The Operations Strategy Process

Ever since Wickham Skinner formulated the notion of “manufacturing as a competitive weapon” in the 1960s, research on operations strategy (OS) has evolved into one of the major streams within operations management and managerial research in general. So far, research in OS has pre-dominantly focused on firm’s decisions regarding competitive priorities, i.e. the “what” of strategy, also referred to as content. In comparison, the decision-making process in OS (the “how” of strategy) is theoretically under-developed. This work focusses on the process of OS, especially on an approach to align and harmonize resource- and market-based view during the formulation of OS, referred to as reconciliation. Its purpose is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of the formulation of OS, by empirically investigating approaches to formulation, particularly reconciliation.