Description
“Strategic planning,” so-called, is a practice into which states, firms, universities, and many other large organizations regularly invest substantial resources. The study of strategic planning is, however, mostly absent in the academy. Strategic planning had its heyday as a field of study in the three or four decades following World War II, mostly in the discipline of strategic management, but research on the subject has steadily declined in volume since the early 1990s. Much of the contemporary literature on strategy, including on states’ grand strategies, has focused on strategy content – explaining its causes, effects, or the relative merits of competing proposals – rather than on strategy process. This paper undertakes an intellectual history that aims to explain the apparent disconnect between the on-going, widespread, real-world practice of strategic planning and the decline in scholarly research on the subject. Based on this history, this paper proposes a new conceptual framework and methodology for multidisciplinary research on strategic planning, and discusses its particular application to the study of grand strategy in the discipline of international relations.
