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Strategic management theory has significantly developed and has been used in guiding the business practice systematically since the 1960s. There are three important stages in the developing process: classic strategic theory, competitive strategic theory and resource-based view theory. Since the start of the twenty-first century, economic globalization, fast development of technical innovation and the advent of the information age have made strategic management work a requirement that can often be out of step with practice.
Reviewing the continually growing foundation, we attempt to grasp the frontier and to identify the direction the management theory is going. Based on the recent strategic management documentation with the quantitative analysis of the scientometric method, this paper tries to describe the new trend of the strategic management field in the twenty-first century to determine the frontier of strategic management theory for further revelations regarding the scientific community (the first endogenous factor) (Bowman et al. , 2002) and the basic theory (the second endogenous factor) (Furrer et al. , 2008) which promotes its development. Mining local knowledge (exogenous factor) (Hoskisson et al. , 1999) on the influence of strategic management theory development from the angle of a particular country, the paper explores the direction of strategic management theory involution in the future.
1. Research design
1.1 Research method
Scientometric analysis is a way and method of using the mathematic statistical principle and computer analysis method to study a document's external character, including author, keywords, bibliography and geographical information (Yue, 2008), to explore the features of a document and the knowledge structure and developing property of its subjects.
Word frequency and co-occurrence analysis of the keywords, co-citation analysis technology of author and quotation and multivariate statistical analysis are widely used in the analysis of subject knowledge structure. These quantitative analysis methods effectively avoid the influence of subjective ideas and blind knowledge zones in reviewing documents; therefore, they are also used in combing strategic management theory (Ramos-Rodriguez and and Ruiz-Navarro, 2004; Nerur et al. , 2008; Ronda-Pupo and Guerras-Martin, 2010; Liu, 2005; Jianhua and Yue, 2007). Combining the visual technical method (Chen, 2009), this paper will synthetically use these effective methods to discover the developing status of strategic management theory subject.
1.2 Data document
The premise and foundation of frontier and involution...