科技管理三重奏:策略視角的分析與評論
280
Division, making it an independent and autonomous community. From the early 1990s,
conferences, proceedings, and professional development workshops began to be held on a
regular basis. To date, most TIM Division members are also affiliated with the BPS Division.
Therefore, the studies of TIM are actually rooted in strategic management, and using the
perspective of strategic management promises to generate insight into the development of
TIM.
Strategic management is indeed multidimensional and can be understood from three
perspectives: voluntarism, determinism, and interactionism. Voluntarism argues that social
agents could behave against structure and are sometimes eulogized as omnipotent heroes -
they can do whatever they want. The etymology of the word “strategy” is the Greek word
strategos
, which means “a general.” Hence, one of the prevailing issues of this perspective is
entrepreneurship. Some studies even discuss the entrepreneur’s personality, characteristics,
experience, and charisma. Others argue that entrepreneurship is inborn and difficult to
acquire from practical experience. Active entrepreneurs have innate abilities to overcome
difficulties, identify growth opportunities, and leverage organizational resources to achieve
strategic planning. Other than at the individual level, resources might be in the spotlight at
firm and sectoral levels. The Greek verb
stratego
means to “plan the destruction of one’s
enemies through effective use of resources.” At the firm level, structure should follow
strategy (e.g., organization, institution, and policy should be designed in harmony with
strategy) because managers would directly or indirectly recombine and reconfigure internal
resources to ensure a sustained competitive advantage. Furthermore, according to Dynamic
Capability Theory, a firm could quickly respond to the changing environment by
reconfiguring its resource portfolio. Some managerial tools or philosophies, such as balance
scorecard (BSC) and management by objective, could also be included in the domain of this
perspective.
In contrast, determinism argues that it is impossible to fight against structure; all social
agents must collectively comply with its pressures. Structure is seen as the rules and
resources which function as an “iron cage,” constraining those embedded actors. The
prevailing analytical framework, the Structure-Conduct-Performance framework (S-C-P),
implies that industrial structure would definitely influence the firm’s conduct (i.e., strategy),
and the firm’s conduct would affect its performance. Therefore, the match between firm
behavior and industrial structure is critical to survival. Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model is
actually rooted in the S-C-P framework - a firm must endeavor to position itself in a
particular industry. According to Institutional Theory, firms embedded within a field (or