Andrew Pettigrew - Ideas Clave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Pettigrew#Key_ideas

Key ideas

Writing about his 1985 book The Awakening Giant, which examines how best to explain the success and failings of ICI, Fairfield-Sonn (1987) says:

"Given the scope of the task Pettigrew sets out to accomplish the likelihood of success seems remote. Yet, the author artfully manages to combine the skills of business historian, methodological critic, and pragmatic counselor to produce a cutting-edge work that should be read by everyone who has an interest in organizational development."

Pettigrew's background in anthropology and sociology seemed to predispose his view that "an organisation's strategy is the result of a process embedded in a context" (2003b). He recalls how when he made his "way across then what was a fairly rickety (and in places non-existent) bridge from sociology by way of organisation strategy" such a view was "an unusual thing" since at the time "those with backgrounds in industrial economics ruled the roost" complete with their "overuse of simple distinctions such as 'strategy formulation' and 'strategy implementation' and 'strategy content' and 'strategy process' research.

Despite his intellectual preference for fewer distinctions between content, process, and context, he still tends to be viewed as a researcher in the process tradition simply because it, as he, is interested in more than static decisions. He argues (2003b) that:

• The link between formulation and implementation is not unilinear but interrelated time
• Understanding the change associated with strategy requires understanding of continuity over time
• Strategy, and its impact on future outcomes, are shaped by power and politics

This view of strategy requires the strategy researcher to be historian, anthropologist, and political analyst.

[edit]Views on methodology

Pettigrew considers his work to have been "to catch reality in flight" (2003b) such that human behaviour is studied in context and by locating present behaviour "in its historical antecedents" (2003b:306). He determines three benefits of such a longitudinal study:

1. Length of time enables appreciation of decision-making in context
2. Each individual 'drama' provides a clear point of data collection
3. Mechanisms that lead to, accentuate, and regulate, each drama can be deduced
4. Comparison and contrast is possible allowing continuity and change to be examined

He claims that "most social scientists do not appear to give much time to time" and that, as a result, much of their work is an "exercise in comparative statics" and therefore recommends strategy researchers follow the approach of historians to "reconstruct past contexts, processes, and decisions" in order to discover patterns, find underlying mechanisms and triggers, and combine inductive search with deductive reason.