Critical Approaches to Strategic Management

This paper contributes to the development of a critical understanding of strategic management. We provide a brief outline of strategic management as it is conventionally taught and practiced, pointing to several avenues for developing critical approaches. In the broadest sense, a critical perspective stands outside of the managerialist orientation in order to study strategy as an organizational process. We review work in the processual school that purports to describe how strategy is 'really' made, from bargaining, constructivist, and emergent perspectives. We argue that processual approaches hold some promise but quickly move toward prescriptive managerialism. A second, more profound critique draws from critical theory and postmodern insights to question the social and political effects of strategic management. Strategy can be viewed as a set of practices and discourses which promotes instrumental rationality, reproduces hierarchical relations of power, and systematically privileges the interests and viewpoints of particular groups. While this approach has been valuable in probing the ideology of strategy, its focus on discourse and lack of concern with the 'truth of strategy' is a potential weakness. A third approach draws from Gramsci to offer an historical materialist perspective, which pays more attention to the content of strategy. We argue that the strategic deployment of discursive, organizational, and economic resources in sustaining or challenging hegemony suggests a strategic concept of power and a political perspective on corporate strategies to exercise market power, discipline labour, influence government policies, and resist pressures from social groups. It also points to a more encompassing vision of emancipation strategies than that offered by critical theory.