Research

Our research group is ultimately concerned with what firms and managers can do to create and sustain superior organizational performance and associated managerial challenges. It provides an integrative perspective on strategic management by combining the use of established strategy theories and frameworks with an understanding of the managerial process of strategy making and the workings of general management. A primary part of the research focuses on how processes, activities, actors, social interactions, and decisions form strategy, performance and competitive advantage.

The research is primarily positioned in behavioral and sociological based strategy process and practice perspectives but closely intersects with economics-based strategy content views. It rests on the firm conviction that the historical separation in strategic management research between strategy content and process is fundamentally artificial.

We continue a long tradition of strategic management research at the former Institute of International Business and DMS/SSE including research on strategy development and processes, on firm knowledge and capabilities, on related strategic complexities of multi-business firms or MNCs and on clusters and competitiveness policy. As in the past we build our research on close access to major Swedish multinational companies for empirical studies, being agnostic in terms of research methodologies and valuing any that generate high quality research (ethnographies, case studies, statistical analyses, experiments, etc.). Collectively, we have published in top journals such as Academy of Management Review; British Journal of Management; Global Strategy Journal; Harvard Business Review; Human Relations; Journal of Economic Geography; Journal of International Business Studies; Journal of Management Studies; Management Science; Organization Science; Organization Studies; Research Policy, Strategic Management Journal and numerous others.

Based on theoretical foundations in strategic management and cutting-edge research in the field our research explores and investigates a range of topics applicable for large and small businesses alike often combined with a focus on contemporary ecological, digital and technological developments:

• Creation and formation of innovative sustainability strategies.
• Relationships between strategy process and outcomes
• Behavioural and cognitive strategy microfoundations.
• Inter-temporal trade-offs between divergent strategy processes and activities.
• Entrepreneurship and innovation in large firms
• Strategic management of formal and informal institutions.
• Organizational learning
• The theory of the firm and knowledge-based views
• Management of multinational corporations