Guest Editor's Introduction: Patterns in the Strategic Evolution of Large, Multi-business Firms

摘要

The vast majority of strategy and organization research still largely centers on the analysis of an individual strategic decision or action by a single firm taken at one specific point in time. Thereby, such research fails to consider the history, sequences, and patterns of a firm's action repertoire and those of other market constituents (i.e., competitors). This negligence is particularly troublesome as recent contributions in competitive strategy and corporate strategy research have increasingly shown that a firm's competitive behavior, and the value creation impact of major strategic decisions, cannot be adequately explained and understood without considering the emerging or manifested patterns in both firm and industry activity. Research in corporate strategy may take different directions: (1) the conceptualization of so-called serial acquirers (e.g., Brauer and Schimmer 2010; Chatterjee 2009; Laamanen and Keil 2008); (2) the analysis of sequences and spillover effects across portfolio restructuring decisions (e.g., Barkema and Schijven 2008; Kim et al. 2011; Zollo and Reuer 2010); and (3) the study of the influence of patterns (i.e., waves) in industry acquisition and divestiture activity on the timing and outcomes of a firm's actions (McNamara et al. 2008; Brauer and Wiersema 2012). These directions of research widely underscore the necessity to move away from an analysis of a single firm event and its outcome to a more comprehensive analysis of streams of firm actions that emerge from the particular trajectories of firms, which are embedded in broader streams of industry activity.