Strategy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Strategy - Essay Example This is a great distance from the view of Chandler (1962), who views strategy as being connected to how an organisation is administered outside of functional responsibilities. His definition of strategy is â€Å"the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals† (Chandler, 1962, p.13). Porter (1996, p.75) finally reaches a definition of â€Å"creating fit among a company’s activities†, which does bear some relation to Chandler’s view, although Chandler deals with the long term survival of the organisation, where Porter acknowledges that achieving fit determines strategy success and if there is no fit, then nothing to sustain (ibid). Teece (1993 p.199) recounts Chandler’s view that competitiveness depends upon organisational and financial capabilities, and supporting institutions. Porter would disagree with the ide a of resources and capabilities being important to strategy, which not only puts him at odds with Chandler but also with Penrose. Penrose’s view of strategy was that it was â€Å"to increase total long-term profits† (Penrose and Petelis, 1999, p.12) again, emphasising the long term view. She also viewed administration as important, identifying that â€Å"administrative co-ordination and ‘authoritative communication’ define the boundaries of the firm† (Penrose and Petelis, 1999, p.9). She saw firms as resource bundles that could be combined in specific ways to generate products and services â€Å"for sale in the market for a profit† (ibid), a view with which Porter disagrees, and which causes her to be portrayed as the founder of the resource-based view of strategy (Foss, 1999, p.87), although Foss argues that what is now seen as the resource-based view is not what Penrose was describing in her work. Standard strategy textbooks provide definit ions of strategy, based on the views of the authors. Johnson et al (2008, p.857) say that strategy â€Å"is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term, which achieves advantage in a changing environment through its configuration of resources and competences with the aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations†, a broad definition that would find both favour and disagreement with the earlier writers mentioned above. But what is interesting is the difference between definitions of strategy in 1959 (Penrose – the year her book was published), 1962 (Chandler), 1996 (Porter) and Johnson et al (2008). There is no direct linear progression, yet Johnson et al’s definition includes all of the ideas of the earlier theorists. It would seem that all of the ideas have merit, and affect strategy, but their discovery was due to something else that caused different things to be discovered at different times. Categories of Strategy Different writers have differ ent ideas of strategy, but only one has attempted to bring all of these together to create a coherent whole. Richard Whittington (2001) considered the different theorists’ views on strategy and tried to make sense of them by constructing a model that produced four different types of strategy. He provides a summary of these in the form of a table, reproduced here: Classic Processual Evolutionary Systemic Strategy Formal Crafted