Towards An Organic perspective on strateg. The Mechanistic perspective, страница 32

[11] Although we use such abstractions as firm, environment, strategy, coordination, action, and adaptation to describe macro structures and processes, we fully recognize that ultimately they include and are carried out by human beings and micro processes.

[12] Prior to the emergence of the strategy field, theories in industrial organization economics, such as the SCP, ascribed firm performance mainly to attributes of the environment. A common distinction made in this literature is between structural variables that can have independent effects on performance, and strategic variables. For example, in entry barriers, structural variables are resources such as scale of production, reputation, and knowhow, and strategic variables are actions taken by incumbents such as entry-deterring strategies. Similarly, organization theory models, such as early contingency research, have viewed performance as being affected directly by organizational attributes such as organizational structure. These direct linkages between organization, or environment, and performance are relevant both to the strategy field and to the disciplines.

[13] Although we describe a general model, we recognize that different organizational, national, and industrial contexts may call for different kinds of strategic management processes and therefore may change the relative weight of some of the elements (e.g., planned vs. emergent strategy).

[14] Strategic leaders play an important but not unlimited role in the strategic management process. In contrast to their depiction in the mechanistic view as rational analyzers, we view their role as combining social and analytical facets and particularly as subject to constraints on rationality and adjustment. Moreover, leaders’ actions and behaviors, such as using external consultants to test the political feasibility of potential directions, or creating a sense of confidence through symbolic actions, often accompany or precede analysis.

[15] Familiar planning tools such as the industry life-cycle and scenario planning often imply the design of strategies around external givens. They do not usually consider changes in the environment produced by strategy itself. The need to choose the best strategy given the strategies of other players is implicit in the game-theoretic notion of the Nash equilibrium. This notion is extended here to include actions and responses of internal actors.

[16] A similar progression to a more organic view can be found in models of human behavior. A major debate in the fields of psychology and organization behavior has focused on the relative primacy of personality and situational determinants in explaining individual behavior. Although neither position completely negates the other, internal views see people as being motivated by inner drives (Freud, 1964) or traits (Allport, 1961), while external models (e.g., Skinner, 1953) view human behavior as primarily caused by external stimuli. A third and more recent perspective explains human functioning in a more dynamic and integrated manner. In social cognition theory (e.g., Bandura, 1986), human behavior is explained in terms of a model of triadic reciprocity in which behavior, cognitive and other personal capabilities, and environmental events interactively influence each other.

[17] For an excellent introduction to the conduct of process research and to pertinent foundational work on time in the social sciences see Pettigrew (1997).