Corporate Strategy: Past, Present, and Future

This article reflects on the development of corporate strategy as a field of research, seeking to accomplish three main objectives. First, I position corporate strategy within the broader field of strategy research. I argue that because corporate strategy addresses the conceptually distinct question of how managers set and oversee the scope of their firms, scholars in this domain require a unique organizing framework for analyzing it. Second, I offer such a framework, which disaggregates the different topics and phenomena that corporate strategy scholars study into three categories: intra-organizational, inter-organizational, and extra-organizational. Third, I use this framework to lay out an agenda for future research in corporate strategy, as well as some ideas for linking research more closely to practice and policy-making. Given the significance of corporate strategy from academic, practical, and regulatory standpoints, my hope is that this article will chart a productive course forward for scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers alike.