The Business Landscape: Unpacking the Idea of ‘Domain Specificity’

The French accord great importance to ‘terroir’, the term encompasses all the environmental factors that affect a crop’s phenotype. The quality of the French wine is inextricably linked with its environmental context. In a similar vein, the strategy frameworks that we cover in the book are all domain specific. One of the weaknesses of the field of strategic management has been to not pay attention to this domain specificity. The frameworks are put forward as applicable universally across the landscape. This is an obvious oversell. Heuristics that work in one domain may be ineffective in another. We redress this problem in the book by first classifying the different domains and then matching the strategy heuristics with the domains where they work best. In this chapter, we develop the domain classification framework. As you would see later in the chapter, the level of uncertainty is a key distinguishing feature of the different domains. Disruptive uncertainty is now the key distinguishing feature of much of the landscape. So, what has led to this situation? We suggest that the pervasive uncertainty is engendered by two main factors—globalisation and digitisation.