PART I

THEORY, SCHOOLS AND PRACTICE

1
Schools of Thought in Strategic Management: Fragmentation, Integration or Synthesis
Tom Elfring and Henk W. Volberda

Over the last thirty years, strategic management has become established as a legitimate field of research and managerial practice (Shrivastava, 1986: 363). In the evolution of strategy research, a diversity of partly competitive and partly supplementary paradigms have emerged. To provide an unequivocal definition would mean ignoring the versatility of strategic management. The choice of a definition and the application of specific strategic management techniques is greatly dependent on which paradigmatic schools of thought in strategic management one prefers. In this book, we will therefore review the various schools of thought and their contribution to the theory and practice of strategy. A school of thought is understood to be the range of thought of a specific group of researchers, which has crystallized within the field of strategic management (Brown, 1993). In other words, a school of thought can be seen as an institutionalized paradigm. Besides reflecting on the variety of schools in strategy, we will also sketch out new promising directions in strategy research and practice. Although some strategy scholars have argued that the achieved multiformity in schools of thought signifies an enrichment of the research within the field of study (cf. Mahoney, 1993), other scholars from related disciplines complain about the lack of consistency and coherence (Camerer, 1985). In particular, they argue that the field of strategic management is extremely fragmented and that there is no agreement concerning the underlying theoretical dimensions nor the methodological approach to be employed. In response, many strategists have advocated increased integration of theories within the strategy field.

2 Rethinking