[转帖]从学术角度看如何研究战略（来自水木清华-阿乖）

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什么是战略?

1. what is
why some firms more successful than others?

2. how to
how can we make a given firm more successful?

战略的三种学术流派:

1. field researchers, the institutionalist

time: mid-1960s and early 1970s.
character: focused on the elements of strategy
and the strategy process from a top manager's perspective
Exemplar: Chandler
Note: Chandler (1972), Mintzberg (1978) have developed a  
reseach tradition -- the so-called processual approach to
strategy -- which is an enduring stream of insights for
research, including empirical hypothesis testing.

2. economists

time: late 1970s and 1980s
character: industrial organization economics is the
background on which they drew to analyze the problems
of the firm. The basic question is: whether industry
characteristics constrain the strategies of competing firms.
Exemplar: Porter

3. behaviour scientists

time 1980s and 1990s.
character: the functioning and survival of the organization,
behavior of its people and the intra- and inter-organization
network they adopt.
Note: cooperative networks as distince from competitive
markets start to inform this analysis.

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战略研究的发展

mid 1960s
firm is the primary focus of strategic management
with its strengths and weaknesses as a key element.

late 1970s through early 1980s
the environment and its relationship to the firm
was the emphasis, with industry analysis at its center.

late in the 1980s
industries and markets and firm scope were the  
dual foci, with the strategy performance
relationship as the focus.

throughout 1990s
firm capabilities and core competencees and more
recently, knowledge as an emphasis, with its link
to the building of capabilities and competitive
advantage as the focus.

战略方面的经典书籍 (节选, based on personal criteria)

Chandler's "strategy and structure"
it focuses on the developing history
of four major American corporations
DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey
and Sears Roebuck. It examines the relationships
between strategy and structure as these firms evolves.

Oliver Williamson (1975) "Markets and Hierarchies"
It deals with the M-form. The boundaries of the  
firm are involved with the make-or-buy decisions, and
are influced by the nature of the assets and the market
invovled.

Porter's "Competitive strategy"
It relied strongly and explictly on industrial
organization economics. Its major emphasis on
the competitive actors in the firm's industrial,
competitive environment -- the five forces.

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如何在战略的学术期刊上灌水
(供有志于走学术道路的同仁们参考)

strategic management journal
是目前最有影响的专业期刊.

Phelan et al (2002) 在 S.M.J. (23) : 1161-1168
总结了SMJ前20年的发文情况.一些具体的对比:

1980年:
单作者,15页,20参考文献,一年排期.
non empirical: empirical=1:1

1999年
多作者,上百案例,70参考文献,20页以上,两年以上排期.
non empirical: empirical=1:7

还有一些趋势:
用二手资料的越来越多,
案例越来越多,美国作者逐渐占多数.

学术界被empirical research统治,主要有两个原因:

1.因为这领域逐渐成熟,其由prescience concept
向data-driven normal science过渡.
2.编辑的偏好. "we do not want for theories,
but we do want for theories that have been  
adequately tested against empirical data. future
research should, wherever possible, be normative
in character, be more rigorous".  

还有其它的一些刊物:
通俗的有:  
Havard business review, sloan managemet review, journal of  
business, business horizons,California management review.

学术:
long range planning, administrative science quarterly,  
academy of management journal, management science,
journal of business strategy

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战略和其它学科的关系

(我隐约记得网上曾经有过争吵
自己对这个问题也很感兴趣,所以
打算浓墨重彩地胡说八道,见谅 // )

分那么几块:
A. 大概的关系
B. 介绍经济的5个学派.
C. 介绍社会学.
D. 来个比较.主要是assumption, objects, etc.

战略和其它学派的关系,下面的话不是我的,是  
fundamental issues in strategy
by R. Rumelt, D.Schendel, D. Teece
(90年代风头很猛的三条牛)他们说的.

Each of the allied disciplines speaks to a unique
metaphor. Economics is concerned with public welfare
and wealth distribution in society. Sociology is  
concerned with groups of individuals and their
activities as groups. Political science is concerned  
with choices made by groups whhere the objective  
function is diffuse and specified by the group
itself. Psychology is concerned with indiiduals,
the mind and the individual behaviors. That all of  
these have something to do with individuals in combination
with group choices and welfare is evident.

However, ...
见后啦

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经济学和战略相关的大概有下面几个学派:

1.Neoclassical perfect competition theory
  firms as combiners of inputs.

it highlights the profound ability of markets to  
efficiently allocate resources to production of  
desired goods, yet leaves a LIMITED role for firms,
which serve as "black box" production function

下面几个,是变了几个assumption,主要考虑因素有：
uncertainty, information asymmetry, opportunism,
bounded rationality, asset specificity

2. Bain-type Industrial Organization
   Firms as output-restrainers

firm exists to restrain productive output
through exercise of monopoly power or by
colluding with other firms. The profit is the
difference between an "artificially" high market
price and its cost.
structure -- conduct -- performance

3. Schumpeter's response
   A focus on DYNAMICS, with firms as seekers
   of new ways of competing.  

The purpose of the firm is to seize competitive  
opportunitiy by creating or adopting innovations  
that make rivals' position obsolete.  

Firms that can exeirce monopoly power are seen by
Schumpeter to have greater incentive to develop
revolutionary innovations. Ex ante market power
provides the firm with the financial wherewithal  
to invest in risky innovation; the potential of  
ex post market power provides a powerful incentives  
to make these investment.

comments:可惜大量实证研究都放在industry concentration
(proxy for monopoly power上), 忽略了其对竞争动态的观点.

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4. Chicago respone
   a renaissance of price theory

firms as seekers of production and distribution
efficiencies.effeictive collusion is not likely
to persist, thus above-normal returns must be due to
a firm's efficiency differential in production
and distribution, in comparison to rivals.

5. Transaction cost economics
   Firms as avoiders of the costs of market exchange.

a firm will tend to expand until the costs of
organizating an extra transaction within the firm
become equal to the costs of carring out the  
same transaction by means of an exchange on the
open market.  

6. Evolutionary economics

Nelson and Winter (1982) married the concepts of tacit
knowledge and routines to the dynamics of Schumpeterian
competition. Organizational capacities are based on
routines which are not explicitly comprehended,
but are developed and bettered with repetition and  
practice. This learning-by-doring means that the current
capacity of the firm is a funtion of history.
This implies that it is impossible to simply copy
best practive when it is observed  

总的来说:
organization economics不同organization theory
其主要不同在假设上．上面的那些理论assume：

a. managemrs attemps to maximize profits;
b. reliance on rationality (bounded or perfet)
c. emphasis on competition  
d. favor efficiency explanations for organization
e. some non-efficiency problem can be solved by price  
mechanism.

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based on "strategic management and economics"
Rumelt, R.P., Schendel, D. and Teece, D.J.
strategic management journal: 12: 5-29 (1991)

为什么经济学在战略中占一席之地?

1. the need to interpret performance data
2. the experience curve
3. the problem of persistent profit
4. the changing nature of economics
5. chaning climate within business school.

但是经济学可以取代战略么?

1. clean models (economy) VS dirty hands (strategy)
most business strategy contain implicit hypotheses  
concerning organizational/political behavior, etc.  

2. strategy is more pragmatic.
infatuated with formal modeling, economy may lose  
the rich empirical base in real business.What's more,
yesterday's business strategy are the subject of
today's research in strategy management; but economics
is just beginning to theorize about phenomena that
developed half a century ago.  

3.microeconmy "explains" rather than "predicts".
each of the model is purposedgully engineered to
capture and illustrate a particular phenomena.  
too much specific situation.

4. what is strategy changes over time.
e.g.,the rise of Japanese has substantially altered
the research agenda of strategy. when nowadays,
research focus regards "inside the firm" as the
enduring source of advantages, economics is at its weakest.

5. future trend
maybe the organizational capabilities as the enduring  
source of advantages.

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社会学

三大基石 (economic sociologists draw on)

Emile Furkheim's ideas about social milieu and identity
Max Weber's ideas about institutions
Karl Marx's idea about power.

主要理论

new insitutionalism: firms' strategic decisions occur
within an institutional context that defines what is
"strategic" and what is not. economic behavior is  
regular and predictable not because it follows universal
economic laws, but becasue it follows institutional
social scripts.

network theory: firms are related through multiple,
overlapping networks. it follows closely in the
wake of Durkheim, who was concerned with how social
milieu shapes behavior, identity and social integration.

structural theory of power: one stream explores the
structure and influence of the corporate elite
(e.g. elite networks develop strategy collectively, thereby
shape firm strategy). a second more concerned with the
exercise of power in the historical integration  
popularised. identifiable actors promoted these
strategies, and they typically had something to gain. Once
institutionalsed, new regulations and business strategies
reinforce the groups that promoted them.

理论的共同之处

economic practices emerge through distincly social
processes in which SOCIAL NETWORK and POWER RESOURCES
play roles in the SOCIAL construction and cognitive
representation of certain actions are national/

其与战略和经济学的不同之处

managers act with POOR information about the
efficiency of prospective strategies, and that
market do not efficiently destroy firms that make
bad calls. sociologists certainly see managers as
striving for effiency, but given the vagaries of
management decisions, they focus on how sociol
PROCESS lead managers to choose from altenatives

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经济,社会学和战略的关系

A.社会学和战略的不同(侧重点,前提,研究对象)

研究对象
strategy explore efficiency from the perspective of
the FIRM,developing theories of why one strategy is  
more successful than another, given product, firm
and industry characteristics.  

sociologis focus on efficiency from the perspective
of the CORPORATE ENVIRONMENT, developing theories
about the CONTEXT in which one strategy becomes
defined as efficient and diffuse across the corporate
landscapes.

研究方法
strategy is based on insigts from successful firms
observes the winners and look for what makes them win.
it is oriented to developing concrete prescriptions
for corporate leaders from exemplary cases.

sociology is across large populations of firms and over
time, typically using multivariate models that control
for diverse potential causes. It is orited to explaining
trends in corporate behavior post hoc.

所以,战略研究讲究时效性,(explain the success
of a strategy before it has become standard procedure),
但社会学,the goal is to explain how context and history  
contribute to management trends, after those trends  
have come and (sometimes) gone.

B.经济学和战略的不同

1. focus
economics focus on the OUTCOME of policy, rather than
the PROCESS and IMPLEMENTATION. Little attention is given
to why firms use managerial hierarchies to plan and  
coordinate. Institutional settings are abstracted away.

2. the unit of analysis
economics focus on the idealized AVERAGE, rather than on  
the DEVIANT case. all firms are alike, having access to
the same information and technology, and the decisions
are rational, driven by cost and demand conditions. VARIED
characters and capabilities of "REAL" firms are not considered.

3. managers
in ecnomics they are SUBSTITUTABLE commodities, or worse,  
as opportunitic actors in need of market disclipline.

P.S.这就是academir-oriented,管理硕士的要求.
    和MBA相差悬殊啊,属于博士的预备课程.

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定量 VS 定性

惭愧,我没有学好,恐怕不能说的很清楚.
这个也是欧洲和美国的不同
欧洲更侧重社会科学一些.
(欧洲how,美国where/what)
原因嘛，我觉得可能有这几个，欢迎切磋．

1) 定性比定量优,
主要是认为定量时去掉了很多隐含信息
simply the original data, replacing the
ambiguous, rich and specific context by  
precise, thin and general indicators.

2) 定量的一些前提(见下),基本很难达到
the incidents are laarge enough for statiscial
analysis; "incidents" must be definted to be
very generic in form, with little contextual
richness and virability remaining attached
to them.


如果再具体按照几种研究方法分,
narrative,            grounded theory,  
temporal bracketing,  visual mapping,  
synthetic strategy,   quantification,
computer simulation

做研究时考虑数据／研究的可信度的主要因素，
主要是accuracy, simplicity, generality.
上面７种，其accuracy是由高到低,
而simplicity, generality是由低到高．

管理研究中theory-building一般有三种：
1．induction (data-driven generalization)
2. deduction (theory-driven hypothesis testing)
3. inspiration (driven by creativity and insight)

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