirical articles that address
inherently interesting phenomena, but that the authors have felt compelled to contort
into a mold that will come across as contributing to theory. This makes for very bad
reading, as well as very imprecise and weak theory. Sergeant Friday on the TV show
Dragnet used to say, Just the facts, maam. There are times when I wish I could just get
the facts.

And so what for SO!?

This new journal, Strategic Organization, has a marvelous opportunity to play a major role
in helping to bring about the needed consolidation of our field. But I am receiving
mixed signals whether SO! will make things better or worse. On the hopeful side, SO!s
interest in the intersection of strategy and organization is exceedingly welcome and
should help promote the type of research I am proposing, particularly work on strategic
processes, strategy implementation and human factors in strategy. It is time to accelerate our interest in the social, psychological and institutional settings in which strategy
development occurs, and it appears that SO! intends to help on this front.
On the more skeptical side, I worry about SO!s plan to publish only disciplinegrounded research. Research that draws upon, or is even steeped in, basic disciplines
should be welcome, but why should it be preferred? Scholars who are anchored squarely
in disciplines economics, sociology or psychology, for instance are the most likely to
take a narrow, circumscribed view of strategic phenomena. While many may equate the
word discipline with high standards and well-developed concepts and tools, we should
also remember that most dictionary entries for the word will include such expressions as
training that molds, enforcing obedience, prescribed conduct and, of course, punishment. Discipline-based researchers, accordingly, tend to be doctrinaire in their assumptions and perspectives. They are often the least likely to be able or willing to engage in
the types of integration and reconciliation we urgently need. I happily note that SO!s
official editorial stance is to be multidisciplinary and discipline-neutral. However, if
SO! requires, or even just favors, what the editors are calling discipline-grounded

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research, this promising new journal may only aggravate the problems of parochialism
and disjointedness that already plague our field.
I will not presume to propose that SO! should take up my call for the publication
of replications, extensions, descriptive accounts and reports of unexplained associations.
Just as such research could be risky for a young scholar, so too might these styles of
research be chancy for a fledgling journal. But I hope that once SO!s prominence
becomes secured, its editors will consider providing us with a diet of articles that help to
reconcile and integrate the disparate things we already know, rather than only adding to
the centrifugal forces that are pulling us apart.
Above all, I hope that the leaders of our field our most prominent scholars, senior
statesmen, editors and review board members, and officers of our professional societies
will join in the call for the intellectual bridge-building that we so urgently need. It is
time to fill in, to address linkages among strategy content and process, to reintroduce
the human element to our inquiries, to test, refine, retest and prune the teeming profusion of ideas that have been generated under the banner of strategic management. We
cannot meaningfully advance unless we comprehend and consolidate what we already
know.

Notes
1

Of course, a significant number of faculty who had been tenured in other fields notably
marketing, organizational behavior and operations management were teaching policy at
elite schools.
In order for a theory to be tested, it needs to be directly pitted against other theories, not
examined in isolation. Further, in order to comprehend the validity or power of a theory, we
need to be told about all the instances in which it has been fairly tested and failed.

References
Bower, J. L. (1970) Managing the Resource Allocation Process. Boston, MA: Division of Research,
Harvard Business School.
Brockner, J. and Rubin, J. Z. (1985) Entrapment in Escalating Conflicts. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Burgelman, R. A. (1983) A Process Model of Internal Corporate Venturing in the Diversified
Major Firm, Administrative Science Quarterly 28: 22344.
Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989) Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments,
Academy of Management Journal 32: 54376.
Finkelstein, S. and Hambrick, D. C. (1990) Top Management Team Tenure and Organizational
Outcomes: The Moderating Role of Managerial Discretion, Administrative Science Quarterly
35: 484503.
Fredrickson, J. W. (1984) The Comprehensiveness of Strategic Decision Processes: Extension,
Observations, Future Directions, Academy of Management Journal 27: 44566.
MacMillan, S. I. (1987) Delineating a Forum for Business Policy Scholars, Strategic Management
Journal 8(2): 1836.
Miller, D. and Droge, C. (1986) Psychological and Traditional Determinants of Structure,
Administrative Science Quarterly 31: 53960.

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Prahalad, C. K. and Bettis, R. A. (1986) The Dominant Logic: A New Linkage Between
Diversity and Performance, Strategic Management Journal 7: 485501.
Prahalad, C. K. and Hamel, G. (1990) The Core Competence of the Corporation, Harvard
Business Review 6: 7993.
Rumelt, R. P. (1974) Strategy, Structure and Economic Performance. Boston, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Schendel, D. E. and Hofer, C. W., eds (1979) Strategic Management: A New View of Business Policy
and Planning. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Donald C. Hambrick is Smeal Chaired Professor of Management at the Smeal College of

Business, Pennsylvania State University. His research is in the field of strategic management,
with particular emphasis on the study of executive behavior, top management teams and governance. Publications include Explaining the Premiums Paid for Large Acquisitions: Evidence
of CEO Hubris (with Mathew Hayward, in Administrative Science Quarterly, 1997) and The
External Ties of Top Executives: Implications for Strategic Choice and Performance (with
Marta Geletkanycz, in Administrative Science Quarterly, 1997). He is former president of the
Academy of Management. Address: Smeal College of Business Administration, The
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. [email: dch14@psu.edu]

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