Towards An Organic perspective on strateg. The Mechanistic perspective, страница 9

1999).

Common epistemological underpinnings

Although some of these organic developments came from within the field, others were influenced by advances in the natural sciences, particularly in modern physics (McKelvey, 1997; MacIntosh and MacLean, 1999), and in the social sciences (e.g., Adam, 1990; Sztompka, 1993) as exemplified by evolutionary ideas in economics (Hodgson, 1993), and by the move in organizational theory from rational to natural views on organizations (Scott, 1995) and towards process models (Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). Common to these diverse developments in the organic wave is a shift in the underlying epistemological assumptions related to time, flow, and coupling found in the mechanistic perspective. The new ideas have emphasized time as incessant and diachronic: concepts and relationships are part of continuous processes and dynamic phenomena, and entities are not fixed but are rather created and changed. History matters in the sense that prior events and developments condition current choices, and action, human agency, and social processes are central. In the organic view interaction and multiple and mutual influences are highlighted; there is more room for actors’ discretion and for endogenous developments. Finally, the new ideas emphasize interdisciplinary and integrated views of strategy phenomena and concepts, particularly depicting and explaining phenomena, while being sensitive to their interdependent social, economic, and informational aspects, and highlighting linkages within and across levels of analysis.

TOWARDS AN ORGANIC PERSPECTIVE: THREE PILLARS

If the mechanistic perspective provided a shared epistemological base, the advent of the organic developments has brought the field much more relevant and enriched approaches to its core issues. Despite the growing recognition in the field of the relevance and utility of the organic ideas, they have not managed to change the mechanistic perspective’s more secure yet increasingly fractured ‘deep structure’. Consequently, the field’s transition away from fragmentation, stasis, and linearity has remained incomplete and uneven.

For example, Porter’s (1996, 1997) reflection on the concept of strategy, which includes several dynamic extensions, still retains a view of strategy as a planned and stable position, and suggests a linear causal flow running from environment to position (i.e., strategy) to internal organization. Similarly, SWOT analysis, rooted in mechanistic ideas, still remains a primary consulting tool (Hill and Westbrook, 1997) and serves as an organizing framework for research and teaching (Barney, 1997). Organic ideas have made more mark on the mechanistic perspective’s concept of strategy and theoretical models than on its analytic models. Moreover, the independent and disciplinary roots of the main mechanistic models have left linkages across models less specified. Against this backdrop, an organic perspective can further exploit the generative power of the organic assumptions to facilitate the transition to more dynamic and integrated approaches to the field’s core issues. We proceed by developing three related building blocks that parallel the main elements of the mechanistic perspective: a concept of strategy, an integrative theoretical model, and a model of the strategic management process.

A concept of strategy

A natural starting point and a linchpin to the other two pillars of the organic perspective is the concept of strategy. Extending earlier definitions (Chandler, 1962; Andrews, 1971; Porter, 1980; Quinn, 1980; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985; Itami and Roehl, 1987; Bowman and Hurrey, 1993; Brown and Eisenhardt, 1998), we define a firm’s strategy as the planned or actual coordination of the firm’s major goals and actions, in time and space, that continuously co-align the firm with its environment. The firm’s strategy co-aligns it with the environment by building on and modifying the firm’s internal attributes and forces to respond to, and influence, environmental conditions and developments. In short, strategy is co-aligning or adaptive coordination. This definition establishes three interrelated points: strategy emphasizes the firm’s behavior over time and includes major goals and actions; it includes coordination in space and time, of which planned coordination is just one special case; and it deals with adaptation, which includes both responding to and influencing the environment. Each of these points is elaborated below.