ABSTRACT
A significant challenge of strategic management as a scholarly discipline is the rapidly evolving nature of its research. The fluidity of many strategic issues requires strategy scholars to employ a variety of research methodologies to keep advancing the extant body of knowledge. As pointed out by Hitt et al. (1998), different types of research methods are likely to be adopted by strategic management researchers tackling different research questions. Among such questions and issues, the emergence of highly clustered areas of firms and related organizational actors has been of growing interest within the strategic management literature. There are various reasons why the emergence of organizational fields represents an important area of strategic and organizational inquiry. First, given that it typically takes several decades for a field to move from initiation to take-off (Klepper and Grady 1990), it is very important to understand the nature of the institutional underpinnings and antecedents that sustain commitment during the lengthy period when success may appear doubtful and the field identity is fragile and unclear. Second, knowledge about the process by which new fields emerge is invaluable both to industrial policy makers and to corporate managers and entrepreneurs (Van de Ven and Garud 1989). New fields shape local development and competitiveness and are the basis of the growth of vibrant regional economies. Yet, the approaches followed to trace the origin of these institutions have relied primarily on ex-post functional accounts of genesis and emergence. As noted by Powell and colleagues (2012): “Most research on the emergence of high-tech clusters samples on successful cases, and works backwards to trace a narrative, often highlighting the role of specific individuals or groups.” A limitation to this approach is that it risks predetermining the outcomes, casting an aura of inevitability to the evolutionary whole process. In fact, the use of the current state of an institution to illuminate its prior state is tantamount to treating the institution “time zero” as an exogenous fact. If some institutional state sits antecedent to a theory, that theory then cannot shed light on the emergence of the state.
