Mapping Strategic Thought

"Mapping Strategic Thought" has a double agenda. It describes empirical investigations of substantive issues that conern the field of strategic management. While other work on such issues tends to seek statistically signicant commonalities, the emphasis of much of the research in this volume is on exploring the nature of commonality, the way it is achieved, or why apparently similar individuals and organizations respond to similar stimuli in different ways. The research represented here has a common a focus on managerial cognition, - a relatively new emphasis in a field that has concentrated recently on financial and accounting data.;The use of mapping methods to illustrate and analyze managerial cognition reflects the second agenda of the book, which is to present a set of methodological tools for depicting and analying managerial thought.;The second half of this book therefore documents the procedures used to "map" the mental representations of decision makers in the empirical work reported. The authors do not promote a cognitive approach or mapping methods as substitutes for other research methodologies, but as additional sources of insight into organizational strategy. Their hope is that technical chapters will help expand the range and complexity of future research on managerial cognition.