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Strategic management is a crucial competency for both strategists and organizations across various sectors, including manufacturing, agriculture, education, and both public and private sectors. Effective strategic management necessitates not only micromanagement from CEOs and senior leadership but also fundamental policies or strategies deemed critical for organizational performance and competitive advantage. In this study, bibliometric analysis offers a systematic understanding of organizational focus on strategic management by integrating a set of strategic themes. Each theme, in essence, elucidates potential directions, strengths and weaknesses, competency scope, and current challenges organizations face or will encounter. Given the continual interaction of organizations with diverse environments, strategic management demands flexible adaptation to uncertainty. Thus, it is imperative to consistently track and comprehend emerging strategic themes or directions in the literature. This study aims to identify the strategic management topics that organizations and researchers focused on during the COVID-19 pandemic. The methodology relies on bibliometric analysis, examining 28,996 ScienceDirect articles, with a focus on publications containing "strategic management" as a key term, to understand major trends in the literature. The VOSviewer software visually represents the co-occurrence of key words and co-citations in scholarly articles. Utilizing the extensive Sciencedirect.com database, the bibliometric method identified five distinct themes or clusters of strategic management: (1) strategic competencies; (2) stresses and sustainability goals; (3) business systems—data analytics management, circular economy, and SCM; (4) market competition; and (5) technology and energy management, cost optimization, and demand. The article delves into these key clusters of strategic management, with a focus on the novel concept of "strategic competencies," encompassing cognitive and behavioral skills essential for developing adaptive business systems. The study underscores the importance of the interconnection between strategic competencies and areas such as stresses and sustainability goals, market competition, and technology management for sustaining competitive advantage in dynamic conditions. The research findings may serve as a catalyst for the development of new theoretical and practical insights, contributing significantly to the field of strategic management (SM).
Tan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.