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Strategy and business history rejoined: How and why strategic management concepts took over business history

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Scholars at the intersection of business history and strategic management have argued for the relevance and importance of historical methods in the study of strategic management of organizations. We flip this argument and ask about the role of strategic management concepts in the study of business history. We analyze volumes of Business History and Business History Review and a representative sample of business history books using a comprehensive set of keywords, each related to a specific sub-discourse in strategic management. Our results show that as scientific communities, business history and strategic management have become increasingly similar in their conceptual overlap. This study contributes further nuance to the understanding of intellectual change across scientific communities, and the role of business history in the rise of management and organizational history.
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Strategy and business history rejoined: How and
why strategic management concepts took over
business history
Juha-Antti Lamberg , Jari Ojala & Jan-Peter Gustafsson
To cite this article: Juha-Antti Lamberg , Jari Ojala & Jan-Peter Gustafsson (2020): Strategy
and business history rejoined: How and why strategic management concepts took over business
history, Business History, DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2020.1856076
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1856076
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.
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BUSINESS HISTORY
Strategy and business history rejoined: How and why
strategic management concepts took over business
history
Juha-Antti Lamberga , Jari Ojalab and Jan-Peter Gustafssonb
aJyväskylä School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä, Jyvaskyla, Finland; bDepartment of
History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyvaskyla, Finland
ABSTRACT
Scholars at the intersection of business history and strategic manage-
ment have argued for the relevance and importance of historical meth-
ods in the study of strategic management of organizations. We flip this
argument and ask about the role of strategic management concepts in
the study of business history. We analyze volumes of Business History
and Business History Review and a representative sample of business
history books using a comprehensive set of keywords, each related to
a specific sub-discourse in strategic management. Our results show that
as scientific communities, business history and strategic management
have become increasingly similar in their conceptual overlap. This study
contributes further nuance to the understanding of intellectual change
across scientific communities, and the role of business history in the
rise of management and organizational history.
We suspect that readers will differ widely in their response to these comments. Some will
strongly support the ideas presented here. Others may strongly disagree. Rather than attempt-
ing to present many angles on the topic, we have chosen to present the views we know best,
and about which we feel most strongly. Those who see things differently are encouraged to do
the same. (Montgomery et al., 1989, p. 189)
Strategic management is one of the fastest-growing fields in the social sciences. As a
cross-disciplinary field at the intersection of economics, sociology, and organization theory,
it is an active and sizeable scientific community, with top journals such as the Strategic
Management Journal and Long Range Planning, conferences, and associations (Nag et al.,
2007; Nerur et al., 2008). History – as business historians are eager to remind us – has had a
specific place in strategic management due to the early contributions of Chandler (1962)
and later by important scholars of strategy process like Mintzberg and Waters (1982) and
Pettigrew (1985). Although most strategy scholars consider themselves statistically oriented
positivists (Hambrick & Chen, 2008), there has always been a minority emphasizing the value
of historical research (for an overview, see Vaara & Lamberg, 2016). Historical studies in the
top journals of strategic management, however, have been rare (e.g., Danneels, 2011).
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
CONTACT Juha-Antti Lamberg juha-antti.lamberg@jyu.fi
https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1856076
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
KEYWORDS
Business history; strategic
management; scientific
communities;
sociolinguistic analysis;
management history
2 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
Most recently, the history-friendly minority in strategic management has promoted historical
work by organizing a series of special issues in journals on strategy (e.g., Journal of
Management Studies 2010; Academy of Management Review 2016; Strategic Management
Journal 2020), and publishing articles emphasizing the unique nature of historical research.
These promotional activities have framed historical work as a narratively oriented sub-field
of qualitative studies (Godfrey et al., 2016), but some studies have demonstrated the het-
erogeneity of historical analysis (Decker et al., 2015; Maclean et al., 2016; Vaara & Lamberg,
2016). There are, accordingly, signs of a ‘historical turn’ (Clark & Rowlinson, 2004; Kieser, 1994;
Üsdiken & Kieser, 2004) in strategy and organization studies, along with increasing enthu-
siasm for business history and historical research.
Our research mission is to provide a complementary analysis to determine whether the
interest management scholars show in business history has been reciprocated by business
historians. The recent reviews of the scholarship on business history (e.g., Decker, 2016; Ojala
et al., 2017; Perchard et al., 2017) seem to be unanimous: business history is not extensively
theoretical, and it remains distant from research in business economics (and thus from strat-
egy). The Lamoreaux et al. (2008) bibliometric study, for example, shows that economic
theories and methods are rarely used in articles on business history. de Jong et al. (2016)
show that most studies of business history are descriptive case histories, reflecting a chal-
lenging task to fluent use of the methods and theories borrowed from other social sciences.
For this reason, they usually fail to generate new theory. Attempting to contribute to strategy
discourses, however, may be worth the effort. In a citation analysis, Ojala et al. (2017) show
that scholars from neighbouring fields also seek articles with ‘theoretical and conceptual
novelty’ from business history journals, and the overall tone in history-promoting editorial
articles (Argyres et al., 2020) in management journals signal a similar demand for histori-
cal work.
We approach the comparison between strategic management and business history from
an institutional point of view. We conceptualize scientific communities as collections of
individuals sharing a joint understanding of taken-for-granted practices (Meyer et al., 1997)
and social boundaries (Stichweh, 1992) specific to their field of study. As linguistically ori-
ented institutionalists have earlier noted (e.g., Phillips et al., 2004), language is a key in
constructing legitimacy (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Suddaby, 2010) as well as in defining
degrees of social distinction (Powell & Colyvas, 2008). In a sociolinguistic sense (Chambers,
2007), every scientific community is marked by a specific vocabulary that distinguishes it
from other fields (Sankoff, 1988). By focusing on the similarity between vocabularies, it
becomes possible to measure the distance between fields. In this study, we use specific sets
of concepts and language to systematically examine the depth and breadth of the overlap
between business history and strategic management as scientific communities (Rampton,
2010). Our findings show that a large quantity of articles published in Business History (BH),
Business History Review (BHR) and business history books use similar conceptual vocabulary
to that used in the field of strategic management. We also analyze the use of concepts in a
qualitative manner to examine similarities and differences in argumentation. The analysis
of the use of concepts reveals that they do not have different meanings in, for example,
Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) and BH. Accordingly, business history (as published in
journals) and strategic management have become increasingly adjacent as scientific com-
munities. Business history published in books, however, still appears to be a more
BUSINESS HISTORY 3
independent field when looking at how frequently strategic management concepts are
used. Yet how concepts are qualitatively used in books remains similar to how they are
used in SMJ.
We presume that several mechanisms explain the diffusion of strategy concepts. These
mechanisms range from normative pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) to boundary span-
ners (Knorr-Cetina, 1982), who facilitate diffusion by publishing in both fields. Accordingly,
while our research does not offer final explanations for these observations, it seems obvious
that a set of institutional factors from imitation to coercion are at work in review processes
and the practice of journal publishing. We emphasize that the situation is not hopeless for
business historians: an important part of scientific progress occurs at the intersection of
scientific communities.
Conceptual background
What are scientific communities?
Scientific communities are part of a larger interest to study the production of scientific
knowledge (Fuchs, 1993; Knorr-Cetina, 2009; Merton, 1973). Scientific communities are ‘[…]
network[s] of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular
domain’ (Haas, 1992, p. 3) and bound by a set of factors:2
(1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for
the social action of community members; (2) shared causal beliefs, which are derived from their
analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of problems in their domain and
which then serve as the basis for elucidating the multiple linkages possible policy actions and
desired outcomes; (3) shared notions of validity—that is, intersubjective, internally defined
criteria for weighing and validating knowledge in the domain of the expertise.
The above excerpt reflects the notion that although scientific communities are functionally
a specific type of a group in their task of producing scientific knowledge, their sociological
nature is like that of any social group (Jacobs, 1987; Knorr-Cetina, 2009). Discipline-based
scientific communities have shared expertise stemming from education and a ‘shared code
of conduct’ and ‘the Gelehrtenstand, a social cast defined by its members’ university educations’
(Broman, 1995, p. 841). As Stichweh (1992, p. 4), writes, ‘[…] disciplines are the primary unit of
internal differentiation of the modern system of science. For us this is important because it
allows us to view business historians and strategy scholars as two different communities.
Following the assumption that scientific communities are a meaningful unit of analysis,
the subsequent questions concern their distinctiveness and any development towards con-
vergence and divergence. In some sense, all humanities and social sciences – including and
especially business history and strategy (Wren & Van Fleet, 1983) – were the same in the late
18th century (e.g., Stichweh, 1992), and the number of distinct disciplines (and simultane-
ously scientific communities) has steadily increased since then. The degree of distinctiveness,
however, is an open question. All scientific communities aim to maintain their unique, semi-
closed nature, yet they are susceptible to a host of influences making them more similar
with other scientific communities.
One explanation for such convergence is a highly functional one: some ideas are simply
so powerful they diffuse everywhere. The evolutionary theory of Nelson and Winter (1982)
4 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
is a good example of such thinking. It emerged after long collaboration and a series of
publications in the 1960s and the 1970s, and was an anomaly at the intersection of economics
and organization theory (Becker, 2004). It never became that popular among economists
but was adopted by strategy scholars studying resources and capabilities (Hodgson &
Lamberg, 2018), becoming one of the core symbolic writings in strategy (Ramos-Rodríguez
& Ruíz-Navarro, 2004). Accordingly, the Nelson and Winter book could serve as a testimony
to the power of ideas and adaptability. There is, however, more at stake if we look at the
sociological side of this and other similar processes.
Aside from its unique and brilliant ideas, Nelson and Winter’s book – and its rapid rise to
become one of the iconic citations in strategy, organization theory, and other fields – is
further evidence of sociological diffusion mechanisms (e.g., Kennedy & Fiss, 2009; Tolbert &
Zucker, 1999) that result in global homogenization. In the case of the Nelson and Winter
book, it has become almost a mandatory citation in many types of research – not just because
of its useful ideas but as a way to legitimatize new research.
In general, two interrelated theoretical perspectives are important for understanding
homogenization processes. First, world society theory (Meyer et al., 1997) starts from the
premise that ideas, along with practices and their homogenization, originate in a powerful
world society that spreads to politics, science, and other practices. The underlying assump-
tion is that there is an institutionalized meta-order that affects practices through organiza-
tions and associations. As Meyer et al. (1997, p. 166) write about scientists and their
associations: …these legitimated experts appeal to and further develop transnational
accounts and models, yielding a self-reinforcing cycle in which rationalization further insti-
tutionalizes professional authority’. When viewed from our perspective, if professionalization
equals rationalization, it is expected that naturalistic scientific communities such as business
history transform themselves and adopt rationalized theoretical models from the core of
world society – in this case strategic management as a sub-branch of microeconomics (Foss
& Lindenberg, 2013).
The second institutional perspective on the diffusion of practices – a close relative of the
world society theory – is sociological institutionalism, and especially the research originating
in DiMaggio and Powell (1983; see also Beckert, 2010) theorizing on isomorphism. Whereas
in world society theory there is a powerful global shadow order that penetrates daily prac-
tices, in neo-institutionalism the emphasis is on specific mechanisms and processes through
which isomorphism takes place, defined as ‘[…]constraining process[es] that forces one unit
in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 149). To some extent, all scientific innovations are based on
imitation. In contrast, normative pressures originate in the educational background of busi-
ness history scholars and a variety of similar activities – professional development workshops
in which famous scholars elucidate the conceptual world available to business historians,
conferences, and editorials encouraging transdisciplinary research (Knorr-Cetina, 2009).
Furthermore, empirical and theoretical research has demonstrated that management fash-
ions diffuse because of mimetic behavior among and as result of ‘[…] the role of professors,
and knowledge entrepreneurs more generally, in the formation, retention, and dissolution
of fashions and institutions’ (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999, p. 737). Normative processes, on
the other hand, are at work at the same time. These include those mechanisms which his-
torical work on scientific communities (Broman, 1995) has considered to be influential: shared
norms in education and training ‘[…] which socialize them into similar worldviews’ (Mizruchi
BUSINESS HISTORY 5
& Fein, 1999, p. 657), and meetings and conferences ‘[…] which further diffuses ideas
among them’.
Although an institutional perspective helps us understand why and how concepts diffuse
across scientific communities, it has shortcomings as well. For example, Knorr-Cetina (2009)
has shown that an important part of scientific innovations happens at the intersection of
scientific communities – the process would thus be transepistemic rather than occurring
through intercommunity imitation or intra-community normative or coercive mechanisms.
Our solution to this basic tension between seeing the convergence of scientific communities
as either the result of powerful institutionalization processes or as a source of scientific inno-
vations is empirical: by focusing on linguistic practices at the intersection of business history
and strategic management, we may reveal an enhanced understanding of the mechanisms
and consequences of transepistemic relations between the two scientific communities.
A sociolinguistic approach to scientific communities
A sociolinguistic approach to scientific communities starts with a shared language. As
Gumperz (2009, p. 69) writes:
Most groups of any permanence, be they small bands bounded by face-to-face contact, mod-
ern nations divisible into smaller sub-regions, or even occupational associations or neighbor-
hood gangs, may be treated as speech communities, provided they show linguistic peculiarities
that warrant special study. The verbal behavior of such groups always constitutes a system. It
must be based on finite sets of grammatical rules that underlie the production of well-formed
sentences, or else messages will not be intelligible.
The outcome of this sociolinguistic approach warrants seeing scientific communities as
defined by their linguistic practices: physicians, mathematicians, and chemists, for example,
each have their own vocabularies and communicational practices (Kitcher, 1995) which dis-
tinguish them from other communities. Accordingly, a scientific community requires specific
practices of communication to be recognized as such (Palonen & Lehtinen, 2001).
Yet linguistic practices are not stable. Empirical research (Tagliamonte, 2006) has demon-
strated that immersion (Mougeon et al., 2004) and diffusion (Maegaard et al., 2013) occur
simultaneously, resulting in ongoing change in vocabularies. Immersion happens every time
a community receives new members. These new members (e.g., a Ph.D. student presenting
at her first academic conference) immerse themselves in the specific sociolinguistic practices
used in that context.
Different scientific communities, however, do not evolve in isolation. Vocabularies and
communication practices diffuse (Sorenson & Fleming, 2004) from one community to
another. This happens between geographic locations (e.g., German business historians
adopting concepts and linguistic practices from the USA) and scientific fields (cf. Varga,
2011). Accordingly, as our institutional perspective predicts, communities are expected
to become increasingly similar, especially when one community is considerably larger and
possesses more resources than the other (Woolard, 1985). Situations also change over
time. Strategic management once borrowed its concepts and communication styles from
economics (e.g., Ghemawat, 2002) yet after growing in size and influence, the field and its
vocabulary began to diffuse into fields such as business history. This is the process we
analyze in this project.
6 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
Table 1. ‘Strateg*’ in titles and wos topics of business history
and business history review, 1986–2020.
Year N of articles Title NTopic NTitle % Topic %
1985–1997 446 22 50 4.9 11.2
1998–2007 294 16 57 5.4 19.4
2008–2020 901 62 263 6.9 29.2
Together 1,641 100 370 6.1 22.5
Source: Web of Science Database. Accessed April 1, 2020. Note: searched
wildcard keyword’ strateg*’.
Strategic management as a scientific community
In an academic sense, the field of strategic management has dramatically evolved since the
early normative models of strategy (Ghemawat, 2002, 2016). Yet the original ethos, especially
in textbooks and empirical (i.e., econometric) research, is that of expecting choices and
actions to result in outcomes.3 In his essay on strategy’s historical roots, Kornberger (2013,
p. 1061) summarizes the issues as follows:
[…] the field of strategy follows an instrumental rationality that is concerned with means-end
relationships, intentionality and predictability of the future or the critique thereof […] Despite
disagreements, their common denominator is to view (or criticize) strategy as a positive science
that can explain and perhaps influence future performance.
The most significant change since the 1980s has been the increasingly scientific nature
of the field, which has been linked to the construction of a more cohesive self-image among
the social sciences (Hambrick & Chen, 2008). The strategic management field, with its jour-
nals, book series, and conferences, is one of the fastest-growing academic fields. Figure 1
depicts the rapid growth of the field from a corpus of Google Books: the total volume of
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
Business History Strategic Management
Figure 1. Research volume of business history and strategic management in Google Books 1970–2008
(Ngram analysis), Index: Business History 1970 = 100.
Source: Google Books Ngrams (https://books.google.com/ngrams), Retrieved May 12, 2020.
Note: Google Books Ngrams traces the relative share of a concept used in the whole corpus. As these
shares are relatively small ones (0.0000078998% for business history in 1970), we used an index series
(Business History 1970 = 100) to show the change in time and to make the two series more comparable.
BUSINESS HISTORY 7
strategic management has increased over a hundred-fold from the early 1970s to the turn
of the millennium, whereas the volume of business history research has remained roughly
at the same level.
For us, the definition of strategic management as an academic field and scientific com-
munity is crucial. Any analysis of strategic management in business history journals must
start with understanding the nature and structure of what is being reflected on: strategic
management as a research field with established linguistic conventions. Instead of qualitative
review articles and books, many of which are well known (e.g., Mintzberg, 1983; Mintzberg
et al., 1998; Mintzberg & Waters, 1982), we use recent quantitative reviews based on keyword
and network analyses (Furrer et al., 2008), and bibliometric analyses (e.g., Nerur et al., 2008;
Ramos-Rodríguez & Ruíz-Navarro, 2004) to identify the concepts that make strategic man-
agement the academic field that it is.
Systematic reviews are ubiquitous in the strategy field. Central authors, for example, are
listed similarly in most articles: Porter, Chandler, and other scholars have been widely cited
since the field emerged in the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s. However, there are many inter-
pretations of what strategy is like as a field (cf. Nag et al., 2007). The distinction between
more normative empirical strategic management research (i.e., the best strategy for different
circumstances) and strategy process research (i.e., accounts of how strategy evolves in dif-
ferent organizations) is one way to characterize the field (Kornberger, 2013). The field has
also been described as swinging from external to internal emphasis (Hoskisson et al., 1999):
Porter’s (1980) competitive strategy, for example, emphasized the decisive effect of firm
external competitive forces on the performance of individual companies whereas the
resource-based view, the dominant discourse of the 1990s, (Kraaijenbrink et al., 2010) focused
on firm internal factors.
Finally, when we look at the nature of submissions and resulting lists of keywords in the
SMJ and Academy of Management’s strategic management division, strategy appears as a
vibrant and versatile research community with interests ranging from organizational politics
to cognition and strategy practices (cf. Hambrick & Chen, 2008). This leads to the following
research question: to what extent have the concepts and linguistic practices from the field
of strategic management spread into business history research?
Method
We started our inquiry by analyzing articles published in BH and BHR from 1985 to 2019. As
a source, we used the Web of Science (WoS) database that enabled us to search keywords
directly from titles, abstracts and keywords. We are aware of the challenges that accompany
the use of WoS, which is not a comprehensive database (Kelly et al., 2009; Ojala et al., 2017).
However, both BH and BHR are included in the database, so we could conduct the necessary
comparative analysis. Because a large portion of business history research is published in
book format, we made a similar kind of analysis on research published in monographs and
edited anthologies. We limited the analysis on books to three major international publishing
houses and their business history series: Routledge International Studies in Business History,
Routledge Studies in Business History, Cambridge Comparative Perspectives in Business History,
Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise, Oxford Business History,4 and Oxford/
Fuji Business History. We had access to 115 books, spanning the years 1996 to 2019. The total
number of books published in the field is larger, and we did not have access to some OUP,
8 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
Figure 2. Keyword analysis using the Web of Science database and business history books.
Sources: Web of Science (retrieved April 1, 2020) and books published with major publishing houses
(Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Routledge).
Table 2. Main discourses in strategic management literature.
Discourse category Explanation Listed in earlier reviews Representative citations
Strategy content Focus on the scope of the
firm and the coordination
efforts to manage the
business and corporate
level strategies.
Nerur et al. (2008, p. 328) (Factor 2);
Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro
(2004, p. 993) (center)
Porter (1980);
Montgomery et al.
(1989).
Strategy process Initially clear focus on
strategy processes inside
organizations, which later
has developed into a
more general
sociobehavioral study
program related to
strategy and strategic
decision-making.
Nerur et al. (2008, p. 328) (Factor 7);
Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro
(2004, p. 993) (lower left corner)
Mintzberg and Waters
(1982); Pettigrew
(1985); Burgelman et al.
(2018)
Resources and
capabilities
Look for competitive
advantage from the
firm-internal assets
(intangible especially)
with a particular focus on
knowledge and learning.
Nerur et al. (2008, p. 328) (Factors 2
and 5); Ramos-Rodríguez and
Ruíz-Navarro (2004, p. 993) (upper
left corner); Furrer et al. (2008, p. 9)
(quadrants 1 and 4)
Wernerfelt (1984); Teece
et al. (1997); Teece
(2007); Priem and
Butler (2001)
Firm-society Study of regulation effects
on firm strategy and the
management efforts and
models of that factor.
Nerur et al. (2008) (Factor 4);
Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro
(2004, p. 993) (upper middle
section); Furrer et al. (2008, p. 9)
(quadrant 1)
Freeman (1999); Porter
and Kramer (2006)
Interfirm strategy Study of alliances and
cooperation between
firms and organizations.
Thomas and Goussevskaia (2008, p. 9)
(quadrant 4)
Gulati (1998); Baum et al.
(2000); Koka and
Prescott (2002)
Organizational
design
Organizational designs
related to strategic
decision-making
including configurations.
Nerur et al. (2008) (Factor 8);
Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro
(2004, p. 993) (lower middle
section); Furrer et al. (2008, p. 9)
(quadrants 2 and 3)
Jacobides (2007); Miller,
1996.
Competition and
(evolutionary) fit
Studies on competitive
interaction,
contingencies, and
evolution.
Nerur et al. (2008) (Factor 1);
Ramos-Rodríguez and Ruíz-Navarro
(2004, p. 993) (middle section and
middle left); Furrer et al. (2008, p. 9)
(quadrant 1)
Chen and Miller (2012);
Hannan et al. (2012);
Braguinsky and
Hounshell (2016)
BUSINESS HISTORY 9
CUP or Routledge books. Despite these limitations, the sample of books is large enough to
assume it reflects changes in the use of strategy concepts within business history research
in book format.
By using ‘strateg*’ as a wildcard search item from titles of articles published in two business
history journals, we found that strategy research is a minor subject at the title level, amount-
ing to about 6% of the content in journals combined (Table 1). However, when we broadened
the search parameters to WoS topics that also captured abstracts and keywords, we acquired
23% of the articles that had ‘strategy’ in one form or another as a subject. In both books and
journal articles, the main title alone does not always reveal the strategy content of the
research: only three of the books analyzed had the word ‘strategy’ or ‘strategic’ in its main
title (Abe et al., 2005; Messina, 2015; Whittington, 2019).
There has been an increase in the word ‘strategy’ appearing as the topic of articles over
the past three decades: from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s only one-tenth of business
history journal articles covered strategy, but in the last decade this share rose to well over
one-fourth. The shares of strategy content analyzed in this way were strikingly similar in
both journals. The growth of strategy as a WoS topic in business history journals is, further-
more, consistent with the increase in the strategy literature (Figure 1). Especially, the early
1990s saw a growth of strategy-related articles in business history journals, including several
highly influential works (e.g., Boyce, 1992; Cusumano et al., 1992; Helper, 1991; Wilson, 1991).
Using the concept ‘strategy’ or versions of it, however, does not mean that an article or
book is engaged in theoretical discussions in or with the strategic management field. The
concept may be used in a purely metaphorical sense, or otherwise loosely defined. More
importantly, a number of articles and books analyzing strategic management might not be
included in the sample simply because ‘strategy’ as a concept does not appear in the title,
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
10
0
1989-1995 1996-20002001-2005 2006-20102011-2015 2016-2019
BH & BHRSMJBusiness & Economics (SSCI) BH books (1996-2019)
Figure 3. The percentage of articles using strategic management main discourse concepts and pub-
lished in BH and BHR, SMJ, and business and economics journals, and the share of business history books
using these concepts, 1989–2019.
Sources: Web of Science Database (accessed April 1, 2020) and business history books published by
Routledge, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press in 1996–2019.
Note: Business and economics articles counted only from journals listed in WoS SSCI database.
10 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
abstract or in keywords. Therefore, we analyzed the overlap between business history and
strategy fields by using keyword identifiers and listed research topics from the SMJ, and from
the submission systems of the Academy of Management’s Strategic Management Division
(2019 lists). Our starting point is that the listed research topics and keywords reflect the
boundaries of strategic management as a field: the listed topics are the core vocabulary that
make strategic management a distinct scientific community. We also used published biblio-
metric analyses (Furrer et al., 2008; Nerur et al., 2008; Ramos-Rodríguez & Ruíz-Navarro, 2004)
to create a structure for these strategy-related topics. The main categories – ‘baskets’ in the
analytical sense – used in our analysis are listed and described in Table 2 (see also Appendix).
0.010.020.030.0 40.0 50.0
60.0
Strategy content
Strategy process
Resources and capabilities
Firm-society
Inter-firm strategy
Organizational design
Co
mpetition and (evolutionary)fit
2016-20192011-20152006-20102001-20051996-20001989-1995
Figure 4. The percentage of main strategy discourses in BH and BHR from articles published 1989–2019.
Source: Web of Science Database. Accessed April 1, 2020.
Note: Because the main discourses are overlapping, there might be more than one discourse mentioned
in a single article.
0.010.0 20.0 30.0 40.0 50.0 60.0
70.0
Strategy content
Strategy process
Resources and capabilities
Firm-society
Inter-firm strategy
Organizational design
Co
mpetition and (evolutionary)fit
2016-20192011-20152006-20102001-20051996-20001989-1995
Figure 5. The percentage of main strategy discourses in SMJ from all articles published 1989–2019.
Source: Web of Science Database. Accessed April 1, 2020.
BUSINESS HISTORY 11
The total number of concepts is 120 (complete list in Appendix). We assigned these con-
cepts to the seven categories in Table 2. For a comparative perspective, we made these
analyses on SMJ’s articles and on all ‘business and economics’ articles in Web of Science.5
As shown in Figure 2, we then searched the topics (titles, abstracts, keywords) in the WoS
Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database by using these 120 keywords. We found more
than 312,000 business and economics articles devoted to strategy discussions published
from 1989 to 2019, 2,066 articles published in SMJ, and 822 articles published in BH and
BHR. When analyzing the journals we focus on the shares of articles using strategy concepts.
We could not, however, do full-text analysis with journals. Due to the limitations of WoS, we
had to limit the search to titles, keywords, and abstracts.
When analyzing business history books, however, we adopted a different approach,
because comparable databases are not available for books. Though we had (digitized) full-
text access to almost all of the books we analyzed, the search functions in digital books did
not work well enough to make reliable searches. Therefore, we did not search strategy con-
cepts from the full texts, but from the indices published in these volumes. The total number
of pages in these books exceeds 40,000. As a result, we could see not only how many books
included strategy concepts, but also how often they were used. Because we use indices as
the main source, the appearance of strategy concepts in the analyzed books depends on
whether or not the authors of the books considered them important enough to merit inclu-
sion in the index. In the books we analyzed, however, all but one contained a comprehensive
index. Thus, though the analyses of journals and books are not entirely comparable, they
still provide a valid picture of the importance and trends of strategy research in business
history.
It is important to note that a quantitative linguistic analysis such as ours indicates intra-
and inter-group variation in the use of words (Grieve, 2012; Guy, 1993), and does not focus
on the texts in which these words are embedded. Accordingly, we supplemented the ana-
lytical procedure described above with a more qualitative citation analysis on articles and
010203040506
070
Strategy content
Strategy process2
Resources and Capabilities
Firm-society
Inter-firm strategy
Organizational design
Competition and (evolu
tionary)fit
2016-20192011-20152006-20102001-20051996-20001989-1995
Figure 6. The percentage of main strategy discourses from business history books published
1996–2019.
Source: Business history books published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge
University Press in 1996–2019.
12 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
Table 3. Strategy in (sub-)discourses of business history (BH & BHR), strategic management (SMJ) and business and economics (B & E) journals
in 1989–2019 (N and % share of articles) and business history books 1996–2019 (N and % share of pages and share of books).
Discourse
BH &
BHR, N% SMJ, N% B & E, N%
Books
(N) %
Books
(pages) %
Strategy content 264 18.0 864 33.9 67,613 7.3 46 40.0 1,176 2.9
Strategy process 215 14.6 846 33.2 6,3135 6.8 40 34.8 1,135 2.8
Resources and capabilities 250 17.0 1,028 40.4 77,484 8.4 36 31.3 867 2.2
Firm–society 127 8.6 395 15.5 39,966 4.3 13 11.3 127 0.3
Interfirm strategy 33 2.2 328 12.9 13,467 1.5 3 2.6 60 0.1
Organizational design 352 23.9 1,101 43.2 173,722 18.8 43 37.4 1,519 3.8
Competition and (evolutionary)fit 230 15.6 973 38.2 62,125 6.7 25 21.7 451 1.1
N of articles (journals), pages and books (BH books) with strategy content 822 55.9 2,066 81.1 312,714 33.9 81 70.4 5,335 13.3
Total N of articles (journals), N of pages (books) and N of BH books 1,470 100.0 2,546 100.0 922,147 100.0 115 100.0 40,120 100.0
Sources: Web of Science Database. Accessed April 1, 2020 and business history books published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press in
1996–2019. Note: Because the main discourses are overlapping, there might be more than one discourse mentioned in an individual article or book.
BUSINESS HISTORY 13
books citing Teece et al. (1997), arguably the most influential article on dynamic capabilities
(Laaksonen & Peltoniemi, 2018; Schilke et al., 2018).
Analysis
In short: strategy concepts are widely used in and out of the core strategic management field.
More than 312,000 articles6 were published in business and economics journals alone from
1989 to 2019 using strategy concepts – one-third of all articles published in business and
economics journals used the same vocabulary as in the strategic management literature. The
share is considerably higher in the case of the SMJ (over 80%). This signals the specificity of
the concepts: the vocabulary of 120 concepts is not generic, but tightly linked to strategic
management research. In addition, research in the business history journals frequently uses
the vocabulary of strategic management: no less than 56% of the content of business history
journals from 1989 to 2019 includes strategic management concepts. From the 115 business
history books analyzed, 81 (70%) used strategy concepts according to the indices, spread over
5,335 pages (13% of the total page count). Figures 3–6, and Table 3 summarize these findings.
There is a notable increase in absolute and relative numbers in the use of strategy con-
cepts in business history as well as business and economics journals (Figure 3). Compared
to the 1980s and 1990s, strategy concepts have rapidly diffused into the language of business
historians. The concepts of strategic management are especially visible in business history
journals, despite a slight decline in strategy discourses in business history books. From 2016
to 2019, roughly 60% of the articles published in BH and BHR used strategic management
concepts in some way. In business and economics journals, this share was 47%, considerably
lower than in business history journals. In the SMJ, the share of main categories was over
90% from all articles published from 2016 to 2019, whereas the share was only about 58%
from 1989 to 1995. This discrepancy makes sense: some of the most important concepts in
strategy were only established during the 30 years we are examining.
At first glance, business history books seem to be even more embedded within strategy-
related topics than the journals are: initially, two-thirds of books had something to do with
strategy concepts, and between 2001 and 2010, over 80% of business history books included
concepts used in strategic management research. However, although the journals do show
an increase in the use of strategy concepts, business history books represent a declining
trend, as Figure 3 demonstrates. If we look at the pages using strategy concepts in business
history books, the outcome is different because the share of pages (according to the indices)
on the topic remained low. The total number of pages devoted to strategy concepts was
four times higher in 2016–2019 than it had been 20 years before. At the same time, the total
number of books increased fivefold.
Approximately 75% of all articles mentioning concepts of strategic management were
published between 2006 and 2019 in business history and in business and management
journals. Because this was also a time of significant expansion in academic publishing, we
compare these figures to total publishing volume in Figure 3.
Does the use of strategy concepts, then, quantitatively differ in business history com-
pared to business and economics literature, and especially in relation to SMJ? Table 3 sug-
gests that the use of strategy concepts in both of these fields follows the same trends. The
shares of the main categories are strikingly similar in business history journals and in SMJ,
14 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
but there are notable differences when compared to business and economics journals
generally, and also to books on business history. Research on organizational design seems
to be the dominant category in business history journals, in strategy research (SMJ), and
in business and economics. This might be because this category covers the largest number
of concepts. Resources and capabilities is, according to this analysis, the second-largest
category. Business history books, however, differ from these patterns, because strategy
content is the most common category in the number of books. From page count, though,
even in business history books organizational design is the most discussed topic. Yet
another slight difference is that in the SMJ, competition and evolutionary fit are far more
important than in business and economics, and in business history books. In business
history journals even this category is among the most debated ones. Accordingly, business
history research published in journals is, from this perspective, more strategy oriented than
business economics in general or than the research published in business history books.
One interpretation is that the business history journals more closely follow current debates
in strategic management than do books in which the research does not follow trends in
adjacent fields of science. To analyze this more precisely, we analyzed the development of
each category in different publishing outlets over six time cohorts, as shown in Figures 4–6.
Figures 4–6 show the changes in time regarding the main strategy discourses in BH and
BHR, SMJ and business history books, respectively. These figures show that the trends of
using the main discourses of strategic management are similar in business history journals
and books and in the leading journal of strategic management. These trends show that
especially the prevailing discourse, organizational design, has grown in popularity over time
in SMJ and in business history journals, but less so in business history books. When calculated
from the number of pages, even the business history books show an increasing trend in
topics dealing with organizational design: 5% explored organizational design in the late
1990s, but 40% did so by the late 2010s. The share of this category increased in the business
history articles from one-fifth in the late 1980s to half of all articles analyzing strategy dis-
courses by the 2010s. In SMJ, however, organizational design was among the leading dis-
courses in the late 1980s, with a 46% share rising to 65% by the late 2010s.
Whereas the organizational design category has increased in popularity in strategic man-
agement and business history, some other categories within these disciplines have had
different paths of popularity. For example, topics related to resources and capabilities are
Table 4. Most cited studies on dynamic capabilities (N of business and economics citations and % of all
articles published in BH & BHR, and SMJ).
Article WoS Google scholar BH & BHR SMJ % BH & BHR % SMJ
Teece et al. (1997) 10,327 37,531 20 258 1.4 10.1
Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) 6,507 20,499 5 54 0.3 2.1
Kogut and Zander (1992) 5,421 16,943 2 212 0.1 8.3
Eisenhardt and Martin (2000) 5,161 17,147 4 123 0.3 4.8
Zahra and George (2002) 3,868 11,136 0 45 0.0 1.8
Levinthal and March (1993) 3,160 8,937 3 165 0.2 6.5
Zollo and Winter (2002) 2,483 7,923 5 70 0.3 2.7
Grant (1996) 2,394 8,051 1 58 0.1 2.3
Gereffi et al. (2005) 2,199 7,551 3 4 0.2 0.2
Teece (2010) 1,727 7,237 12 184 0.8 7.2
Total 43,247 142,955 55 1,173 3.7 46.1
Sources: Web of Science (1989–2019, ‘business and economics’) and Google Scholar, retrieved April 4, 2020. See also
Albort-Morant et al. (2018, p. 48): their top 10 list on the most cited studies on dynamic capabilities (Table 7) is almost
identical to ours (with two exceptions); these differences can be explained by the timing of the analysis.
BUSINESS HISTORY 15
on the rise in strategic management articles, yet show a slightly declining trend in business
history journals and books. Another difference is the category on strategy content. It has
grown in business history journals, but declined in business history books. Articles analyzing
the relationships between firms and society have increased in business history journals and
in SMJ. The share of this category is surprisingly low in business history books, even though
many of them focus on the relationship between business and politics.
The use of concepts does not necessarily mean that business historians have become
strategy scholars. Nevertheless, these results confirm that strategic management concepts
are deeply embedded in the narratives of both fields. When viewed through numbers and
frequencies, strategic management and business history have grown closer to each other
as scientific communities – if not rejoined.
Dynamic capabilities as a concept and its use in strategy and business history
The descriptive quantitative analyses above give an overall picture about the increasing close-
ness of the two scientific communities. One criticism of our results would be that the analysis
Table 5. Similarity of speech communities
between strategic management and business
history discussions: survey results.
Pairs Average Variance N
SMJ–BH 3.47 1.61 414
SMJ–Books 3.27 1.66 222
SMJ–SMJ 3.50 1.67 128
Total 3.41 1.64 764
Source: Survey of 16 academics on 48 sentence pairs cit-
ing Teece et al. (1997). Evaluation categories: 1 = Not
similar at all; 2 = Largely different; 3 = Neutral;
4 = Almost similar; 5 = Almost exac tly similar.
Figure 7. Procedure for the supplementary qualitative analysis.
Sources: Web of Science (retrieved April 1, 2020) and books published with major publishing houses
(Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Routledge).
16 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
based on keywords might show a biased correlation. The dozens of keywords reviewed might
have been used in contexts that are not necessarily related to strategy discussions. As Rowlinson
et al. (2014) point out in their seminal article on the promises and difficulties of integrating
history and organization theory, there may be considerable communicative differences
depending on the education and linguistic practices of individual scholars. This would imply
that discourses in business history and strategic management might both include words such
as strategy or competitive advantage, but the respective uses of the word may be very different.
To judge if the two communities use concepts similarly (in a qualitative sense), we exam-
ined more closely the use of one specific concept: dynamic capabilities. Research on dynamic
capabilities is a central part of the broader discussion on resources and capabilities that has
increased in the strategic management field during the past decades (Figure 5), and an iconic
concept for defining what strategy is as a research field (Barreto, 2010). We analyze the use
of dynamic capabilities from two angles: first, we look for citation patterns, and then focus
on interpretative understanding of how a sample of authors from business history and stra-
tegic management use dynamic capabilities in their research.
In the following analyses, we wanted to determine whom and how business history
researchers, on the one hand, and strategy scholars, on the other, cite when discussing
dynamic capabilities. For this purpose, we conducted a citation analysis to see which studies
on dynamic capabilities are the most cited in Web of Science and Google Scholar (Table 4,
see also Albort-Morant et al., 2018). Table 4 shows that key studies dealing with dynamic
capabilities are widely cited in SMJ: almost half of all the articles published in SMJ from 1989
to 2019 cited these studies, that is, over a thousand articles altogether. Moreover, the share
has increased substantially during the last two decades. In business history journals, in turn,
scholars and researches refer to these studies more rarely. Less than four percent of articles
(N = 55) published in the period had citations of these studies. In both fields, however, the
most influential article is Teece et al. (1997). In the following section, we further scrutinize
the citations of this particular study in more detail.
In order to better understand the citation contexts, and thus possible similarities and
differences between strategic management and business history speech communities, we
made a supplementary qualitative analysis of the articles published in BH and BHR (20 arti-
cles), SMJ (258 articles) and business history books (4 books) that cite Teece et al. (1997) in
Figure 7. We read through these texts and extracted the exact citation point for each refer-
ence to Teece, Pisano, and Shuen. Usually one sentence was enough yet in some cases we
had to extract two to three sentences to clarify the context. As we extracted all the exact
citation points, the number of cases increased considerably, because one article or book
might have several citations to the same source. Because SMJ had roughly a hundredfold
more citations to Teece et al. (1997) than the business history sources did, we made a sample
from the SMJ citations by using three cross-cutting years (1998, 2008, and 2018), with 31
articles citing Teece et al. (1997). Altogether, we constructed a sample of 96 exact citations
points. We then grouped these 96 citations points into 48 pairs. Each pair consisted of a
citation to an SMJ article, and one to either a business history or an SMJ text. We removed
in-text or footnote references from the sentences, so that in the end we had two sets of
sentences without information on who was citing who and what the source publication was.
We used the data described above in the next step of our analytical procedure. We orga-
nized a mini-survey of 16 academics (business historians and strategic management schol-
ars), all of them familiar with basic discursive structures in strategy and business history. We
BUSINESS HISTORY 17
sent the survey, built on the 48 comparative pairs, to the respondents via an online survey
platform (Webrobol).7 We did not inform the respondents about our exact research topic,
nor about the sources. We simply asked them to answer the following question: ‘To what
extent do the paired sentences originate in the same intellectual and onto-epistemological
domain?’ We also stressed to respondents that the sameness referred to the idea behind the
specific formulation of the idea – not to the form it is expressed in. The respondents were
asked to assess each pair on a five-point scale (1 = not similar at all, 2 = largely different,
3 = neutral, 4 = almost similar, 5 = almost exactly similar), and they were also asked to make
qualitative comments on each pair. Obviously, analyzing the similarities and differences
based on only a few sentences taken from an article or book is in many ways challenging
when trying to answer the survey question. We did not tell the respondents what the sources
of the texts were, nor were they aware that some of the pairs came from SMJ and BH/BHR,
some from SMJ and business history books and some from different articles published in SMJ.
After the survey, we regrouped the data in order to see if there were differences in how
the respondents had interpreted the texts, and whether there were signs of different lin-
guistic practices between strategic management and business history fields. We summarize
the results in Table 5 below. With 16 respondents and 48 pairs we received 764 observations,8
an adequate amount to make tentative conclusions. Our mini-survey indicates no significant
qualitative difference in the use of dynamic capabilities concepts between the fields of
strategic management and business history. The average of the evaluations between the
journals was, in practice, similar, and moderately lower for the books. The respondents,
accordingly, found equally similarities and differences between the articles published in
SMJ, and in articles published in SMJ and business history sources. Unfortunately, the dataset
is too small to analyze whether there is a change over time in the citations. The overall aver-
age is fairly low (3.4) and there is a relatively large variation between the individual citation
points. Accordingly, the results are, to a certain extent, unclear: there seems to be more
similarity between the fields than between the individual articles. Moreover, our respondents
read the articles very differently, which emphasizes the active role of an individual researcher
in the creation and interpretation of texts.
Discussion and conclusions
The results of our analysis demonstrate a substantial overlap between strategic management
and business history as scientific communities. The closer we come to the present era, the
two scientific communities become increasingly similar in both numbers (use of strategy
concepts in business history publications) and content (how concepts are used and who are
cited). Chandler’s heritage and shared roots in micro- and historical economics may explain
some part of the overlap. However, it seems likely that the increasing research activity in
strategic management has diffused into business history as concepts, frameworks, and
research ideas. There is also a group of scholars that publishes in both fields (e.g., Jacobides,
2015; Kornberger, 2013; Langlois, 2003), revealing the numerous integrative mechanisms
between them. Our results reflect a more general trend in the social sciences in which a
dominant discourse generates mainstream discussions with high impact, leaving more lim-
ited space for emerging themes. History is repeatedly reflected and referred to in several
fields in the social sciences, but historians’ voices are generally not the loudest in these
discussions (see the history manifesto by Guldi & Armitage, 2014, and its critique in Cohen
18 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
& Mandler, 2015). Accordingly, our results may reflect a more general trend in which new
emerging fields come to dominate citation patterns, and over time the intellectual core of
older, more slowly growing fields. In the following section, we elaborate how our results
contribute to the discussion on the convergence of scientific communities as well as on the
evolution of management and organizational history – the historic turn (e.g., Argyres et al.,
2020; Rowlinson, 2015; Vaara & Lamberg, 2016).
On the degree of convergence between scientific communities, our results are not unam-
biguous – a result that correlates with a fundamental division between institutional-driven
(Meyer et al., 1997) and innovation-driven (Knorr-Cetina, 2009) perspectives on the work of
scientific communities. Our contribution is not to erase this division, but to add nuance to
the discussion. As we have already argued, the concept of borrowing from strategic man-
agement to business history is more common now than it was in the early 1990s, and when
we look for evidence on how these concepts were used, the differences between journals
have become marginal. The background mechanism to explain this phenomenon is the rise
of strategic management from a sub-field of management and organization studies towards
a large intellectually independent community of scholars. At the same time, business histo-
rians seem to have found the conceptual tools of strategy scholars to be useful and inter-
esting. Why this happens at an accelerating pace, however, may indicate institutional
isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) between the fields – the stronger the community
of strategy scholars has grown, the more there are institutional mechanisms encouraging,
even pressing, business historians to imitate and borrow. Language is an important channel
for isomorphic processes, and accordingly, conceptual convergence can be seen as evidence
of the strong isomorphic pressure originating in the larger and more rapidly growing field.
Yet this is only one side of the story. Another interpretation, in line with Knorr-Cetina’s
(2009) elementary insight, is that the intersection of the two communities is a great source
of innovation. By using concepts borrowed from strategy, business historians have an oppor-
tunity to ask better and different research questions (Ankersmit, 2013, p. 184; Lamoreaux
et al., 2008) from their data, and thus improve the impact of the whole community. This
trans-epistemic perspective does not fully fit with our evidence. On the one hand, our data
indicate that a significant group of business historians use concepts from strategic manage-
ment almost for decorative and illustrative purposes. Accordingly, the research and its pur-
poses are intact, but the form resembles some conceptual practices from strategic
management. On the other hand, another group of scholars are either members of the
strategic management community or fluently publish both in strategy and business history
journals (i.e., dual integrity; Maclean et al., 2016). Their research is historical (in terms of
research topics and methods) yet their primary motivation is to contribute to the develop-
ment of strategic management theories. Overall, the increasing use of strategic management
concepts may mean the erosion of proper business history based on phenomenon-driven
research and determined by source criticism. Alternatively, it may lead to renewal of the
field by asking better and more interesting questions. Which of these interpretations is
ultimately right primarily depends on who is making the observation (Kobrak &
Schneider, 2011).
Our other contribution concerns the links between history and management studies.
Discussion on the historic turn in organization studies has, to date, mainly considered the
role of business history in business schools and management discipline (e.g., Clark &
Rowlinson, 2004; Decker, 2016; Kieser, 1994; Perchard et al., 2017; Rowlinson, 2015; Üsdiken
BUSINESS HISTORY 19
& Kieser, 2004). Less discussed is how management research as a whole and strategy research
in particular might have colonialized the business history discipline, and what are the reasons
and outcomes of this process (see, however, Decker et al., 2015; de Jong et al., 2015; Kobrak
& Schneider, 2011; Ojala et al., 2017). Business history journals today publish more content
from scholars working in business schools than they do from those in history departments
(e.g., Decker et al., 2018), which has affected even the typesetting and referencing style in
business history scholarship. This, in turn, is a symptom of the process described in this
article: the social scientification of business history as a discipline. We do not take a stand
here on whether this development is good or bad; the fact is that it has happened and it is
continuing. However, it is important to remember what insights the intersection of business
history and strategy research can create for the study of past, present, and future organiza-
tions and their strategic choices.
Although we have only offered a critical and somewhat bleak view of business history
research as colonized by strategic management concepts and practices, we have called
attention to the potential of business history as a field with its own strengths. Themes such
as corporate social responsibility, environmental management, or degrowth and collapses
could be platforms and research programs with a stronger impact in history, strategy and
related fields. Strategy famously originated in Chandler (1962) and there are no reasons why
this creation of new concepts and ideas could not be repeated.
Our study comes with limitations. Our categorization of discourses is not the only one,
and other scholars might have placed some concepts in different categories from ours.
Nevertheless, the trend identified through this exercise reveals the evolution of strategy
research in business history and in business and economics at large. Moreover, the results
demonstrate the importance of strategic management concepts used in these fields as well
as how their use has changed over time. In future work, more in-depth qualitative analyses
are needed to evaluate the way in which concepts are used in different research settings.
We encourage researchers to conduct similar exercises in contexts other than in the English-
speaking academic environment.
Notes
1. We thank Reviewer 1 (from the second review round) for clarifying advice concerning the sen-
tence on our research mission.
2. Haas also lists a fourth attribute which is closely related to her specific context of international
policy and which is largely irrelevant for this study. Overall, the specific concept Haas uses,
‘epistemic community’, is a commonly used synonym for scientific communities yet with a
broader meaning.
3. We use a sociolinguistic definition of strategy. However, earlier historical research has identi-
fied at least three different meanings for the word (Kornberger, 2013; Nag et al., 2007). First,
strategy means a set of normative assumptions regarding the management of organizations.
Second, strategy is a profession guided by normative assumptions and models, but it is also a
research object for strategy research (Carter, 2013; Ghemawat, 2002). Third, strategy is a re-
search field among its neighboring disciplines (especially entrepreneurship and international
business; Perchard et al., 2017) with subfields: strategy process and content researchers, strat-
egy as practice, research oriented towards game theoretical modeling, and, to some extent,
the history of strategy. The normative approach to strategic management is performance
driven: organizational characteristics and behavior are judged from the outcomes (Furrer
et al., 2008). In its naive form, certain traits (e.g., superior resources; Peteraf, 1993) are seen to
20 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
explain the existence and durability of competitive advantage causally. Strategy is also a pro-
fession. In parallel with the increasing popularity of Porter (1980; 1996), Igor Ansoff, and other
strategy gurus (Huczynski, 2012), a distinct industry has emerged especially in consulting. As
Ghemawat’s (2002) history of strategic management illustrates, Boston Consulting Group and
McKinsey made an equally significant impact on business practice as the guru department in
business schools: people working with strategy issues (planning, analysis, management, etc.)
constitute a distinct profession. Kipping’s (2011) and Armbrüster and Kipping’s (2002) studies
on the rise of strategy consulting demonstrate the rapid increase in volume and influence.
Likewise, we have cases like Enron in which the adverse effect of gurus and other strategy
professionals was destructive (Whittington et al., 2003) and critical studies questioning the
societal value-add of strategic management techniques (Mintzberg, 2000).
4. In the case of OUP we used the books that the publishing house had categorized on their web-
sites as ‘business history.
5. The Web of Science categorization of business and economics was used in the study. We ana-
lyzed only those business and economics journals that are listed in the Social Science Citation
Index database.
6. The exact number is 312,214 business and economics articles in journals listed in the WoS SSCI
database. We used WoS categorization of articles as belonging to business and economics.
WoS database, cited April 1, 2020.
7. https://link.webropolsurveys.com/S/A6DFEB98975880F4
8. Four missing answers.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the comments received at the 2018 European Business History Association
Conference, 2019 Academy of Management Conference, various seminars and workshops at the
University of Jyväskylä and the feedback from Christian Stutz, Tomi Laamanen, Mirva Peltoniemi, Henrikki
Tikkanen and Eero Vaara. Also, special thanks to the respondents of the survey reported in the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
The project has been funded by the Academy of Finland project ‘Learning from the past for the
future’.
ORCID
Juha-Antti Lamberg https://orcid/org/0000-0003-3173-0199
Jari Ojala https://orcid/org/0000-0002-4348-8857
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BUSINESS HISTORY 27
Appendix. Seven main discourses in strategy research and their respective
Sub-discourses used in this study
1. Strategy Content
Value Creation
Value Capture
Value Appropriation
Corporate Strategy
Diversification
Global Strategy
Multinational Corporation
Emerging Market
Business Model
Venture Capital
Crowdfunding
2. Strategy Process
Downsizing
Restructuring
Spinoff
Divestiture
Divestment
Merger
Acquisition
Organizational Change
Organizational Identity
Startup
Strategy Process
Strategy Implementation
Strategic Planning
Strategy Development
Resource Allocation
Strategy Execution
3. Resources and Capabilities
Dynamic Capabilities
Capabilities
Knowledge-Based View
Organizational Learning
Resource-Based View
Core Competencies
Capability Development
Capability Acquisition
Capability Life Cycle
Origins of Capabilities
Capability Imitation
Knowledge Imitation
Social Capital
Factor Markets
Routines
Technology Innovation
Innovation Process
Open Innovation
User Innovation
28 J.-A. LAMBERG ETAL.
Crowdsourcing
Patents
R&D Strategies
TechnologicalSearch
Types of Innovation
4. Firm–society
Institutional Theory
Stakeholder Theory
Corporate Social Responsibility
Ethical Issues Strategy
Ethics Strategy
Government Strategy
Regulatory Strategy
Political Strategy
Social Issues
Environmental Strategy
Sustainability
5. Interfirm Strategy
Network Theory
Cooperative Strategy
Relational Strategy
Alliances & Networks
Coopetition
Alliance Governance
Alliance Processes
Alliance Strategy
Alliance Portfolio
Interfirm Collaboration
Interfirm Coopetition
Interfirm Network
6. Organizational Design
Agency
PropertyRights
Contract Theory
Behavioral Theory
Transaction Cost Economics
Corporate Governance
Vertical Integration and Outsourcing
Organization Design
Organizational Forms
Organizational Structure
Family Businesses
Behavioral Decision-Making
Real Options
Risk
Uncertainty
Behavioral Strategy
Aspiration Levels
Boards of Directors
Group Decision-Making
Decision-making OR Cognition
BUSINESS HISTORY 29
Managerial Compensation
Top Management Team
Strategic Entrepreneurship
Corporate Entrepreneurship
Social Entrepreneurship
7. Competition and (Evolutionary) Fit
Contingency Theory
Resource Dependence
Evolutionary Theory
Population Ecology
Exploitation and Exploration
Search Behavior
Industry Analysis
Intra-industry Dynamics
Game Theory [Database]
Competitive Heterogeneity
Strategic Positioning
Sustainable Advantage
Temporary Advantage
CompetitiveAdvantage
Scale & Scope Advantages
Competitive Interaction
Economic Geography
Clusters
Industry Dynamics
Industry Transformation
Industry Evolution
... The historical turn is increasingly being supported (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004;Godfrey et al., 2016;Cummings et al., 2017) with a wider group of scholars recognizing that history matters (Rowlinson et al., 2014;Hatch and Schultz, 2017). A similar line of thinking can also be discerned in the strategic management literature (Bridgman et al., 2019;Lamberg et al., 2020;Lubinski and Wadhwani, 2020;Sasaki et al., 2020). ...
... We see Stewart's entire work as an ignored 'managerial theory of the firm'; future research must unveil the rest of Stewart's ideas and gauge to what extent this 'theory' is ripe enough to be enshrined as a (holistic) strategy theory (Üsdiken et al., 2021). By revealing the seeds and content of SWOT analysis, we illustrate the spirit of a renaissance in strategic planning and cater to an increasing demand by editors of managerial journals for 'historical work' (Laamanen, 2017;Lamberg et al., 2020). We aim to contribute to a rethink of SWOT: very topical, given the calls for holistic strategic thinking (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011;Suddaby et al., 2011;Collis, 2021). ...
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The origins of SWOT analysis have been enigmatic, until now. With archival research, interviews with experts and a review of the available literature, this paper reconstructs the original SOFT/SWOT approach, and draws potential implications. During a firm's planning process, all managers are asked to write down 8 to 10 key planning issues faced by their units. Each manager grades, with evidence, these issues as either safeguarding the Satisfactory; opening Opportunities; fixing Faults; or thwarting Threats: hence SOFT (which is later merely relabeled to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, or SWOT). Subgroups of managers have several dialogues about these issues with the instruction to include the needs and expectations of all the firm's stakeholders. Their developed resolutions or proposals become input for the executive planning committee to articulate corporate purpose(s) and strategies. SWOT's originator, Robert Franklin Stewart, emphasized the crucial role that creativity plays in the planning process. The SOFT/SWOT approach curbs mere top-down strategy making to the benefit of strategy alignment and implementation; Introducing digital means to parts of SWOT's original participative, long-range planning process, as suggested herein, could boost the effectiveness of organizational strategizing, communication and learning. Archival research into the deployment of SOFT/SWOT in practice is needed.
... Management practices have long been practiced in any business to achieve its objectives, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Lamberg et al. (2022) state that management practices are essential in developing a business. Small and limited resource and savings factors cause businesses such as SMEs to require more efficient and systematic management practices than large firms (Farida & Setiawan, 2022). ...
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Most of the women from the B40 groups have been involved in informal business. Many mumpreneurs need higher knowledge, education, motivation, imbalance between work and household roles, and financial restraint in developing a business. Therefore, the objective of this study is determined based on the level of bankability status among B40 managers and to assess the issue of financial management, which could affect their bankability and business expansion. This study uses a qualitative method, and the research instrument used is a semi-structured interview. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inductive techniques. The study involved 23 respondents who are B40 mumprenuers who live in PPR Kerinchi Lembah Pantai. Thematic analysis is employed to analyze, identify, and report themes and patterns in the research data. The analysis is done by combining approaches: 1) descriptive approach and 2) inductive (data-driven) approach. The findings revealed that the level of bankability among mumprenuers is low. Second, the results of the inductive approach revealed that most of the mumpreneurs practicing poor financial management could affect their business's sustainability. The implication is that mumpreneurs still need continuous disclosure and awareness in managing their finances, especially in cash inflow and outflow, budgeting, and decision-making.
... Management practices have long been practiced in any business to achieve its objectives, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Lamberg et al. (2022) state that management practices are essential in developing a business. Small and limited resource and savings factors cause businesses such as SMEs to require more efficient and systematic management practices than large firms (Farida & Setiawan, 2022). ...
Article
Most of the women from the B40 groups have been involved in informal business. Many mumpreneurs need higher knowledge, education, motivation, imbalance between work and household roles, and financial restraint in developing a business. Therefore, the objective of this study is determined based on the level of bankability status among B40 managers and to assess the issue of financial management, which could affect their bankability and business expansion. This study uses a qualitative method, and the research instrument used is a semi-structured interview. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inductive techniques. The study involved 23 respondents who are B40 mumprenuers who live in PPR Kerinchi Lembah Pantai. Thematic analysis is employed to analyze, identify, and report themes and patterns in the research data. The analysis is done by combining approaches: 1) descriptive approach and 2) inductive (data-driven) approach. The findings revealed that the level of bankability among mumprenuers is low. Second, the results of the inductive approach revealed that most of the mumpreneurs practicing poor financial management could affect their business's sustainability. The implication is that mumpreneurs still need continuous disclosure and awareness in managing their finances, especially in cash inflow and outflow, budgeting, and decision-making.
... Several recent studies have analyzed the historiography of business history, showing especially the intensifying interplay between the discipline and organization studies, "social scientification" of the discipline, and the impact of business history on policy and business practices (see e.g., Hannah 2018; Kipping, Kurosawa, and Wadhwani 2016;Ojala 2017;Wilson et al. 2022;Wilson and Tilba 2023). Moreover, history-oriented research has gained more foothold within organization studies, initiating at least to some degree "historical turn"; that is, emphasizing historical methods in organization studies (Clark and Rowlinson 2004, Kieser 1994, Booth and Rowlinson 2006, Decker et al. 2015, Maclean et al. 2016, Vaara and Lamberg 2016, Lamberg et al. 2022, Rowlinson 2015. ...
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This article extends our earlier analysis (2010) to gauge, first, to what extent quantitative methods have been used in recent business history research and, second, the impact that quantitative methods may have had on the citations of business history articles. We used data from the two premier journals in the field (Business History and Business History Review) of the last 20 years. We found that the quantitative content has not increased in relative terms recently in these journals, yet it has in absolute terms. However, at the same time more sophisticated statistical methods have been used more frequently also in business historical research. Contrary to our earlier results, quantitative methods no longer have an easily discernible impact on citation patterns, yet the explicit use of theories seems to have increased the appeal of such scholarship. The unclear impact on citations may be due, at least in part, to a time lag in interdisciplinary knowledge networks. We also argue that the growing impact of economics and economic history, global and comparative history, and digital big data methods will necessitate more use of quantitative methods in the future, with citation impacts becoming observable only in the coming decades.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to unravel the success story of a family business, while engaging with debates in business and management research through the application of corporate strategy frameworks. Implement a structured methodology to evaluate a company’s strategic efforts and explore how businesses historically achieved competitive advantages over time. Design/methodology/approach This company analysis adopts a longitudinal approach on competitive advantages, moving beyond traditional cross-sectional business to transform static models into dynamic ones. It adheres to Michael Porter’s Value Chain model (1985) and his subsequent revisions (1996, 2001) to explore how competitive advantages emerge and are sustained. Data exploration leverages an extensive archival corporate collection comprising approximately 100,000 documents, enabling a thorough examination of value chain activities through primary and secondary sources. Findings Chocolates Amatller effectively channelled its competitive advantages through strategic operational areas, including purchasing cocoa at prices below market value, using strong marketing tools such as illustrative collectible cards and posters and implementing skilful financial strategies. Originality/value Examine why, when and how a Spanish chocolatier achieved a position of prominence among Spain’s foremost industrial figures by constructing Barcelona’s iconic Casa Amatller.
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In addressing the urgent need for business historians to think about enhancing their relationships with practitioners, we advocate what we term a 'Practical Turn' (as opposed to a 'historic turn' or a 'narrative turn', as proposed by other scholars). Although not entirely original, this 'Practical Turn' is essential if the discipline is to gain greater credibility, especially in management and business schools where most business historians reside. The article addresses some of the challenges faced by business historians, providing evidence to demonstrate that the discipline has much to offer the various worlds of practice.
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Bu çalışmanın gayesi daha önce bu alanda yapılan ulusal çalışmalarca hazırlanan “asırlık Türk firmaları” listelerini genişleterek fenomene ilişkin idrakı bir adım daha ileriye taşımaktır. Bu bağlamda, daha önce hazırlanan kıymetli listelerden faydalanılarak bir baz liste hazırlanmış ve bu liste, araştırmacının sektör bazlı yaptığı okumalar ve kendi kişisel araştırmaları vesilesiyle zenginleştirilmiştir. Araştırmalar neticesinde, 1454-1923 yılları arasında kurulmuş ve halen varlığını devam ettiren 238 firmaya ulaşılmıştır. Listede yer alan firmaların, akademik yazında kullanılan “en eski”, “kıdemli”, “köklü”, “tarih gibi”, “uzun ömürlü” vb. ifadelerle kendilerini nitelemek yerine, bilhassa “tarihi” ve “meşhur” ifadelerini tercih ettikleri tespit edilmiştir. Faaliyet alanlarına göre listede en çok karşılaşılan firmalar; hamamlar, helvacılar, esnaf lokantaları, fırınlar/unlu mamul üreticileri, kebapçılar ve şekerci/lokumculardır. Firmaların şehirlere göre dağılımı incelendiğinde ise, bu firmaların 116 tanesini (yaklaşık %49’unu) bünyesinde barındıran İstanbul’un listeyi domine ettiği görülmektedir. Çalışmada ulaşılan diğer bulgular ise; firmaların mühim bir kısmının kendi web sayfasının bulunması ve tüm firmaların erkek girişimciler tarafından kurulmuş olmasıdır.
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