ABSTRACT
Marketing-inspired strategic thinking, the industrial organization approach, and the static resource-based view all assume the strategist to be this unbiased information processor who is engaged in rational decision-making. One important contrast between marketing and industrial organization is the difference between competing on price and competing on costs. From a marketing point of view, being a low-price/ no-frills supplier in a product market is a feasible strategy. Scholarship and by implication management are bound by having to make basic assumptions about the nature of reality and about human nature. The opposite assumption – as befits the strategist as negotiator or manager of meaning – that any description of what is taken to be the business reality is but a mere interpretation and that there is no way of knowing how accurate this interpretation is, makes the strategists as subjective in their judgements and decisions as anyone else.
