Some Thoughts on the Development of Disciplines, with Particular Attention to Behavioral Strategy

Abstract

Abstract The earliest contributors to discussions of strategy were advisors to military leaders, and that model was carried into early business schools, where the teachers of strategy were, for the most part, people with extensive experience as executives or advisors to them. The key course materials were anecdotes and cases, and the standard intellectual discourse was organized around recollected episodes in organizational history. The central contributions of the early teaching of strategy were consciousness of the complications introduced by complexity, competition, and attention to the second-order surprises of intentional action. There was neither a pretense of theory nor a significant involvement in research. Although it shared in the onus of a general academic skepticism about the academic legitimacy of research on business, the “discipline” of strategy sought to emulate the attributes of more established disciplines. The new field was typified by an early open interdisciplinary flavor that facilitated the differentiation of a new field, and a subsequent refinement that restricted access. By the start of the twenty-first century, this process had run much of its course, and the field of strategy had taken its place as a reasonably respectable academic specialty. The history of an emphasis on real organizations in real situations led to an openness to anchors drawn from sources other than conventional economics. These included particularly the theory of games, the evolutionary theory of the firm, and the behavioral theory of organizations. The struggle for respectability in economics was repeatedly frustrated by the difficulty of discovering a formulation that honored the litany of economics while fitting the observations of real strategy making. The future seems likely to be more of the same, a combination of efforts to secure recognition through emulation of the standards and barriers to entry that characterize established disciplines, and of exploratory gambits that are mostly destined to be forgotten. The optimal balance is likely to be as elusive as it is in other domains.