Towards An Organic perspective on strateg. The Mechanistic perspective, страница 15

Organic ideas in turn extend familiar constructs and relationships through their emphasis on dynamic notions of constructs and relationships, reciprocal causation and interaction, and integration across and within constructs. Particularly emphasized are the processes and historical paths linking different constructs, self-loops, and causal relationships between several constructs and across time. Additionally, each of the different linkages in the model can be used to address variance and process questions. Therefore, the central questions of the field are viewed in the model as dealing with both how firm strategy and firm performance are determined and with what the determinants are.

The OESP model goes beyond merely renewing existing key mechanistic and integrating organic models and emphases. By isolating and applying key organic assumptions on time, flow and coupling, the OESP model offers several distinct contributions. First, it highlights several dyadic relationships that have been rather overlooked or only partially researched. For example, rather than the traditional focus on firm performance as the field’s ultimate dependent variable, in the OESP model it is viewed as a means (independent variable) for achieving a constantly changing dependent variable— long-term performance. Furthermore, the model suggests that performance can affect each of the other constructs. It can affect firm organization, for example, by changing internal political processes or cause–effect beliefs. It can affect environment, as by changing resource distributions, signaling growth and profit potential, allowing comparison, and otherwise affecting actors’ behavior (e.g., March and Sutton, 1997). Finally, it can affect strategy on a continuous basis, or through unique historical events such as a firm’s near-death experience.

Another acknowledged but mostly overlooked relationship highlighted in the model is the effect of strategy on environment (and indirectly on performance). Hardly treated by any of the original mechanistic models, but highly complementary to them, this set of relationships has to some extent been examined by the new industrial organization research (e.g., Tirole, 1989). Although the environment is generally expected to exert a stronger influence on firms than in reverse, firms still have considerable and often overlooked latitude. In line with the organic concept of strategy, this latitude includes strategies that create new industries, establish technological standards, and otherwise generate ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter, 1942).

Additionally, the OESP model specifies the existence of direct casual flows between firm organization and environment (and their subconstructs). These linkages represent the basic idea that firms and their attributes are parts of the environment, and are linked to it by exchanges of resources and information and by various relationships and institutions. For example, firm resources affect and are affected by competitors, customers, and local environment (Levinthal and Myatt, 1994; Porter, 1991), organization structure can affect competitors’ behavior and industry

structure (e.g., Caves, 1980), and perceptions of key individuals within the firm affect the environment viewed by the firm directly, or indirectly through organizational structure (March and Simon, 1958). These linkages are particularly relevant given the advent of relational views of competitive advantage and the greater recognition that key firm resources may reside in a firm’s external network (e.g., Dyer and Singh, 1998).

A second distinctive feature of the OESP model is that it stresses the too often ignored self-influences in each construct’s development path. It specifically considers firm performance effects on its own development (Barnett and Hansen, 1996), such as when current customers help generate new customers (Arthur, 1995) and current successes lead to future failures (Miller, 1990). Additionally, it includes the effects of strategy upon itself such as when early choices constrain or enable future ones (e.g., Nelson and Winter, 1982; Bowman and Hurrey, 1993; Ghemawat, 1991).