How Strategic Management Shed Business Policy’s Sense of Social Responsibility in the 1980s

Abstract

A staple of the business curriculum for nearly forty years, Michael Porter’s five forces framework answered the needs of, and quickly epitomized, a fledgling discipline, Strategic Management, with a Harvard-backed framework that aligned with the Chicago School’s dismissal of social responsibility. I show that the successful positioning of the five forces as an extension of the Harvard Business Policy tradition derived from Kenneth Andrews’s decision to introduce the concept of strategy with a structured framework that separated social responsibility from the analytical search for “economic strategy.” Ironically, the effort to boost social responsibility hastened its marginalization in the core curriculum.