Strategic Evolution Of The System Based View

As an emerging discipline and research field, the discipline idiosyncracy of strategic management determines that it is problematically/practically oriented. To explain strategic choices and behaviours in transition economies like China, the idiosyncracy of institutional and other social processes must be seriously considered and be integrated into theoretical analytical framework. In this dissertation, we propose an integrated framework incorporating the institutional perspective, duality of social structure and co-evolution analysis, to explore the trajectories and sequences of strategies in the institutional transformation background.Applying micro institutional analysis and co-evolution methodology as the basic theoretical approaches, this dissertation intend to build a holistic framework, in which combined strategic change with institutional factors, to research their endogenous interaction relationship. With this theoretical framework, we can describe and understand organizational strategic change processes, especially in the contexts of institutional transition.In this thesis, organizational strategic change is conceptualized as nested sequences of events that unfold in the situated contexts over time, and the key issues of the strategic change process are generalized from three perspectives or facets: strategy making, convergence and divergengce.Focusing on the strategic change process, this thesis abandones the traditional dichotomy such as strategy-environment, actor-structure, and posts the complex dynamic process of strategy making, convergence and divergence into context of institutional transition organically. For this research aim, we conceptualize strategic change as nested and dialectic process of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization that unfold in the multiple levels of contexts. In this process, strategic change includes the contents of social construction within organization on the one hand, which is nested and embedded in the social construction outer organizations unfold in the broader institutional transition context. As the convergence mechanism in the strategic change process, institutionalization could manifest different forms at different levels, for example, as routinization at organizational level, or as isomorphism at industry level. The interaction, coupling across organizational fields, and the relative strength between institutionalization and deinstitutionalization at different level, will determine the characteristics of organizational strategy change and process. Based on these synchronic analyses, we use the idea and methodology of 'duality of structure' and coeovlution, to explore the coevolutional relationship between organizational strategic change and institutional transition from diachronic perspective. That is to say, organizational strategy is changed through the continuous, adaptive process in which inner and outer contexts interacted and coevolve. For organizational strategic change and evolution, institution (transition) is constraint factor and enabling driver simultaneously, and there is an endogenous, recursive, and multi-level constitution relationship between strategic change process and institutional transition process. There by, from this perspective we can avoid the simple single-dimension problems such as institutions determine strategic behaviors or strategic choices shape institution, and explicitly emphasize the particularities of organizational strategic change in the institutional transition period.Combining synchronic analysis with diachronic analysis, institutional theory with coevolutionary idea, the thesis provides a holistic theoretical framework, in which institutional factors, strategic agents and strategic choices are all brought into as endogenous variables. And we call this theoretical framework as 'institutional-based view' of strategic change. From this perspective, we can answer these questions thoroughly: (1) how do the organizational strategic change enact and unfold in the process of institutional transformation...