SO! Far, SO! Good: Strategic Organization at 20

Abstract

By their own account, Joel Baum, Royston Greenwood, and Dev Jennings (Baum et al., 2022) founded Strategic Organization 20 years ago to counter what they saw as a disturbing trend. Namely, they perceived that scholarship on strategy and scholarship on organization were becoming increasingly separate, leading to distinct journals, professional associations, and research agendas underpinned by different disciplines (economics vs sociology), and differentially dominant in different areas of the world. Believing that this increasing differentiation might lead to impoverished understanding of important phenomena, Strategic Organization's founding mission was to support convergence at the intersection of strategy and organization, bridging disciplines, methods, perspectives, and geographies.Since then, although Strategic Organization has grown and evolved, it has remained faithful to its founding mission as reflected in the content of regular issues, in the mix of intellectual backgrounds of our editors and editorial board, and in our special issue themes that inhabit and enrich the intersection between strategy and organization theory. These themes include, for example, "Strategic responses to institutional complexity" (Vermeulen et al., 2016); "Firms, crowds and innovation" (Felin et al., 2017); "Exploring the strategy-identity nexus" (Ravasi et al., 2020); "Temporal work: The strategic organization of time" (Bansal et al., 2022); "Categories and place: Identities, materiality and movements" (forthcoming) (David et al., 2020); "Research frontiers on the attention-based view of the firm" (forthcoming) (Ocasio et al., 2021); and "Impact driven strategy research for grand challenges" (deadline for submissions 30 November 2022) (Williams et al., 2022).The So!apbox Essay format is another long-standing tradition at Strategic Organization, launched in 2003 by the founding editors who described the format in their opening editorial as follows:A soapbox is a platform used by a self-appointed, spontaneous, or informal orator, or, more broadly, an outlet for delivering opinions. These editorial essays provide a forum in which interdisciplinary bridges can be built, methodological traditions discussed, and the field of strategic organization staked out. (Baum et al., 2003: 7) So!apbox essays have become a little longer over time (the word limit has shifted from 2500 to 6000 words), and varied in their orientation-some more phenomenon-oriented, some more theoretical, and some methodological-but they have tracked the field, continuously debating concepts, ideas, methods, and issues at the intersection of strategy and organization. Some have been collected together in So!apbox Debates around themes such as dynamic capabilities (2009), the