engleski

Evolution of Strategic Management: Toward Strategic Thinking Era

The discipline of strategic management is a relatively young field where all seminal scholarly articles were published in the last 30 years, with over 80 per cent of them in the last 10 years (McKiernan, 1996, p. xiv). During the decades of evolution, strategic management has passed over several phases reflecting and distinguishing the development of content and process part of the field. As the multidisciplinary approach in management, strategic management has two generic roots in biology and military tradition (Cummings, 1993, p.133) reflecting the experiences from sociology and psychology. The content of the field was born under the name of Business Policy. The most strongly development emphasis was put on strategic planning. Today it is widespread to talk about Strategic management. The formal studying of the subject began with the practitioners experiences working in the big corporations in USA. The field strongly developed its theoretical base, without the formal articulation of the dominant paradigm. The scientific interest in the top journal (Strategic Management Journal) is predominantly apart from the practise focusing more on the methodology and robustness and less on the creative ideas dealing with practise (Mintzberg, 2005). Strategy research has taken a practice turn (Chia, 2004) putting the activity-based form of inquiry (Whittington, 1996, 2002 ; Jazabkowski, 2003 ; Johnson et al. 2003) into the focus of academic interest forming a strategy as practise, relatively new group of scholars trying to make closer connections between theory and practise. Apart from the shift in approach there is a recognisable tendency of the evolution of strategic management toward the strategic thinking. Due to the fact that there is no definition of strategic thinking, there are attempts in defining strategic thinking in different directions. Strategic thinking is put in relation to strategic planning and therefore Heracleous (Heracleous, 2003) suggests dialectical relation between strategic thinking and strategic planning. Paper concludes with the research hypothesis on strategic thinking and suggestions for future research. To be more specific is the elaboration on different elements of strategic thinking and their combination and linking them to firm's success.

strategic management; strategic thinking

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