STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT



Critical Evaluation of Strategic Management

Abstract

This paper contributes to the development of a critical understanding of strategic management. We provide a brief outline of strategic management as it is conventionally taught and practiced, pointing to several avenues for developing critical approaches. In the broadest sense, a critical perspective stands outside of the managerialist orientation in order to study strategy as an organizational process. We review work in the processual school that purports to describe how strategy is 'really' made, from bargaining, constructivist, and emergent perspectives. While this approach has been valuable in probing the ideology of strategy, its focus on discourse and lack of concern with the 'truth of strategy' is a potential weakness. A third approach draws from Gramsci to offer an historical materialist perspective, which pays more attention to the content of strategy. We argue that the strategic deployment of discursive, organizational, and economic resources in sustaining or challenging hegemony suggests a strategic concept of power and a political perspective on corporate strategies to exercise market power, discipline labour, influence government policies, and resist pressures from social groups. It also points to a more encompassing vision of emancipation strategies than that offered by critical theory.

Critical Evaluation of Strategic Management

Introduction

It is only comparatively recently that "strategic management" has been labeled, studied, and privileged as a field of managerial practice and scholarly attention (Knights and Morgan 1991). In recent years, many business schools have crowned their programs with a "capstone" course in strategic management, which is generally intended not just to convey the key concepts of the field, but also to synthesize the other sub-disciplines of management and to provide a "top-management perspective". As possibly the most managerialist of the management specialties, strategy tends toward a narrow pragmatism and is deeply rooted in the managerial functionalist paradigm. As such, it presumes the legitimacy of established managerial priorities and is dedicated to identifying more effective and efficient means for their realization. It largely takes for granted the historical and political conditions under which these priorities are determined and enacted. Moreover, as a technocratic mode of decision making by specific elites and serving particular interests, strategy is not simply confined to the business world; rather, the hegemonic strategic project can be seen in the ever widening circle of problems which are deemed suitable for strategic management, from public sector and non-profit management to regional economic development and business school accreditation.

This chapter contributes to the development of a critical understanding of strategic management that is less coloured by the preoccupations and sectional interests of top managers. Since we do not presume readers' familiarity with this field, we provide a brief outline of strategic management as it is conventionally studied, taught and practiced, pointing to some of the major conceptual divisions and controversies in the field and several avenues for developing critical approaches. In the broadest sense, a critical perspective stands outside of the managerialist orientation in order to study strategy as an organizational process, one which has significant political ramifications within organizations ...