ABSTRACT
In 1962, the American economic historian Alfred Chandler published a book entitled Strategy and Structure that contained in-depth studies and comparisons of large American companies. Chandler concluded that the strategic orientation of a large company is a determining factor in the way the company structures its organization. The comparison emphasized that, in time, a company’s strategy determined its structure, and that the common denominator between structure and strategy was the application of the enterprise’s resources to market demand. Structure had been used to adapt the enterprise’s existing resources to current demand; strategy had been used to plan for the allocation of resources to anticipated demand (Chandler 1984). In his research, Chandler explored how large businesses adapted their administrative structures to accommodate strategies of growth (Heracleous 2003). The importance of formulating and implementing a business strategy to strengthen competitiveness and growth has often been stressed in the literature on organization and management (Ansoff 1965; Stern and Stalk 1995; Porter 1996).
