Overview of Methodological Trends of the Last Decade in Strategic Management Research

AbstractThe main purpose of this article is to present existing and new research strategies and methods in the last decade of strategic management literature. We first examined 137 research articles in Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) from 2009 to 2011 in terms of four key criteria that lie on the methodology dimensions such as research topics, data collection and analysis methods and contributions to literature. Then to determine methodological trends, we compared findings of our content analysis and of review article - Ketchen et. al. (2008) - which includes content analysis, results from 2000 to 2002. We choose SMJ for examination; because it is an excellent source for documenting basic methodological trends in Strategic Management field. Our research question is that: “What are the new developments in the methodology of strategic management area in consideration of these four key criteria in the last decade?” The contribution of this study is adding a holistic overview of methodological trends in strategic management to small research stream that critiques only one side of the strategic management research. As a result, performance-related, organization theory and behavior, competitive advantage and value/knowledge creation have become more frequently discussed topics through longitudinal data obtained from archival sources. Therefore, event history analysis has gained importance near regression methods and statistical analysis