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This paper is concerned with revealing and explaining patterns in the ways firms diversify into new products and industries. Shifting the focus from the observable similarity of products provided by the firm, to the less observable underlying resources required in different industries, can be a useful and interesting way of looking at patterns of diversification. The theory outlined in the paper suggests that firms diversify within groups of industries that are related to one another in the types of human skills and expertise required in each industry. Within these resource-related industry groups, firms can more efficiently utilize their resources by sharing and transferring them across similar products. The theory was tested with a sample of 12,781 diversified firms operating in all sections of the U.S. economy. Across the firms studied, much of a firm's diversification was found to be on average within resource-related industry groups and was consistent with the efficiency arguments developed. The study demonstrates the utility of looking at human expertise similarity to reveal and explain patterns in diversification. It suggests new ways of examining the concept of resources. It also suggests that the industry group, rather than the single industry, needs to be used to analyze the context where diversified firms operate. By looking at resource-related industry groups, the study encourages strategic thinking that views demand, competition, and relatedness of industries more broadly.

The strategy field's core issues-the concept of strategy, causal models relating strategy to other constructs, and models of strategic management and choice-have been previously addressed by two key progressions. The mechanistic perspective based on disciplinary-based theories, the design model, and a view of strategy as a planned posture, has provided a unified view, but a narrow and increasingly less pertinent one. The advent of organic developments that included strategy process research, evolutionary and process models, and interactive and integrative views, has provided richness and pertinence, but not a unified perspective. These two progressions marked an epistemological shift from mechanistic to organic assumptions: from discrete to incessant time, from directional to interactive flow, and from differentiated to integrated constructs and models. Building on this shift, this paper proposes an organic perspective that combines the insights and coherence of the mechanistic perspective with the more relevant organic ideas. It makes use of the organic assumptions to advance a view of strategy as an adaptive coordination, introduce the Organization-Environment-Strategy-Performance (OESP) integrative theoretical model, and present an organic model of strategic management. The organic perspective provides a basis for an upgraded, more unified, and better-attuned view on strategy's core issues.

Organizational scholars have shown a growing interest in drawing on the philosophy of Pragmatism to address contemporary problems and theoretical questions. We elucidate Pragmatism’s core ideas and show their uniqueness and relevance to the field. We present Pragmatism as a problem-solving philosophy that builds on a rich and behaviorally plausible model of human nature, views reality in terms of processes and relations, and highlights the interplay of meaning and action. We demonstrate how Pragmatist ideas can help transcend the perennial problem of agency and structure and illustrate how these ideas might contribute to one specific domain of research on categories and categorization. More generally, Pragmatism is well suited to understanding the contemporary challenges of change and complexity especially as they play out across multiple levels of analysis. We argue that Pragmatism provides a “third way” between rational and structural approaches and represents a living school of organization theory in its own right.