What is strategic management?
Strategic management deals with decisions made by the Chief Executive Officer, senior executives, and the board of directors in charting the future growth directions of the firm, formulating and revitalising competitive strategy in specific markets, and redrawing the boundaries of the firm. Execution of strategy involves engaging in mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, and creating/entering platforms and ecosystems. It also involves developing the appropriate infrastructure of decision heuristics and processes, designing corporate governance mechanisms, and managing stakeholder relationships.
Strategy research gives close attention to how firms achieve competitive advantage, but also explores the tensions between different stakeholder contributions to value creation and the benefits/impact they incur. Strategy combines micro and macro levels of research with attention to both the roles of individuals (eg managers and entrepreneurs), teams, and underlying processes (microfoundations) and the roles of macro influences on how strategy is created and implemented. As an interdisciplinary field of research, it combines pluralistic insights from management research, economics, organisational theories, psychology and sociology.
Why the Strategic Management specialisation?
The Strategic Management specialisation of the MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour, as an integral part of the Strategic Management PhD pathway, lays a strong foundation for the pursuit of that pathway. Several features make the Strategic Management specialisation unique:
- Rigorous academic training: We work with you to develop an integrated and coherent programme of study that includes intensive seminars and workshops. The SMOOB Strategic Management specialisation will train you in the latest quantitative research methods and emerging thinking in strategy.
- Close research collaborations: The core feature of the programme is the close collaboration between our faculty and our research students. You will work with faculty on joint research projects for presentation at top international conferences and for publication in leading academic journals.
- Highly selective and global: The programme is highly selective. You will interact closely with outstanding fellow research students representing a wide variety of professional experiences, nationalities and ethnicities.
- Connections with renowned scholars and schools around the world: Through our active research seminars and renowned visiting scholar programmes, you can interact closely and collaborate with leading strategy scholars from around the world.
- State-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure: You will have access to comprehensive research databases, latest software and computer equipment and a fully equipped behavioural lab.
Learn more about our supervising faculty’s research interests
Yasemin Kor
Beckwith Professor of Management Studies
About Yasemin’s research
Professor Yasemin Kor is the Beckwith Professor of Management Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of strategy formulation and renewal, top management teams and corporate governance. She studies strategy as a configuration of resources and capabilities that are uniquely assembled to achieve a purpose. In her research, she examines how firms differ in ways in which they manage and govern their resources and capabilities. Her current research focuses on the organic food industry and the responsiveness of firms respond to the organic opportunity based on the specificity and versatility of the CEO’s experiences. She also studies the role of the independent board chair in achieving effective board governance.
Allègre Hadida
Associate Professor in Strategy
About Allègre’s research
Dr Allègre Hadida is a University Senior Lecturer in Strategy. She studies: (1) strategy and decision-making in temporary and agile organisations and in volatile environments, including digital music and online streaming; (2) general management and strategy in creative, arts and media industries – in particular, cinema, music, theatre, and heritage; (3) the impact and integration of new technologies on traditional arts organisations, including theatres and opera houses, and on audiovisual content production and diffusion; and (4) creativity and improvisation in organizations across sectors and beyond the creative industries.
Lionel Paolella
Professor of the Social Sciences and Organisations
About Lionel’s research
Lionel Paolella is a Professor of Social Sciences and Organisation. His research interests include strategy and economic sociology, organisation theory, categorisation, social evaluation and gender diversity. Lionel’s main line of research explores how market categories – a set of firms that share cognitive and cultural similarities – affect the social evaluation, the innovation and performance of organisations. He mainly uses quantitative methods.
Christopher Marquis
Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management
About Christopher’s research
Professor Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management. His research and teaching is focused on how some of the biggest crises of our day – including climate change, inequality, and discrimination – are intimately connected to how our current economic and societal systems prioritise accumulating and concentrating wealth for the few over the concerns and needs of everyone and everything else. His research and writing focus on the need to rebalance the interactions between corporations, governments, and civil society to deliver socially and environmentally beneficial outcomes to all.
Curriculum
By default, a student on the Strategic Management specialisation of the MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour writes a dissertation and takes 6 modules (5 core modules and one elective), including strategy area specialisation courses and a methods/statistics course:
Area specialisation core modules
This course covers key theories in the field of strategy, innovation and organisations. We discuss the foundational theories, central debates and key readings that help us understand organisations and their strategies to survive and innovate through both technological and managerial innovations. Discussions include why managers adopt particular courses of action, how innovation is fostered, how are new markets created and how is strategy formulated. The field of innovation, strategy and organisations is inherently interdisciplinary, and so is this course. Accordingly, we not only discuss the underpinnings of research in innovation, strategy and organisations but also a host of related questions that have since become significant to understanding this body of research. The course is based around intensive seminar-based sessions. The format is group debates around contrasting perspectives related to the readings. The course enables you to critically interpret, analyse and problematise scholarly material and develop an understanding of how to make theoretical contributions in the field.
One of the following 2 courses, depending on year:
This course provides a foundational survey of the key theories, puzzles, and empirical contributions in strategic management. These include the relationship between different strategies and the resource and capability bundles firms develop, strategic positions they create, and their financial performance and competitive advantage. The course gives attention to how decision makers operate at the upper echelons, such CEOs, executive teams, and boards of directors, and how they shape the firm’s strategic choices. The course also covers substantive research on the changes to competitive and corporate strategies undertaken by firms in connection with the disruptions in the environment. The course involves active student participation and discussions in a stimulating class environment and the critiques of seminal classic contributions and latest research in key strategy topics. It also involves you developing your own research ideas and learning to communicate them effectively. The focus of the module is on developing you for a scholarly research career.
This course surveys the major theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in strategic management research, particularly as it relates to the underlying strategic and organisational processes.
Strategic management is currently one of the liveliest areas in all of the social sciences, in part because of the importance of understanding how to best position organisations and get ahead of competition and in part because of the challenges to traditional theory that have emerged over the past 20 years. Strategy deals with charting the future directions of the firm and implementing these directions to maximise the long-term profits. Accordingly, strategic management and processes address the resources, capabilities and strategic positioning of the firm to create and sustain competitive advantage as well as the psychological and social challenges in implementing organisations’ strategies.
This course focuses on foundational theories, central debates and key texts that help us conceptualise organisational dynamics. it provides you with advanced reading, writing and interpretation skills relating to, for example, organisational identity, organisational control and theories of entrepreneurship. It is based around intense seminar-based sessions in which key articles are closely read and discussed. Having completed the course, you will be equipped to interpret and problematise scholarly material relating to the organisation of innovation in a creative and critical manner.
Methods/statistics core modules
Econometrics I is the first in a sequence of econometrics modules for research-oriented MPhil students intending to use econometric methods in their PhD research at Cambridge Judge Business School. It is taught in Michaelmas term.
This module develops your ability to use linear regression and related statistical techniques to investigate economic and managerial relationships using primarily cross-sectional observational data. By the end of the module, you will be able to specify, estimate, test, interpret and critically evaluate single-equation regression models, with applications drawn from management, finance and business economics.
The sequence continues with Econometrics II in Lent term, which covers methods and applications in microeconometrics.
Econometrics II builds on Econometrics I and introduces research-level methods in microeconometrics. It equips students to exploit the structure of longitudinal and cross-sectional individual-level data, model complexities in behaviour and decision-making, and address problems arising from limited or partial observability.
The module develops your ability to select econometric methods appropriate to different research questions, data structures and model specifications. It emphasises the relationship between econometric theory and applied methods, the substantive insights that can be obtained from empirical analysis, and the careful interpretation and critical appraisal of results.
Econometrics I is a prerequisite for this module.
Electives
The elective modules for the Strategic Marketing specialisation of the MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour are:
This research seminar helps you understand a variety of cutting-edge topics in organisational behaviour (OB). The overarching question we address is how these topics relate to individual, group and organisational effectiveness. Specifically, the course covers the following content areas:
- making a theoretical contribution to OB
- personality and values
- creativity
- culture
- leadership
- ethics
- affect and cognition
- artificial intelligence and its applications to organisational behaviour
The objectives of this course are to familiarise you with classic and current articles that have shaped the field of organisational behaviour, and to prepare you to develop and conduct organisational behaviour research yourself.
This course is a survey of 3 distinct yet related areas: marketing, innovation and emerging economies. Marketing is the study of the interaction between organisations and markets. Innovation is the study of the commercial exploitation by organisations of new ideas. Emerging economies, such as India and China, are the big economic phenomenon of the contemporary global scene and the theatre in which new opportunities for marketing and innovation are unfolding in real time. This course takes a strategic perspective on these topics, viewing them all from the perspective of the firm and its performance.
This course focuses on 3 elements of qualitative research methodology:
- research philosophy, in which you are introduced to some basic philosophical concepts and tools – particularly in the area of epistemology
- qualitative research methods, where we look at the principal types of qualitative data used in management research and the practical and epistemological issues associated with their collection, analysis and use
- research design, in which you will come to understand the links between theory, methodology and choice of research techniques; the principles and practice of research design and data access and collection using experiment, observation, interviews, surveys and archival and database retrieval; and issues of research validity, reliability, bias and ethics
This course helps you understand a variety of predominantly quantitative research methods, as well as their embeddedness within various research designs. The course is divided into 2 independent content blocks, part A (taking place in Michaelmas term) and part B (taking place in Lent term). It is designed in such a way that part B can be attended without having attended part A previously. Upon completion you’ll have a good understanding of various research methods commonly used in management research, and will have applied this knowledge to your own research project.
Extends coverage to more advanced topics such as time series analysis including ARCH and GARCH models that are commonly used in applied financial econometrics. Assumes a good level of understanding of the core Econometrics course.
Please note: MPhil students who would like to take this course need to achieve a minimum mark of 70 in the Econometrics I taught in Michaelmas Term.
Taught by the Faculty of Economics.
The Cross-section and Panel Data course covers a broad range of topics in microeconometrics. Topics covered are taken from random utility models in discrete choice, heterogeneity and endogeneity in binary choice models, program evaluation and treatment effects, fixed and random effects estimators for panel data, nonlinear and dynamic panel data models, machine learning, count data models, and an introduction to simulation methods (classical and Bayesian).
It may be possible that your elective coursework modules can include modules from other research courses offered by Cambridge Judge Business School or other University of Cambridge departments that are not in the above list, upon approval by the Degree Committee.