Is Strategy in Crisis? (PDF)

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 68% (1,7), University of Glamorgan, language: English, abstract: This paper discusses the assertion that strategy is in crisis as Wilson and Jarzabkowski (2004) suggest. To come to this discussion, it is necessary to define the terms strategy and crisis. However, defining strategy is not straightforward. In fact, there is hardly any one who knows what strategy is (Markides, 2004). Even Porter (1987) recognises that there is not really an agreement about the definition of strategy. As a result, several, even opposing definitions shape the field of strategy (Whittington, 1996) as well as an accumulation of terms connected to strategy which are more confusing than claryfying (Markides, 2004). Mintzberg and Lampel (1999) for example, try to divide these different views into ten schools, whereas Johnson, Scholes and Whittington (2005) suggest that these approaches can be assembled with three lenses. Apart from the existing fields, there are also new ones emerging like the view of strategy as practice which focuses roughly speaking on the individuals in a company (Whittington, 2002). Nickols (2003) goes one step further. He claims that every definition and hence every approach has its right to exist, because strategy involves any of those definitions. Finally, Franklin (1998a) even questions the assumption whether strategy is an established paradigm, though it has been researched for many years...