This paper takes the long view on the development of strategy as a profession, from the 1950s to today. We identify strategy as a structurally precarious profession, subject to cyclical demand and shifts in organizational power. This precariousness has increased with the secular shift towards...

This themed issue commemorates the twenty-first anniversary of Henry Mintzberg's classic Harvard Business Review article, ‘Crafting Strategy’. With his striking image of the strategist making strategy as a potter crafts clay, Mintzberg crystallised a widespread reaction against strategic...

This article examines three practices of strategising/organising – strategy workshops, the project management of strategic and organisational initiatives, and the creation of symbolic artefacts to communicate strategic change. These are seen through a practice theory lens that emphasises...

This paper distinguishes between `tight' and `loose' perspectives on national business systems. These two systems perspectives are compared in the light of new and existing European data on corporate strategies and structures, on the one hand, and national institutions of business finance,...

This paper assesses economic, political and national institutional explanations for continued resistance to the multidivisional form in France, Germany and the United Kingdom during the 1980s and 1990s. It finds that the economics of different diversification strategies play a significant but...

Strategy is a pervasive and consequential practice in mostWestern societies. We respond to strategy’s importance by drawing an initial map of strategy as an organizational field that embraces not just firms, but consultancies, business schools, the state and financial institutions. Using the...

This research note examines the stability of diversification performance relationships in three countries (France, Germany and the United Kingdom), for two time periods (1982–84 and 1992–94). The aggregate findings, taking the three countries and two time periods together, support a general...

As European economic integration proceeds, this paper examines the integration of managerial elites in the major West European economies. It finds that top manager profiles in France, Germany and the United Kingdom have changed very little despite major internal and external pressures over the...

This paper examines the Chandlerian model of corporate development in the light of new data on the strategies and structures of large European firms in the post-war period. Conglomerate strategies continue to spread, but these are typically less stable than strategies of diversification. The...