An Underlying Theory for Strategy, Organization, and Management: Bridging the Gap Between Analysis and Synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considerable progress has been made in strategic management, organization theory, and general management over several decades, yet they seem to be at an impasse, riding off in all directions. Looking back may offer a way forward. This article revisits an underlying theory for the field, then called Management Policy, that was developed in the 1970s but never published. Building on the work of two eminent scholars, Herbert Simon on the programming of work and Ludwig von Bertalanffy on General Systems Theory, one more oriented to analysis, the other to synthesis, these fields are considered in terms of (1) basic elements (the structuring of organizations, power in and around organizations, and the nature of managerial work), (2) the strategy processes (strategic decision making and strategy making), and (3) the role of the analyst (analytic programs and planning programs). This article may offer some cohesion in a field that has been divided between analysis and synthesis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".