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科技管理三重奏:策略視角的分析與評論

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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