THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT FIELD: A SURVEY-BASED STATUS REVIEW AND ASSESSMENT.

Abstract

By many measures, the field of strategic management has had enormous success, the number of members of the Business Policy and Strategy division, the number of paper submissions to the Academy's national meetings, the rapid increase in prestige and influence of the Strategic Management Journal. Yet despite this success, there is a frequent concern that the field may be off-track and future success may be jeopardized (Daft & Buenger, 1990; Hambrick, 2004). Such reflection and self-criticism is healthy and necessary for the progress of an academic field. Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to that self-assessment through survey-based opinions, evaluations, and activities of over 500 members of the BPS division. Sample findings show that important constituents to the field include scholars, practitioners, students, and public policy officials, in that order. However, there is a lack of correspondence between the relative importance of a constituency and the effectives with which that constituency is served. Results also show that organization theory and economics are the most heavily used disciplines in strategic management research, followed, with a significant gap, by sociology, psychology, and international business. The findings of this study should help play an important role in assessing the current status of the field as well as in providing a platform for continuing the dialog of critical self-assessment of strategic management.