Advances and Challenges in Strategic Management (Part 1)

Introduction

In the journal “Advances and Challenges in Strategic Management” (Grant, 2007) we learn that various strategic management frameworks have become common bases for guiding work, particularly in market-based economies and create a great challenges for both researches and practitioners. And over last two decades, major governmental restructuring in parts of the world have altered both constraints and stimuli impacting companies large and small.

In spite of that, the substantial obstacles faced in using many research methodologies, researches have been marking considerable progress.

Global Context facing managers and researches

Grant (2007) explained that history suggests there have been relatively few tranquil periods for general managers in market-based economies, but today challenges and combinations of challenges seem be multiplying.

It was started with the consequences of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, at the same time that concerns about the “Y2K” problems facing computer systems. As the excess of that technological and economic transition were becoming ever more apparent in 2001, terrorist attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon left many analysts scrambling for a new framework to aid understanding in a world that was both “hypercompetitive” and laden with physical threats from organizations with a variety of geographical and political origins.

Grant (2007) also stated the globalization of markets has been expanded substantially during the last decades as government policies have shifted in populous regions of Asia and Eastern Europe and internet-based transaction have accelerated the speed and extended the reach of commercial activity.

Grant (2007) selected factors contributing to the dynamic and ambiguous global context summarized above have created great opportunities for many, but in more than a few instances the investors, executives and government officials have been surprised by outcomes.

Steps in the development of Strategy Management

Grant (2007) differentiate teachers and researchers will mark conceptual transitions within the strategic management field in somewhat differing ways and times, but a few of the events are well documented.

Grant (2007) argues two broad stream of research were integrated by a number of participants during the decade following the mid-1950s. One stream might be described as examining “people and organizations unconnected to economic performance” and the other could be characterized as viewing “economic entities without human participants”

Grant (2007) also argues additional and sometimes “fundamental issues in strategy” are more specialized conferences have been sponsored as means of encouraging the development, exchange and testing of new ideas in strategic management.

Advances in the strategy management literature

Grant (2007) stated with hundred of scholars contributing a vast number of articles and research reports during recent years, there have been many advances in the strategic management literature than space permits us to review here.

The “industrial analysis” stream of research also witnessed development under the category of “strategy groups”. Several research methods have been used by various scholars to further our understanding of factors, which contribute to improved performance both within and across strategic groups.

References:

Grant, J. H. (2007), Advances and Challenges in Strategic Management, International Journal of Business 12(1), 2007. ISSN: 1083-4346.