International audienceThis 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 more open forms of strategy-making, with more transparency inside and outside organizations and more inclusion of different actors internally and externally. We analyse four forces - organizational, societal, cultural and technological - driving the evolution of strategy as a profession and discuss implications for the future of strategy work, for effective strategies, for strategy's professional bodies and for strategy researc
This paper investigates the changing job characteristics of strategic planners in the face of long-run increases in environmental turbulence since the 1960s. We build on contingency theory to examine how growing turbulence may have impacted three aspects of strategic planner jobs: temporal range, processes and organizational location. Drawing on job advertisement data between 1960 and 2003, we compare strategic planner jobs over time and relative to a similar managerial function, marketing. We find that the secular increase in environmental turbulence is negatively associated with forecasting (temporal range), economics and analysis (processes) and centralization (organizational location), especially *Manuscript-MUST NOT CONTAIN AUTHOR IDENTIFIERS Click here to view linked References
In this paper we explore how a historical strategic resource (HSR) could be used by an organization. We propose that within an organization, HSR is both an asset and an arena for power struggle. Our contributions stand at several levels at the crossroads of strategic management and organizational studies. First, we show the importance of various stakeholders in constructing a HSR. Second, we highlight its complexity due to its embeddedness with history. The fact that a HSR could be akin to a public good implies that its rents are difficult to control for organizations. To uncover what is meant by a historical resource, we first present a review of the resource-based theory and the uses of the past in organizations from the perspective of organization theory and organizational history. We then present our fieldwork, which focuses on Emmaus, a major charity organization in France, and its founder, Abbé Pierre. Based on a historical study covering the period 1949 to 2017 drawing on the organization’s archives, online publications and data from the French national audiovisual archives, we identify visual and rhetorical elements that constitute Abbé Pierre and his past as HSR for the Emmaus organization. Eventually, our paper contributes to the literature by offering a four-dimensional management framework for HSR with appropriation, ownership, maintenance and distancing.
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