This document presents a framework for organizing topics in corporate strategy. It discusses corporate strategy as how managers set and oversee the scope of their firms through three key components: intra-organizational actions like resource allocation; inter-organizational actions like acquisitions; and extra-organizational actions like mergers and divestitures. For each component, it outlines relevant theories and provides ideas for future research, such as studying the influence of top management structure on decision making or how inter-organizational relationships impact performance. The overall goals are to contribute to the field of corporate strategy and link research to practice and policy-making.

1. Corporate Strategy: Past,
Present, and Future
Presentation by Nathan Sorin
Emilie Feldman
Strategic Management Review
2020

2. (VERY BRIEF) SYNOPSIS
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3. ○ How corporate strategy fits in the field of strategy?
○ Present a 3-part framework to organize corporate strategy
topics.
○ Provide an agenda to link coporate strategy research to
practice and policy-making.
THREE GOALS
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4. CONTRIBUTION
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5. ○ Strategy -> What enables firms to enjoy sustainable performance
advantage over competition?
WHAT IS CORPORATE STRATEGY?
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Industrial organisation
Structure conduct performance paradigm
Industry is key
Resource based view
Idiosyncratic inimitable resources/
capabilities
Business unit is key

6. ○ Competitive strategy
How markets, industries,
technologies might explain
performance?
○ Corporate strategy
How do managers set and
oversee the scope of their firms?
TWO SEPERATE FIELDS
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7. ○ This means:
□ Which businesses belong –or not- within their firms?
□ What transactions – M&A, alliance, divestiture – do they
undertake to achieve that scope?
□ How do they allocate resources/coordinate businesses?
HOW DO MANAGERS SET AND OVERSEE
THE SCOPE OF THEIR FIRMS?
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8. THREE KEY COMPONENTS
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9. Managers oversee their firm’s scope through many actions – resource
allocation, develop synergies, cross subsidization …
○ Two theories
□ Dynamic capabilities -> “firm’s ability to integrate and
reconfigure internal and external competences to address
rapidly changing environments” (Teece et al. 1997)
□ Resource redeployment -> understand the value of managers
redistributing resources across the component businesses of
multi-business firms (Anand and Singh 1997; others)
Empirical playing ground: diversification setting
INTRA-ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIONS
TWO THEORIES
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10. Managers oversee firm scope by developing inter-organizational
routines and learning from other organizations
○ Two theories
□ Relational view-> unique combinations of resources between
partners can lead to supra-normal profits (Dyer and Singh?
1998)
□ Network theory-> ties are a source of learning and value
creation
Acquisitions -> shocks leading to the collapse of nodes
INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIONS
TWO THEORIES
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11. Managers set the firm scope through deciding what is part of the
firm -> M&A as main topic
○ Two theories
□ Resource reconfiguration -> dynamic view of the corporate
scope, focus on M&A and divesting to update resources
□ Agency theory-> Assumption of previous theory –manager’s
act in the firm’s best interest- questioned
M&A advances manager’s personal agenda (compensation for
example)
EXTRA-ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIONS
TWO THEORIES
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12. IDEAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
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13. Intra-organizational:
○ Structure and composition of top management.
○ Influence of cognition, biases, heuristics on decision making.
- we could add personality –one of my previous projects-/ augmentation through
artificial intelligence-
○ Influence of ownership on corporate strategy.
-type of governance, we could add literature of family businesses
FUTURE RESEARCH
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14. Inter-organizational:
○ How firms accumulate experience in strategic decision-making?
○ Influence of relationships with other firms on decision-making.
○ How inter-organizational relationships influence performance?
○ We could add: how do organizations unlearn bad practices/routines?
FUTURE RESEARCH
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15. Extra-organizational:
○ Effects of different sequences of transaction.
○ Relationships among different configurations of corporate
development strategies.
Suggested method: Time-series analysis
We can add qualitative process studies (Langley 1997) ->
studies events, not variables
studies temporal order
FUTURE RESEARCH
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16. ○ Large-scale research on how corporate strategy transactions
executed in practice –Strategy as practice literature?-
○ Update of key concepts
○ Research to help managers add structure to avoid bias
○ Compare and categorize corporate strategy across industries
LINK TO PRACTICE AND POLICY
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