The strategic management field focuses on questions addressing competitive and corporate strategy. Competitive strategy concerns how firms gain and sustain a competitive advantage. Corporate strategy concerns the management of the multi-business firm and its associated boundary-of-the-firm choices in product, factor, and geographic markets (e.g., market entry and exit, restructuring, acquisitions, partnerships, foreign direct investment, outsourcing, etc.). These questions have been distilled into four fundamental issues of strategy: (1) How do firms behave? (2) Why are firms different? (3) What is the function of, or value added by, headquarters? and (4) What determines success or failure in international competition? (Rumelt, Schendel, and Teece, 1994).
As a consequence, the strategic management field has long been interested in the decisions made by general managers. Managers craft and execute upon four components of strategy within a coherent economic logic:
More generally, research in the field addresses how organizations can create and capture value through their actions in markets and resource allocation decisions.
Scholarly interest in strategic management has burgeoned in the past few decades. This growth has led to specialization in research activities and a substantial literature covering an increasingly diverse set of topics. While growing breadth and specialization are indicators of research progress, they also require continually striving to elevate research by connecting all areas of strategic management research with the core research questions of the field and with the current challenges and decisions facing general managers and their advisers.
Strategic Management Review (SMR) provides a forum to integrate insights from multiple disciplines to improve our understanding of the distinctive contributions of strategic management. For example, contributions will offer insights on the field’s canonical problems and frontiers, the tradeoffs that senior executives face in their decision-making (e.g., when to compete versus collaborate, when to invest in a committed versus more flexible fashion, etc.), and the defining characteristics of strategic decisions (e.g., irreversible investment subject to uncertainty, rivalry, and interdependent organizational activities).
The SMR is an academic outlet whose intended audience is scholars. The journal also takes seriously the input of practitioners to shape strategy scholarship through practitioners’ involvement in the SMR's Business Practice Advisory Board as well as through mini conferences and through commentaries and exchanges that can influence strategic management research.
The SMR aims to promote insights on core questions in the strategic management field through impactful essays. These essays can take many forms, including (a) essays on the theoretical foundations of strategic management and the theoretical perspectives emanating from the field, (b) scholarly exchanges, (c) thought pieces dealing with managerial practice or public policy, (d) methodological primers on advances relevant for strategic management research, (e) state-of-the-art reviews or research retrospectives, and (f) forward-looking literature critiques.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas of strategic management research. Each of these topics can be potentially connected to the fundamental issues in strategic management, the tensions underlying strategic decisions, and the unique characteristics of strategic decisions:
Behavioral strategy
Competitive strategy
Collaborative strategy
Corporate strategy
Entrepreneurship and strategy
International strategy
Knowledge, innovation, and technology
Micro-foundations of strategy
Stakeholder strategy
Leadership and governance
Organization and strategy
Strategy process and practice
Strategic decision-making
Research methodology in strategic management
Empirical articles or other pieces of original research that could be published in traditional strategy and management outlets fall outside of the scope of the SMR. An aim of the SMR is to complement those outlets by focusing on developing and curating thought-provoking essays. The SMR will facilitate integration of strategy research by embracing contributions from multiple disciplinary perspectives and by fostering input from managerial practice to academic research.