The phenomenology of strategic management: How alternative methodologies redefine theory and practice

The development of principles to guide the process of conceptualizing and implementing a corporate vision is the most pressing need of management and has developed into a multi-billion-dollar market, with the top gurus enjoying the celebrity status and inflated incomes of pop stars. Yet this essential part of the strategic management process is relatively little studied academically, and has no generally accepted methodology. This is because it is not captured by the scientific method. The major management thinkers generally did not develop their principles through systematic observation of a representative population, nor did they validate their principles by prediction, experiment of a statistical surrogate of either. In relying almost exclusively on natural-science methodology, management academics have not only ignored the methodology of the classics and of the most active and lucrative part of their field they have also fallen methodologically far behind the other behavioral sciences, which have long recognized that natural-science methodology is incomplete and inappropriate for them, and have developed more suitable alternatives. This dissertation (1) survey these alternative methodologies, including methods derived from philosophy, psychology, history and literature, developing in the process what seems, based on a survey of standard business research texts, to be the first systematic catalogue of alternative methodologies applicable to strategic management (2) analyzes the strategic management experience, principally thorough a detailed account of an actual re-engineering, to determine which alternative methodologies survey and the analysis of the strategic management experience, conclusions about the nature of strategic management, its research methodology and the manner in which its research results should be presented and (4) recommends a doctoral program to implement these conclusions, and thus align academic methodology to implement these conclusions, and thus align academic methodology and research with the needs of the strategic management market