Chapter 6
Four trends: declining theory, rising phenomena, more causal methods, persistent coherence. What they tell us about where the field is headed.
The previous chapters each traced a single thread: how strategy research frames its questions, what methods it uses, and whether the field holds together as it grows. Each thread revealed a distinct shift. Viewed together, four trends converged over 45 years to reshape the structure of strategy research in ways that no single trend fully captures.
The role of grand theory in organizing strategy research followed a rise-and-fall trajectory, not a simple decline. Theory-driven papers accounted for roughly 29% of the field in 1980, then rose steadily as frameworks like the resource-based view provided shared intellectual scaffolding. That share peaked near 60% around 2003, then fell to about 34% in recent years. The field did not abandon theory so much as shift the work that theory is asked to do.
As the theory-driven share receded, phenomenon-driven research rose to approximately 65% of recent papers. These studies begin from empirical regularities, organizational practices, or market outcomes rather than from the predictions of a theoretical framework. This represents a change in how research questions are framed, not merely in what topics are studied. The starting point of inquiry moved from “what does theory predict?” to “what do we observe, and how can we explain it?”
The methodological transformation is visible in two crossing lines. Causal identification techniques rose from 2% to 44% of empirical papers, reflecting the broader credibility revolution in the social sciences. Yet adoption remains uneven across subfields: CSR research reached 56% while RBV-adjacent work sits at 25%. Meanwhile, survey-based research fell from 37% to 8%. The field’s methodological toolkit narrowed in some respects even as it became substantially more rigorous in others.
One might expect these shifts to fragment the field, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Roughly 52% of citations cross area boundaries, indicating that strategy scholars continue to read and build on work outside their own subfields. Semantic coherence has remained stable since the 1990s, even as the number of effective paradigms grew from approximately 7 to over 40. That growth reflects the expanding scale of the field, not its dissolution into disconnected communities.
Taken together, these four trends describe a single structural transformation. Strategy research shifted from a field organized by grand theory, where shared frameworks like the RBV and transaction cost economics defined research agendas, to one organized by empirical phenomena studied with causal methods. The field grew more methodologically rigorous and more topically diverse, yet remained intellectually connected. Whether this transformation represents scientific progress or intellectual drift depends on one’s philosophy of science. The data presented here describe the shift; they do not evaluate it.
The previous chapters each traced a single thread: how strategy research frames its questions, what methods it uses, and whether the field holds together as it grows. Each thread revealed a distinct shift. Viewed together, four trends converged over 45 years to reshape the structure of strategy research in ways that no single trend fully captures.
The role of grand theory in organizing strategy research followed a rise-and-fall trajectory, not a simple decline. Theory-driven papers accounted for roughly 29% of the field in 1980, then rose steadily as frameworks like the resource-based view provided shared intellectual scaffolding. That share peaked near 60% around 2003, then fell to about 34% in recent years. The field did not abandon theory so much as shift the work that theory is asked to do.
As the theory-driven share receded, phenomenon-driven research rose to approximately 65% of recent papers. These studies begin from empirical regularities, organizational practices, or market outcomes rather than from the predictions of a theoretical framework. This represents a change in how research questions are framed, not merely in what topics are studied. The starting point of inquiry moved from “what does theory predict?” to “what do we observe, and how can we explain it?”
The methodological transformation is visible in two crossing lines. Causal identification techniques rose from 2% to 44% of empirical papers, reflecting the broader credibility revolution in the social sciences. Yet adoption remains uneven across subfields: CSR research reached 56% while RBV-adjacent work sits at 25%. Meanwhile, survey-based research fell from 37% to 8%. The field’s methodological toolkit narrowed in some respects even as it became substantially more rigorous in others.
One might expect these shifts to fragment the field, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Roughly 52% of citations cross area boundaries, indicating that strategy scholars continue to read and build on work outside their own subfields. Semantic coherence has remained stable since the 1990s, even as the number of effective paradigms grew from approximately 7 to over 40. That growth reflects the expanding scale of the field, not its dissolution into disconnected communities.
Taken together, these four trends describe a single structural transformation. Strategy research shifted from a field organized by grand theory, where shared frameworks like the RBV and transaction cost economics defined research agendas, to one organized by empirical phenomena studied with causal methods. The field grew more methodologically rigorous and more topically diverse, yet remained intellectually connected. Whether this transformation represents scientific progress or intellectual drift depends on one’s philosophy of science. The data presented here describe the shift; they do not evaluate it.
How should we understand this transformation?
Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific fields advance through paradigm shifts: a dominant framework enters crisis, and a new one replaces it. The decline of the resource-based view, from roughly 40% of the field’s output to about 6%, looks at first glance like the crisis phase of a Kuhnian revolution. But the rest of the pattern does not fit. No single framework rose to take its place. Instead, the field diversified across ten or more thematic areas, none commanding more than 15% of publications. What we observe is less a paradigm shift than a paradigm dissolution: a transition from theoretical consolidation to theoretical pluralism.
A persistent concern in strategy, sometimes called the lamppost effect, holds that the rise of causal identification methods will pull researchers toward questions that are methodologically convenient but substantively trivial. The data allow a direct test of this concern, and the results do not support it. Papers using causal methods are not more topically peripheral than other papers, and they score slightly higher on measures of question importance, with Cohen’s d values in the range of 0.11 to 0.16. These are small effect sizes, and the analysis is observational, so the right conclusion is not that the concern has been definitively refuted. Rather, the evidence available through 2025 does not lend it strong support.
If the field has not adopted a new grand theory, it has adopted something else: a methodological commitment to credible causal evidence applied to real-world phenomena. Causal identification methods rose from roughly 2% of papers in 1980 to 44% in 2025. Over the same period, theory-driven papers fell from their peak near 60% to about 34%, while phenomenon-driven papers climbed to approximately 65%. The new organizing principle is not a theoretical claim about where competitive advantage comes from. It is an epistemological standard for what counts as persuasive evidence. This is a different kind of paradigm than the one Kuhn described: one grounded in how scholars study questions rather than which questions they study.
If shared theory no longer unifies the field, what does? Peter Galison’s concept of trading zones offers a useful lens. In Galison’s account, scientific subcultures can coordinate not because they share a single worldview but because they develop shared tools and exchange practices at their boundaries. The citation data are consistent with this picture: roughly 52% of citations cross thematic area boundaries, and this rate has remained stable even as RBV declined and the field diversified. Strategy scholars working on corporate governance, innovation, and stakeholder management increasingly draw on the same empirical methods and cite each other’s work.
The adoption of these methods is uneven. CSR-related areas reach about 56% causal identification, while RBV-adjacent work sits near 25%. This suggests that methodological change is not uniform but shaped by the questions each area asks. The shared methodological vocabulary appears to function as connective tissue across a field that no longer shares a dominant theory.
Donald Stokes distinguished research driven purely by curiosity (Bohr’s quadrant) from research driven purely by application (Edison’s quadrant), and identified a third category: use-inspired basic research, or Pasteur’s quadrant, where practical problems motivate fundamental inquiry. The patterns in these data are consistent with strategy’s movement toward that quadrant. The shift to phenomenon-driven research (now about 65% of papers) suggests that scholars increasingly take their questions from real organizational and competitive settings. The simultaneous rise in causal methods (to 44%) suggests they are bringing increasingly rigorous tools to those questions. Critically, this combination has not, at least so far, come at the cost of narrower scope or diminished importance. Whether the field can sustain this balance as causal methods diffuse further remains an open question.
Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific fields advance through paradigm shifts: a dominant framework enters crisis, and a new one replaces it. The decline of the resource-based view, from roughly 40% of the field’s output to about 6%, looks at first glance like the crisis phase of a Kuhnian revolution. But the rest of the pattern does not fit. No single framework rose to take its place. Instead, the field diversified across ten or more thematic areas, none commanding more than 15% of publications. What we observe is less a paradigm shift than a paradigm dissolution: a transition from theoretical consolidation to theoretical pluralism.
A persistent concern in strategy, sometimes called the lamppost effect, holds that the rise of causal identification methods will pull researchers toward questions that are methodologically convenient but substantively trivial. The data allow a direct test of this concern, and the results do not support it. Papers using causal methods are not more topically peripheral than other papers, and they score slightly higher on measures of question importance, with Cohen’s d values in the range of 0.11 to 0.16. These are small effect sizes, and the analysis is observational, so the right conclusion is not that the concern has been definitively refuted. Rather, the evidence available through 2025 does not lend it strong support.
If the field has not adopted a new grand theory, it has adopted something else: a methodological commitment to credible causal evidence applied to real-world phenomena. Causal identification methods rose from roughly 2% of papers in 1980 to 44% in 2025. Over the same period, theory-driven papers fell from their peak near 60% to about 34%, while phenomenon-driven papers climbed to approximately 65%. The new organizing principle is not a theoretical claim about where competitive advantage comes from. It is an epistemological standard for what counts as persuasive evidence. This is a different kind of paradigm than the one Kuhn described: one grounded in how scholars study questions rather than which questions they study.
If shared theory no longer unifies the field, what does? Peter Galison’s concept of trading zones offers a useful lens. In Galison’s account, scientific subcultures can coordinate not because they share a single worldview but because they develop shared tools and exchange practices at their boundaries. The citation data are consistent with this picture: roughly 52% of citations cross thematic area boundaries, and this rate has remained stable even as RBV declined and the field diversified. Strategy scholars working on corporate governance, innovation, and stakeholder management increasingly draw on the same empirical methods and cite each other’s work.
The adoption of these methods is uneven. CSR-related areas reach about 56% causal identification, while RBV-adjacent work sits near 25%. This suggests that methodological change is not uniform but shaped by the questions each area asks. The shared methodological vocabulary appears to function as connective tissue across a field that no longer shares a dominant theory.
Donald Stokes distinguished research driven purely by curiosity (Bohr’s quadrant) from research driven purely by application (Edison’s quadrant), and identified a third category: use-inspired basic research, or Pasteur’s quadrant, where practical problems motivate fundamental inquiry. The patterns in these data are consistent with strategy’s movement toward that quadrant. The shift to phenomenon-driven research (now about 65% of papers) suggests that scholars increasingly take their questions from real organizational and competitive settings. The simultaneous rise in causal methods (to 44%) suggests they are bringing increasingly rigorous tools to those questions. Critically, this combination has not, at least so far, come at the cost of narrower scope or diminished importance. Whether the field can sustain this balance as causal methods diffuse further remains an open question.
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.