Mapping the scholarly development of strategic management

In an effort to move from speculative to scientific discourse, a key meta-issue in strategic management is addressed by systematically tracing the intellectual development of this sub-discipline. The flow of scholarly knowledge is mapped over time by combining multivariate statistics and other techniques. Observed citation frequencies are fitted to a chi-square model of importance, receptivity and similarity, while cluster analysis is employed to map changes in journal relationships over time. The results contradict at least one widely espoused and previously uncontested assertion, by revealing that the strategic management sub-discipline has evolved from a receptor to a transmitter of interdisciplinary knowledge and entered the mainstream of social science. The study demonstrates the potential to shed objective light on the social construction of knowledge and to address important issues in other scholarly disciplines.