Dynamics of the evolution of the strategic management concept: From the planning school to the neostrategic approach.

• Author: Kafel, Tomasz

INTRODUCTION

The beginning of the 21st century brought about fundamental changes in the conditions of business operations. They are above all a consequence of the political processes (particularly military conflicts), social processes (in particular migration), economic (particularly the growing disparity of income), technological ones (particularly the effects of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution) and the phenomena forming health threats (in particular the COVID-19 pandemic). The unpredictability of the organization's environment is not a phenomenon we have only been dealing with in recent years. For this reason, among others, traditional strategic planning methods became outdated as early as the 1990s (Vrdoljak-Raguz, Jelenc, & Podrug, 2016; Kaleta & Wittek-Crabb, 2016). As a consequence, other research areas in strategic management have been developed, among others: strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, internationalization strategies, or strategic learning (Vrdoljak-Raguz, Jelenc, & Podrug, 2016). Certainly, the increased uncertainty of the conditions of business operations can be noticed at present. For this reason, new concepts, models, and methods presently arise, aspiring to be modern tools for studying the strategic management "blackbox." They go away from the classical understanding of strategic management, towards designing the practice, process and approaches to strategy on the basis of the achievements of other scientific fields. This combination of various perspectives and approaches to strategic management, along with the application of knowledge from other disciplines, is what distinguishes new strategic management, for which the international literature uses the term: neostrategic management. The purpose of this article is to present a relatively little-known approach to strategic management and especially to indicate new research directions undertaken in the field of strategic management. In the first part of the article, the authors characterize the most important, in their opinion, challenges faced at present by enterprises and their consequences for the strategic management process. Some directions of research in strategic management will also be proposed here, resulting from the challenges being described. Further, the evolution of strategic management schools and the essence of the new strategic management concept (neostrategic management) and the disciplines that create it will be presented. Finally, the articles presented in this issue, with the contents matching the new strategic management concept, will be summarized. The further directions of strategic management concept exploration, hopefully creating inspiration for other researchers and management practitioners, will be indicated at the end of the paper.

LITERATURE BACKGROUND

Key changes in the environment of enterprises and their consequences for the strategic management process

New challenges faced by entrepreneurs at the beginning of the 21st century have significant consequences for the approach to the strategic management process. Among those challenges, the most important ones are mainly the effects of the recent industrial revolutions (both the third, but particularly the fourth and the fifth one) that are difficult to anticipate as well as the pandemic phenomena. As a consequence, the uncertainty of business operations is growing. Other essential processes that managers must tackle include pressure on corporate social responsibility, the increasing potential of emerging markets, and shrinking natural resources. It seems that the main problem for the "strategic management" discipline will be the fast pace of change and the scale of novelties concerning enterprises and their environment. The period of intensive economic and technological change started atthe end of the 20th century, known asthe Third Industrial Revolution, shows its new face, which has already been named the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This idea, for which the term Industry 4.0 is used, assumes that manufacturing competitiveness can be ensured based on new technologies combined with the Internet (the so-called business networking). Here, we are talking about the realization of the idea of a smart factory through the application of technologies and principles of organization of the value chain together using and utilizing cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (intelligent mobility) and cloud processing (Hermann, Pentek, & Otto, 2015; Kagermann, Wahlster, & Helbig, 2013). Other equally important elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are the internet of persons (social and business networks), internet of services (smart networks and logistics), and internet of data (smart buildings and apartments). Some researchers include smart factories arising on the basis of the mentioned technologies as phenomena of the Fifth Industrial Revolution (Furmanek, 2018). The reality of the Fifth Industrial Revolution implies that in the near future, chat-bots and cobots (collaborative robots) will substitute live people in performing many work processes, while blockchain and cryptocurrencies will completely change the functioning of the world of finance. In the opinion of Furmanek (2018), the introduction of artificial intelligence and self-learning machines changes the way decisions are made and communication is conducted, and this process is irreversible and will proceed. It is therefore difficult to imagine that these phenomena be neglected in the business strategic management process. Given the key challenges of the contemporary times described above, and in particular the future, the authors have made an attempt to determine the directions of future research in strategic management, which is synthetically presented in Table 1.

The development of research in the field of strategic management within the last two decades has been dramatic. The survey areas described in the table are already the subject of scientists work around the world. For example, Sanchez, and Heene (2004) described the new strategic management in the context of competition and competence. Zakrzewska-Bielawska (2021) revealed the essence and meaning of the ambidextrous strategy concept, in turn, Kosch and Szarucki (2020a, 2020b) indicated a trend of growing international scientific collaboration in the field of strategic management. When analyzing the literature on the subject, it can be noticed that the current field of strategic management is strongly theory based, with substantial empirical research. This trend is also followed by the approach described below, for which the term neostrategic management was adopted.

Development of strategic management concepts towards the neostrategic approach

The challenges of the contemporary times presented in Table 1 contribute to the fact that strategic management is subject to constant changes, like the whole discipline of management sciences. New theories, concepts, methods, and techniques aimed at improving the management of both commercial and non-commercial organizations are being created almost each year. This is a consequence of departing from the simplified and naive claim of the precursors of scientific management (in particular the engineering school) that there is one best management method. At the end of the 20th century a number of new approaches leading to the so-called Organizational Excellence appeared. Among them, there are, for example, the concept of a New Wave in Management, Process Management, Business Process Reengineering, TQM, Project Management, and Postmodernism in Management. Among the newest achievements in management sciences - known in the United States and Europe - certainly include, for instance, The Actor-Network Theory, The Organization Learning Theory, The Positive Organizational Management Concept, The Organization's Social Responsibility Concept (considering the environmental context of management), The Creative Class Concept, the birth of the so-called Social Entrepreneurship (in particular among nongovernmental organizations), and, in the case of public institutions, New Public Management and Governance Concept or the so-called Neoweberism. Their formation and dissemination is a result of a continuous search for instruments to improve the effectiveness of companies (in particular their profits) in the new operating conditions. On the other hand, in the public and non-governmental sector, new management concepts or methods are largely a result of isomorphic pressures arising directly from the goals expected from these organizations (what often means transformation of the solutions applied in business to non-commercial organizations). These changes also relate to strategic management, which is a separate part of management sciences. Accordingto Romanowska and Krupski (2010), its development takes place both at the level of developing theoretical models and the methods supporting strategic management (in particular strategic analysis methods) and verification of theoretical models in management practice. Research objects are mainly businesses, but the majority of theories and tools are also applied in public institutions and non-governmental organizations.

Multipletheoreticalviewsand practical experiencesof advisory companies and enterprises on the development of strategic management have created the need to order them. The consequence of this is various classifications of strategic management schools. The roots of strategic management have been in a more applied area, often referred to as business policy (Hoskisson et al., 1999). An effect of changes in the business environment was the management practitioners' search for theories and methods of solving the problems they were facing. In response to the needs of the management practice in the second half of the 20th century, subsequent strategic management theories, models, and methods were born. The convergence of the views...