Chapter 6
Four trends — declining theory, rising phenomena, more causal methods, persistent coherence — and what they tell us about where the field is headed.
The previous chapters each traced a single trend. Here I put them together. Over 45 years, four trends converged.
Grand theories lost their organizing role. The share of theory-driven papers fell from over 50% to under 30%.
Real-world phenomena took their place: platform competition, sustainability, entrepreneurship, governance.
Methods became more rigorous. Causal identification rose from 2% to 44% of papers.
Yet the field stayed coherent. Semantic similarity stabilized, cross-citations remained strong.
The field shifted from being organized by what it believes to being organized by what it studies and how it studies it.
The previous chapters each traced a single trend. Here I put them together. Over 45 years, four trends converged.
Grand theories lost their organizing role. The share of theory-driven papers fell from over 50% to under 30%.
Real-world phenomena took their place: platform competition, sustainability, entrepreneurship, governance.
Methods became more rigorous. Causal identification rose from 2% to 44% of papers.
Yet the field stayed coherent. Semantic similarity stabilized, cross-citations remained strong.
The field shifted from being organized by what it believes to being organized by what it studies and how it studies it.
How should we understand this transformation?
Thomas Kuhn described how fields progress through paradigm shifts, periods of normal science punctuated by revolutionary change. The decline of RBV looks like a Kuhnian crisis. But no new grand theory took its place.
I read these data as suggesting a different kind of shift. If there is a new paradigm, it is not a theory. It is an epistemological commitment: claims require credible causal evidence applied to real phenomena.
The historian Peter Galison studied how groups of physicists with very different goals and methods managed to collaborate by developing shared languages at their boundaries. He called these “trading zones.” With roughly half of all citations crossing area boundaries and stable semantic coherence, strategy research may fit a similar pattern: a field held together not by shared theory, but by shared methods and shared real-world concerns.
Donald Stokes argued that the best research can be both use-inspired and fundamental. The data here are at least consistent with that possibility: strategy scholars are studying real phenomena with more credible methods, seemingly without sacrificing the importance or scope of their questions.
Thomas Kuhn described how fields progress through paradigm shifts, periods of normal science punctuated by revolutionary change. The decline of RBV looks like a Kuhnian crisis. But no new grand theory took its place.
I read these data as suggesting a different kind of shift. If there is a new paradigm, it is not a theory. It is an epistemological commitment: claims require credible causal evidence applied to real phenomena.
The historian Peter Galison studied how groups of physicists with very different goals and methods managed to collaborate by developing shared languages at their boundaries. He called these “trading zones.” With roughly half of all citations crossing area boundaries and stable semantic coherence, strategy research may fit a similar pattern: a field held together not by shared theory, but by shared methods and shared real-world concerns.
Donald Stokes argued that the best research can be both use-inspired and fundamental. The data here are at least consistent with that possibility: strategy scholars are studying real phenomena with more credible methods, seemingly without sacrificing the importance or scope of their questions.
What the data show
The field does not seem to have fragmented: semantic coherence stabilized and cross-citations remain high.
The identification revolution does not seem to have driven the field to narrow its ambitions: causal papers score at least as high on question importance and scope.
And the field seems to have become more rigorous, with causal identification rising from 2% to 44% of published work.
Whether this adds up to cumulative knowledge is a question these data cannot answer—Kuhn would warn that methodological consensus without theoretical integration risks excellent puzzle-solving that does not add up to understanding, and I cannot rule that out.
But by the measures available here, the field is in a stronger position than the “crisis” narrative suggests.
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