Business strategy, as an educational subject, is over a century old if one were to count the years it had been called 'business policy' (Rumelt et al, 1995). Along with finance, accounting and marketing it has become a 'mastery discourse' in management studies (Hoskin et al., 2006) and access to it a de facto requirement of managerial elites (Clegg, 2004). The strategic management 'education industry' is based upon the expectation that as the direction of successful companies is so important to western civilisation (Rumelt et al, 1995), society will demand managers versed in the latest techniques of direction, therefore more effective to their organisations/civilisations benefit. This expectation produces weighty textbooks which materialise the research and opinion of knowledge entrepreneurs as they codify the important practice of strategy. Typically, in trying to present as much of the totality of the discourse as the writers think relevant, they present much the same content. Educational programmes in strategy then take this as the starting point.
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