The State of the Union in the Field of Strategic Management: Great Theories. Imperative Problems

The field of strategic management has had great success over the past 50 years. We have developed bodies of theory that are compelling and important. However, these theories are not unified by a common conceptual architecture. As a result, further progress is impeded just at a moment in history when the most important problems of our time — climate change, the pandemic, mass immigration, authoritarianism, economic nationalism, among others — raise the stakes on strategic insights for making progress beyond what our field has ever known. We must take on these challenges together as an intellectual community before it is too late for organizations and institutions to work together to accomplish what is needed to secure the future of democratic capitalism as a system for organizing social and economic life.