An Exploratory Examination of The Threshold Concepts in Strategic Management
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Threshold concepts are core concepts in a field that students find particularly troublesome to understand, often because they integrate what students previously believed were discrete concepts or because they span boundaries between concepts or fields. Consequently, they are often transformative in nature and irreversible once fully understood. Therefore, they should form the core of our pedagogy. Threshold concepts have yet to be identified in strategic management. In this exploratory study, we examine student perceptions to determine which strategy concepts are likely threshold and identify four candidates: vertical integration, corporate diversification, innovation, and governance. In addition, we identify three non-core concepts - PESTEL, global strategies, and the balanced scorecard – that possess threshold-like characteristics, suggesting we rethink their curricular value. Finally, we identify active learning strategies that help students understand threshold concepts: applying/using the concept, discussing it with peers, and exploring examples. Class time devoted to such learning activities facilitates students “crossing the threshold.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".