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¹Department of Strategic Management and Business Environment, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Correspondence to: HW Volberda, Department of Strategic Management and Business Environment, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: H.Volberda@fbk.eur.nl

The strategy field is replete with competing prescriptions and directives with regard to successful performance. Although integration should be pursued more vigorously from an academic standpoint, in this paper it is argued that real progress in the strategy field requires synthesis. Attempts at integration often lead to theoretical frameworks that are relatively disconnected from urgent problems in strategic management. In escaping this fragmentation-integration dilemma, several avenues for strategy synthesis are provided. Synthesis does not attempt to develop a single paradigm consisting of universal concepts and laws covering the entire strategic management field. Instead it is anchored in a few clusters of strategic management problems: drawing firm boundaries, developing dynamic capabilities, and finding viable strategy configurations. They are essential future directions in strategy synthesis.

European Management Review (2004) 1, 35-42, advance online publication, 5 March 2004 doi:10.1057/palgrave.emr.1500013

strategy; fragmentation; integration; strategy synthesis; paradigm; competitive advantage