A Strategic Model of Organizational Conduct and Performance

Strategic decisionmaking is at the heart of the organizationenvironment co-alignment process so heavily emphasized in both the business-policy and the organizationtheory literature. It is the key administrative activity through which organization leaders establish the social or economic mission of the organization, define its domain (s) of action, and determine how it will navigate or compete within its chosen domain(s). Although business policy and organization theory have both focused on this co-alignment (as have other fields such as marketing and microeconomics), each has approached the subject from a different set of perspectives and a different set of variables. Business policy's approach has been to view management as a proactive or opportunistic agent and has centered much of its research on the strategy variable (Mintzberg, 1972). Organization theory, on the other hand, has taken a more reactive stance by viewing the environment, technology, and other contextual factors as deterministic forces to which organizations respond