Name: Khanjan Desai

Roll Number: J060

Subject: Strategic Management

Topic: Summary Article on Business Level Strategy

In the pursuit of operationalising the concept of business-level strategy in research, Donald C. Hambrick explains that strategy is generally viewed as a pattern of important decisions that guides the organization in its relationships with its environment, affects the internal structure and processes of the organization, and centrally affects the organization's performance. Numerous variables (e.g., nature of the industry, product life cycle,other environmental attributes) can be introduced to enrich the array of possible strategy-performance theories to be tested. Miles and snow [1978] have systematically examined the linkage between business-level strategy and structure. The range of organizational processes and managerial activities that could be tested for their associations with business level strategies appears to be substantial.
Research on business-level strategy has implicated basically four different approaches to operationalising the construct. First, some researchers have seen strategy as a situational art that can best be studied through in-depth case studies. When cases are used in an attempt to build theory, they likewise involve qualitative descriptions of business-level strategies. An attraction of textual characterizations of strategy is that they may be used when strategy is treated as a predictor, mediator, or criterion variable in a research design. Second is by hypothesizing. Examples are studies that have put market share as the dominant strategic variable, or studies that have focused on a limited number of strategic variables in a single functional area e.g., marketing. Third group of researchers has viewed strategy as a quantifiable interaction of a broad set of variables. The fourth and possibly most recent