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13 - Broader methods to support new insights into strategizing
- Edited by Damon Golsorkhi, Linda Rouleau, David Seidl, Universität Zürich, Eero Vaara
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- Book:
- Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice
- Published online:
- 05 October 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 August 2010, pp 201-216
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Summary
waxman: ‘In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.’
greenspan: ‘Absolutely, precisely […] you know, I was shocked because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.’
(Transcription from hearings by the Government Oversight Committee of the United States House of Representatives, 23 October 2008)‘…the situation is manifestly not coming under control. Things continue to fall apart.’
(Paul Krugman, 27 October 2008Introduction
Crises affecting different aspects of the global economy began to capture public attention as we prepared the final version of this chapter in the last months of 2008. Markets were on a downward roller coaster generating dramatic government responses around the world. While elected officials tended to speak and act as if they were close to calming volatile economic behaviour, other observers were less sanguine, including former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan and Professor Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in mid-October for his research on trade and the location of economic activity.
Gradually, the increasing instability of financial institutions, housing markets, employment and other indicators of economic activity became so significant that we decided we could not finish this chapter without a substantial change in perspective. Our initial draft applauded increasing attention to Strategy as Practice, or strategizing, recognized the importance of the case studies that provide almost all empirical evidence of the micro-behaviour that is the focus of this area of inquiry, but argued for a broader methodological base.
Foreword by Anne Sigismund Huff
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- By Anne Sigismund Huff, Director AIM – The Advanced Institute for Management, London Business School
- Mark De Rond, University of Cambridge
- Foreword by Anne Huff
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- Book:
- Strategic Alliances as Social Facts
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 19 June 2003, pp ix-xi
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The contributions of this book are threefold. First, the three empirical studies of strategic alliances in biotechnology research add to an already considerable literature on the pharmaceutical industry and its evolving structure. Second, the approach to understanding these increasingly pervasive strategies exemplifies the utility of moving away from theoretic ‘silos’ towards multi-theoretic analysis. This approach can be usefully juxtaposed with contrasting arguments about how management research might achieve more depth and maturity, as outlined in more detail below. The third contribution of the book is to relate a pluralist perspective to the work of Isaiah Berlin. This section of the book not only provides a stronger ontological foundation for Mark's effort, but introduces a philosophical depth that has been missing from most discussions of management theory around the world. All in all, this is a fresh, ambitious and welcome agenda. Though complex, the book is brief enough to be accessible to many readers; I encourage you to be one.
The empirical study begins with the puzzle of why alliances continue to flourish despite widely agreed statistics showing that at least half of previous efforts have failed, often miserably. Those interested in alliances, especially their strong role in the pharmaceutical industry, will be interested in the (disguised) descriptions of three specific connections. None of these collective efforts fulfilled its initially stated purpose; the most apparently successful was terminated the most quickly.