Strategic Management and the Person

The empirical world of strategy and organization is populated by living, thinking, feeling persons, but the intellectual history of strategic management theory is one of creeping impersonalism, both in the questions we ask and our answers to them. The past 30 years have seen the field drift steadily away from human-scale problems like goal-setting, problem solving, and decision making, to mass abstractions like strategic factor markets and dynamic capabilities. This essay explores the causes and consequences of impersonalism and calls for a personalist rebalancing in strategic management research. I argue that a return to personalism will bring better theorizing and more rigorous empirical research, while allowing the field to recapture the lost connection between strategy and moral responsibility.