In his engaging overview of organizational research during the last forty years, March (1996:278) remarks:

"Although students of organizations have increasingly differentiated themselves into a distinct semi-discipline with its own professional associations, journals, academic departments, and traditions, the field remains one that depends heavily on more established disciplines for ideas, personnel, and legitimation."

March’s remarks while directed at the general audience of organizational researchers have special resonance for students of strategy. During the past two decades, students of strategy have promiscuously borrowed ideas from the disciplines of economics, sociology, and psychology (Rumelt, Schendel and Teece, 1994). The result has been an abundance of models ranging from the structure-conduct-performance model to evolutionary economics, from ecological models of strategy to network models of strategy, and cognitive perspectives on strategy to learning models of strategy.

Alexander (1988: 81-82) notes that a profusion of models in any branch of social science leads to the "overdetermination of social science by theory and its underdetermination by fact" and the result is that "from the most specific factual statements unto the most abstract generalizations, social science is contestable. Every empirical conclusion is open to argumentation by reference to supra-empirical considerations".

A plurality of perspectives seems to have led to an overabundance of discourse and a paucity of explanation in strategic management. Resource-based models of the firm have been pitted against the structure-conduct-performance paradigm (e.g. Hamel and Prahlad 1994), and researchers debate over whether transaction cost economics is bad or good for practice (Ghoshal and Moran 1996, Williamson 1996). These debates have induced some writers to suggest that it might be more appealing to view strategic management as a fiction spun by top managers and scholars (Barry and Elmes 1997). In the ‘strategy as story’ narrative, strategic management research consists of different literary genres. If the epic genre holds that events are to be interpreted by actors in organizations in the light of key principles (e.g., Andrews 1965), the techno-futurist genre holds that details and quasi-scientific forecasts are crucial (e.g., Ansoff 1965), and the purist genre asserts the primacy of characters (e.g., Miles and Snow 1978).

The multitude of models has led to pessimistic forecasts of the future of organizational research. In his celebrated lament, Pfeffer (1993:620) remarks:

"without working through a set of processes or rules to resolve theoretical disputes and debates, the field of organizational studies will remain ripe for either a hostile takeover from within or from outside. In either case, much of what is distinctive, and much of the pluralism that is so valued, will be irretrievably lost."

On the other hand, Campbell (1969: 328), while cognizant of the divisive effects of ethnocentric disciplines, suggested that a "fish-scale model of omniscience represents the solution" and asserted that

"[the] slogan is collective comprehensiveness through overlapping patterns of unique narrownesses. Each narrowness is in this analogy a ‘fish scale’ … Our only hope of a comprehensive social science, or other multiscience, lies in a continuous texture of narrow specialties which overlap with other narrow specialties."

In this introductory chapter, we suggest that borrowing from root disciplines of economics, sociology and psychology has led to a comprehensive whole, or ‘multiscience’ consisting of fish-scales or narrow specialties that overlap with each other. We begin by defining a disciplinary matrix for strategic management, identifying parent disciplines of economics, sociology, and psychology, the fields nested within each discipline, and subfields nested within them in turn. We then classify citations from the individual chapters of this book based on the disciplinary matrix, and analyze the chapter citation patterns to uncover fish-scales of narrowly textured specialties. We conclude that the importation of ideas from disciplines is a double-edged sword and then provide overview of each of the individual chapters.

A useful starting point to highlight how students of strategic management have borrowed theory and concepts from other fields to create their own area of study is to create a disciplinary matrix. Kuhn (1970:182) says that a disciplinary matrix is "‘disciplinary’ because it refers to the common possessions of the practitioners of a particular discipline; ‘matrix’ because it is composed of ordered elements of various sorts [including symbolic generalizations, models, values and paradigms]".

Table 1 shows the disciplinary matrix of strategic management as a nested hierarchy consisting of root disciplines, fields and subfields. The three disciplines are economics, sociology, and psychology and each family consists of multiple fields and subfields. We do not describe the fields and subfields in detail here because each of the individual chapters elaborates on them and their inter-relationships in greater depth. Collectively, these comprise the working tools of the student of strategic management. However, we seek to show that even if the chapters of the book are ostensibly situated in a particular, root discipline, they nevertheless, come into contact with each other in a series of interconnected specialties or fish scales.

Note: Average and standard deviations for proportions of citations in each discipline, field, and subfield is given in brackets.

A useful way to define the narrow specialties that make up each ‘fish-scale’ is to think of them as comprised of concrete phenomena. Ireland and Hitt (1997) reaffirm this when they remark:

"in recent years there has been significant development in the theoretical models used to explain and understand strategic management phenomena, including those of corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, competitive dynamics, cooperative strategies, and international strategy. Furthermore, this maturation has led to increased integration of these theories (e.g., the resource-based view, transaction costs, and organizational learning) to build more complex and accurate models explaining strategic actions"

Below, we perform a citation analysis to reveal how the chapters that comprise Volume 15 are ‘interlocked’ with each other across disciplines, fields, and subfields comprising the strategic management disciplinary matrix, thereby, creating a ‘fish-scale multiscience.’

The first step in our citation analysis was to determine the relative frequency with which each chapter's authors cited each 1) root discipline, 2) field, and 3) subfield. For each chapter, we computed the proportion of citations to each discipline, field, and subfield. Since, as with the chapters we analyze here, each cited article is itself a ‘fish scale,’ we coded up to four subfields for each cited article, and computed proportions based on the total number of classifications given to the cited articles (rather than total number of articles cited). The average and standard deviations for proportions of citations to each discipline, field, and subfield are given in Table 1.

We used chapter citation proportions to compute Euclidean distances between citation patterns across all possible pairs of chapters. Euclidean distances were computed as

where p_ij is the proportion of citations to discipline, field, or subfield i in chapter j, and p_ik is the proportion of citations to discipline, field, or subfield i in other chapters, k. Since correlations among the three matrices varied considerably (r_{panel (ab)}=.75; r_{panel (ac)}=.39; r_{panel (bc)}=.68), we analyzed the matrix for each level separately.

The three panels of Figure 1 show the MDS configurations for each distance matrix. The coordinates for the plots were generated using the MDS procedure in SAS. In all cases the number of dimensions was set equal to two, which resulted in acceptable stress levels (Kruskal, 1964).

To assist interpretation of directions in the MDS configurations, we regressed several variables over the coordinates of the configurations. The regressions estimated were of the form:

where C_ij is the proportion of citations to family/species/subspecies in chapter i, Dim1_i and Dim2_i are the MDS coordinates for chapter i.

Based on the regressions, we drew axes through the figures that associate characteristics of the chapters' citations with their positions in the configurations (Stuart & Podolny, 1996). In panel (a) we drew three regressions over the coordinates, one each for the proportions of citations to each root discipline (i.e., economics, sociology, psychology). For panel (b) we drew regressions for microeconomics, IO economics, interpretive sociology, and cognitive science fields. And, for panel (c), at the subfield level, we drew axes for the resource-based view, agency theory, organizational ecology, institutional sociology, social networks and computation. The axes show how directional movement away from the origin is related to the degree to which chapters are characterized by citations to a given discipline (panel a), field (panel b) or subfield (panel c).

The regression axes in panel (a) based upon root discipline-level citation classifications reveals three broad disciplinary clusters: Sociology-driven (bottom left) economics-driven (bottom right), and psychology-driven (top). The further a chapter is from the origin along a given axis, the more unitary and less interlocked the character of its ‘fish scale.’ For example, citations in the chapters by Glynn and Abzug (sociology), Kotha (economics), and Page and Ryall (psychology) draw most homogeneously on fields and subfields within a single discipline and are weakly interlocked with other disciplines. Chapters nearer the origin (e.g., Garud et al.) feature more interdisciplinary fish scales, interlocked with a greater diversity of fish-scales drawn from other disciplines.

Panel (b) shows the MDS plot based on the more fine-grained, field-level citation classifications. The overall structure of the plot is quite similar to panel (a), however, there are some notable differences. At this level of detail, the field-level drivers of the earlier disciplinary clusters are revealed. The further a chapter is from the origin along a given axis, the more homogeneous its fish-scale becomes with respect to microeconomics, IO economics, interpretive sociology, and cognitive psychology. At the field-level, chapters are more dispersed in the ‘citation space,’ and there are fewer chapters at axis extremes. Thus, there is greater within-discipline interlocking (than between-discipline interlocking) of fish scales. Regressions for the two remaining fields did not yield significant coefficients. For realist sociology, which was widely cited by the chapters, we conclude that citations to these fields are distributed homogeneously among the chapters, and thus contribute significantly to their interlocked character.

Panel (c) maps out the citation-space for the subfield level. Again the MDS plots reveals still more fine-grained drivers of chapter positioning in citation space. The cognitive psychology axis in panel (b) is driven by Page and Ryall's heavy citation of computational science. Notably, the chapter by Carley and Lee, which also takes a computational approach to strategy, draws on a more diverse set of subfields than do Page and Ryall, and is positioned near the center of the MDS plot, indicating a high degree of interlock with other chapters' fish scales. Of course, this does not mean that one or the other of these two chapters is somehow "better" than the other; both types of work are essential to constructing a viable multiscience. Some must be strongly connected to emerging developments in subfields within the root disciplines, and others must be highly integrated within other elements of the disciplinary matrix; too much of the former and the multiscience will not develop a unit character (e.g., Pfeffer, 1993); too much of the latter and the multiscience will become over-embedded and insulated from new or novel theoretical developments in the root disciplines (e.g., Uzzi, 1997).

The microeconomics axis in panel (b) splits into two divergent axes in panel (c), one driven by the focus of Kotha's citations on the resource-based view of the firm and the other driven by Ingram's citation focus on agency theory. The interpretive sociology axis in panel (b) is also split into two distinct axes, one driven by Walker's heavy citation of the social networks literature, and the other driven by several chapters' (Glynn & Abzug, Lounsbury et al.) citations to institutional sociology. Organizational ecology also forms an axis on the subfield citation space, driven by Ingram and Nickerson and Silverman's citations to this subfield. These two axes, along with the agency theory axis are less discriminating than the three others, however, as indicated by the smaller distances of the chapters from the origin along these axes.

Our citation analysis reveals how each chapter in Volume 15 draws upon more or less diverse disciplines and the fields and subfields comprising them to understand their particular phenomena of interest to create a ‘narrow specialty’ or ‘fish scale’. Moreover, our analysis also shows how these fish scales are interlocked to create a multiscience. Some fish scales are extensively interlocked across disciplines (e.g., Garud et al.), others are interlocked across fields within a particular discipline (e.g., Carley and Lee), and still others are tightly coupled to a particular subfield (e.g., Kotha). All three types of fish scale patterns are essential to an effective multiscience. As noted earlier, close attention to developments within subfields comprising the parent disciplines and integration of these developments across the study domain are essential to a vital multiscience. Without the former, a multiscience risks antiquation; without the latter it risks disintegration.

These different types of fish scales can be viewed as temporally distributed; recent developments in a subfield are more likely to appear in loosely connected fish scales, and over time to shift into the integrated core of the multiscience. Reflecting this, citations to disciplinary journals (e.g., American Economic Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Applied Psychology) tend to be older in chapters located at the center of the the MDS plots in Figure 1.

An implication of our analysis is that an effective multiscience requires an ongoing (blind) variation-selection-retention evolutionary process for embedding (and discarding) new disciplinary concepts and ideas (Campbell, 1965). Varied concepts first arise in a multiscience through accident or deliberate actions of researchers. Then, some of these concepts are selected through processes of competition (e.g., ‘bad’ concepts are not supported in research), or perhaps through institutional forces (e.g., journal editors and reviewers' reject concepts). Finally, some concepts are retained in the multiscience through imitation and diffusion, and scholars reproduce selected concepts over time.

However, as Powell (1996:294) notes, this process is a double-edged sword:

"ideas fashioned in one disciplinary setting sometimes travel oddly when imported into novel arenas. At best, ideas are fleshed out and given richer substantive life. At worst, caricatures emerge, so distorted that the original proponents no longer even recognize the purportedly new application of their work … the popularity of … ideas outpaces the clarity of the arguments."

Thus, as contributors to a multiscience, strategy researchers need to be rigorous in integration and wary of new ideas speeding their way into the core of study.

The contributions to Volume 15 are organized into five themes: Economics, Institutions, Networks, Technology, and Computation. Although the themes do bear some relation to the foregoing analysis, they were not derived from it and are not intended to reflect it. Rather, they were set out in advance to stimulate contributions reflecting root disciplines, fields and subfields from across the strategic management disciplinary matrix (see Table 1).

Part One: Economics. In chapter 1, Entrepreneurial Capacity and the Growth of Chain Organizations, Paul Ingram explores how the development of internal control and franchising influenced the growth of U.S. hotel chains. Professionally managed, multiunit organizations represent a substantial separation of ownership and control, which brings a risk of opportunism by employees. While monitoring by owners might address this problem, their capacity to operate a large organization subject to control problems is bounded by their limited "entrepreneurial capacity." Internal control systems, Ingram suggests, can enhance entrepreneurial capacity by facilitating monitoring. Franchising too can enhance entrepreneurial capacity, by aligning interests of component managers and owners. Ingram's finding support his contention that as internal controls improved, the growth increased, and moreover that franchisors had a higher growth rate than non-franchisors.

In the next chapter, Economic Performance, Strategic Position, and Vulnerability to Ecological Pressures among U.S. Interstate Carriers (chapter 2), Jack Nickerson and Brian Silverman combine two distinct theoretical lenses through which firm survival has been studied: economics, which emphasizes market forces that enable efficient firms to drive out their inefficient rivals, and organization theory, which emphasizes the role of socially driven criteria, such as political or institutional ties, rather than efficiency in determining which firms survive, which until very recently have remained separate. Nickerson and Silverman suggest that a firm's economic performance influences its vulnerability to density-driven competitive pressure, and that the nature of the influence is moderated by firms' strategies: high-performing firms employing firm- and industry-specific resources enjoy differentially greater survival benefits than high-performing firms whose strategies rely on more generic resources. Results of their empirical exploration of these interactions between strategic choices, economic performance, and vulnerability to ecological pressures in the U.S. trucking industry provide some of the first empirical evidence showing how that economic performance moderates density-related competitive pressures and thus reduces the likelihood of organizational mortality in predictable ways. Thus, although organizational ecologists do not typically study firm performance, Nickerson and Silverman show clearly how performance variation can be integrated into development of an ecological approach to strategic management.

In the final chapter of Part One (chapter 3), Paradigm Shift: The Parallel Origin, Evolution, and Function of Strategic Groups with the Resource-Based Theory of the Firm, William Bogner, Joseph Mahoney and Howard Thomas complement these empirical papers with an historical analysis of the parallel evolution of resource-based and strategic-groups literatures. Their historical analysis clarifies some fundamental theoretical concepts and provides a basis for connecting the strategic group concept with the resource-based conception of the firm. Their analysis surfaces important connections in historical arguments, current research goals, and the cumulativity and continuity of the evolving strategic management literature. Bogner et al. conclude that observed trends in resource-based and strategic group debates reflect a larger paradigm shift in strategic management that is moving the field toward knowledge integration: "patterns of inquiry within strategic management are moving toward a synthesis of economic, behavioral, and cognitive research … and that this structure captures (and requires) both the resource-based and strategic group concepts." They close by sketching out a resource learning view of competition, which they see as the new emerging paradigm.

Part Two: Institutions. Part two begins with Isomorphism and Competitive Differentiation in the Organizational Name Game (Chapter 4), by Mary Ann Glynn and Rikki Abzug, who study organizational naming, a manipulation of organizational symbols, to explore seemingly contradictory forces for institutional isomorphism on the one hand and competitive differentiation on the other. Does organizational naming, due to strong isomorphic forces for legitimacy, lead firms’ choices of new organizational names to be similar and to follow central tendencies in their industry or organizational field? Or, an extension of the competitive games that organizations play, do organizations seek to differentiate themselves with inimitable names to create competitive advantage? To answer this question, Glynn and Abzug present two studies. Study 1 presents an historical analysis of generic trends in organizational naming over the last century, and introduces key attributes for characterizing organizational names: name ambiguity, specificity and length. Study 2 examines 1,600 organizational name changes that occurred between 1982 to 1987, to gain insight into the social and competitive environmental antecedents of name change outcomes. Their analyses indicate that convergence in name attributes within an organizational field is a stronger predictor of conformity to institutionalized naming practices than is environmental uncertainty.

The second chapter in this section, Institutional Upheaval and Performance Variation: A Theoretical Agenda and Illustration from Deregulation of Commercial Banks (Chapter 5), Michael Lounsbury, Paul Hirsch, and Steven Klinkerman. Lounsbury et al. explore the interdependence of economic and institutional forces by examining how deregulation creates conditions facilitating the deinstitutionalization and recomposition of organizational fields as well as how field stratification contributes to organizational performance variation. Based on analyses of bank performance data from 1967-92, archival documents, industry research and trade press reports, and interviews with 30 bank executives and regulators, their study provides a rich case study that describes how deregulation transformed the U.S. banking industry into a fast-moving and challenging environment characterized by rapid new product introductions, downward cost pressures, and new, unknown competitors with unpredictable and more aggressive strategies, tactics, pricing, and product definitions. Although, like organizational ecologists (see Nickerson and Silverman, this volume) institutional scholars typically neglect the study of performance and institutional transformation, Lounsbury et al.'s analysis demonstrates clearly the centrality of the study of performance variation to the development of an institutionalist approach to strategic management. It also points to important new questions about how stratification orders shape industries under conditions of institutional upheaval: Whether core actors remain core, or are replaced by more peripheral actors is an significant empirical question that remains to be addressed. They conclude by providing four guidelines for future study of institutional upheaval and performance variability.

Part Three: Networks. In the single chapter in this section, Strategy and Network Formation (Chapter 6), Gordon Walker examines how networks develop, endure and coevolve in association with firms' strategies. Although the importance of interorganizational phenomena is now generally accepted, most research on these relationships has focused on their organizational performance and survival consequences, and scant attention has yet been given to factors that determine network formation and longevity. Network formation, contends Walker, entails more than just cooperation among firms: It means the evolution of an industry-wide network structure within which firms make decisions, the dynamics of which are determined by a complex web of influences including firms' strategies, the entry and exit of firms, the force of inertia determined by cognitive or economic factors, and the incidence of technological or macroeconomic shocks. After laying out economic and institutional explanations for the emergence and growth of industry-wide cooperation, Walker ties network dynamics back to firm-level strategy. The result is a cogent and comprehensive account of the joint evolution of firms' strategies and network structure.

Part Four: Technology. In chapter 7, The Interpretive Flexibility of an Organization's Technology as a Dynamics Capability, Deborah Dougherty, Leslie Borelli, Kamal Munir, and Alan O'Sullivan begin with the observation that, in many industries, creating enduring competitive advantage increasingly depends on the organization’s dynamics capabilities, the ability to build, combine, and re-combine its technological knowledge assets. Dougherty et al. explore how socially constructed, organization-wide interpretive schemas for defining, coordinating, and controlling technology affect dynamics capabilities--the ability of organizational members to build, deploy, and re-configure their technology over time. They contend that interpretive flexibility, organization members’ ability to couple the social action that constitutes their technology with the social action that is constituted by that technology, enables multilevel links between technology’s design and use, facilitating the construction, deployment, and transformation of technologies in line with shifting opportunities. Richly detailed analyses of innovation practices in 11 firms in mature industries supports their view: people in innovative firms repeatedly couple the design and use of technology, while those in non-innovative firms separate design and use. Dougherty et al. conclude by contrasting the practices and the technology worlds that reinforce them to speculate on how non-innovative organizations might change.

In the next chapter, Organizational Linkages and Product Transience: New Strategic Imperatives in Network Fields (Chapter 8), Raghu Garud, Sanjay Jain and Corey Phelps analyze the so-called "browser war" between Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. As rapid technological advance fosters convergence of consumer electronics, entertainment and information systems, network fields are evolving around systemic products that consist of components that must be compatible with one another. Of course, these trends have many implications for the field of strategy, not the least of which is that render many traditional concepts, including barriers to entry and sustainable competitive advantage, virtually obsolete. Garud et al. define two new strategic imperatives, organizational linkages (i.e., interfirm arrangements aimed at ensuring that parts of a technological system work together to offer customers product functionalities) and product transience (i.e., the temporary status of any product generation and the continual innovation process in which firms engage), particularly important in contemporary network fields. They use these concepts to characterize and illuminate the intense strategic maneuvering in which Microsoft and Netscape have engaged in the web browser field.

In chapter 9, Competing on the Internet: How Amazon.com is Rewriting the Rules of Competition, Suresh Kotha complements Garud et al.'s analysis of the browser war by recounting the meteoric rise of Amazon.com, a bookseller solely dependent upon the WWW for its revenues and survival. The, to date, primarily normative literature on Web-based strategy proposes that the creation of on-line communities is the key to Internet success. Although the rationale for developing such communities is clear, the mechanisms used by on-line firms to develop and sustain such communities is not, and the proposition on-line communities enhance performance has not been examined critically. Kotha's analysis of the Amazon.com "phenomenon in the making" reveals the operational and competitive dynamics of pursuing a Web-based strategy, and the creation of a prototype that may foreshadow the evolution of on-line retailing. Kotha concludes that to understand Amazon is to understanding the genesis of a technology-driven medium that has the potential to completely re-shape the competitive landscape.

Part Five: Computation. In Dynamics Organizations: Organizational Adaptation in a Changing Environment (Chapter 10), Kathleen Carley and Ju-Sung Lee use computational theorizing to develop a neo-information processing model of strategic management, which combines structural and cognitive elements that affect strategic behavior into a single dynamic organizational system. Of central significance to this model are the nonlinear dynamics of webs of interlocked boundedly rational personnel and tasks. Carley and Lee's approach distinguishes re-engineering (i.e., altering the network of connections among tasks and task assignment structure) and re-structuring (i.e., altering who reports to, has authority over, or communicates with whom) change strategies permitting examination of their relative impact on performance of the different types of change. Using computer experimentation, Carley and Lee examine the dynamic behavior of a set of organizations that have the capability of learning both structurally (by altering the connections) and operationally (by personnel gaining experience). Their experiments indicate that loose coupling between strategic between the operational and strategic level leads to different patterns of adaptation on the part of high and low performers. Although high performing organizations can trade luck for accuracy if they are willing to accept greater risks, if poor performing organizations respond to a changing environment by taking greater risks, they may suffer severe performance declines. Since strategies for adaptation are different for high and low performers, low performers may be better off copy the organizational form of the high performers rather than their strategies for change. Mimicry at the wrong time, however, can prove fatal.

Scott Page and Michael Ryall, in their chapter Does Strategy Need Computer Experimentation? (Chapter 11), provide an accessible, in-depth and balanced assessment of the value of computer experimentation for researchers in strategic management. Computer experimentation, which studies complex social phenomena using artificial adaptive agents, has recently attracted increasing interest in the field of strategy. Modern computational methods appear to hold promising for the strategy researcher, whose problem domain is typically characterized by high levels of computational difficulty, uncertainty and complexity. Page and Ryall discuss how and why these tools are likely to advance the strategy agenda. Although they contend that these methods constitute a valid form of social science, they are also clear that computer experimentation is "no silver bullet." New computational techniques, they conclude, are most fruitfully viewed as complements to, not substitutes for, their more conventional scientific counterparts.

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