Strategic management deals with decisions made by the Chief Executive Officer, senior executives, and the board of directors in charting the future growth directions of the firm, formulating and revitalising competitive strategy in specific markets, and redrawing the boundaries of the firm. Execution of strategy involves engaging in mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, and creating/entering platforms and ecosystems. It also involves developing the appropriate infrastructure of decision heuristics and processes, designing corporate governance mechanisms, and managing stakeholder relationships.
Strategy research gives close attention to how firms achieve competitive advantage, but also explores the tensions between different stakeholder contributions to value creation and the benefits/impact they incur. Strategy combines micro and macro levels of research with attention to both the roles of individuals (eg managers and entrepreneurs), teams, and underlying processes (microfoundations) and the roles of macro influences on how strategy is created and implemented. As an interdisciplinary field of research, it combines pluralistic insights from management research, economics, organisational theories, psychology and sociology.
Why the Strategic Management specialisation?
The Strategic Management specialisation of the MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour, as an integral part of the Strategic Management PhD pathway, lays a strong foundation for the pursuit of that pathway. Several features make the Strategic Management specialisation unique:
Rigorous academic training: We work with you to develop an integrated and coherent programme of study that includes intensive seminars and workshops. The SMOOB Strategic Management specialisation will train you in the latest quantitative research methods and emerging thinking in strategy.
Close research collaborations: The core feature of the programme is the close collaboration between our faculty and our research students. You will work with faculty on joint research projects for presentation at top international conferences and for publication in leading academic journals.
Highly selective and global: The programme is highly selective. You will interact closely with outstanding fellow research students representing a wide variety of professional experiences, nationalities and ethnicities.
Connections with renowned scholars and schools around the world: Through our active research seminars and renowned visiting scholar programmes, you can interact closely and collaborate with leading strategy scholars from around the world.
State-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure: You will have access to comprehensive research databases, latest software and computer equipment and a fully equipped behavioural lab.
Learn more about our supervising faculty’s research interests
Yasemin Kor
Beckwith Professor of Management Studies
About Yasemin’s research
Professor Yasemin Kor is the Beckwith Professor of Management Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of strategy formulation and renewal, top management teams and corporate governance. She studies strategy as a configuration of resources and capabilities that are uniquely assembled to achieve a purpose. In her research, she examines how firms differ in ways in which they manage and govern their resources and capabilities. Her current research focuses on the organic food industry and the responsiveness of firms respond to the organic opportunity based on the specificity and versatility of the CEO’s experiences. She also studies the role of the independent board chair in achieving effective board governance.
Dr Allègre Hadida is a University Senior Lecturer in Strategy. She studies: (1) strategy and decision-making in temporary and agile organisations and in volatile environments, including digital music and online streaming; (2) general management and strategy in creative, arts and media industries – in particular, cinema, music, theatre, and heritage; (3) the impact and integration of new technologies on traditional arts organisations, including theatres and opera houses, and on audiovisual content production and diffusion; and (4) creativity and improvisation in organizations across sectors and beyond the creative industries.
Professor of the Social Sciences and Organisations
About Lionel’s research
Lionel Paolella is a Professor of Social Sciences and Organisation. His research interests include strategy and economic sociology, organisation theory, categorisation, social evaluation and gender diversity. Lionel’s main line of research explores how market categories – a set of firms that share cognitive and cultural similarities – affect the social evaluation, the innovation and performance of organisations. He mainly uses quantitative methods.
By default, a student on the Strategic Management specialisation of the MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour writes a dissertation and takes 6 modules (5 core modules and one elective), including strategy area specialisation courses and a methods/statistics course:
Area specialisation core modules
This course covers key theories in the field of strategy, innovation and organisations. We discuss the foundational theories, central debates and key readings that help us understand organisations and their strategies to survive and innovate through both technological and managerial innovations. Discussions include why managers adopt particular courses of action, how innovation is fostered, how are new markets created and how is strategy formulated. The field of innovation, strategy and organisations is inherently interdisciplinary, and so is this course. Accordingly, we not only discuss the underpinnings of research in innovation, strategy and organisations but also a host of related questions that have since become significant to understanding this body of research. The course is based around intensive seminar-based sessions. The format is group debates around contrasting perspectives related to the readings. The course enables you to critically interpret, analyse and problematise scholarly material and develop an understanding of how to make theoretical contributions in the field.
One of the following 2 courses, depending on year:
This course provides a foundational survey of the key theories, puzzles, and empirical contributions in strategic management. These include the relationship between different strategies and the resource and capability bundles firms develop, strategic positions they create, and their financial performance and competitive advantage. The course gives attention to how decision makers operate at the upper echelons, such CEOs, executive teams, and boards of directors, and how they shape the firm’s strategic choices. The course also covers substantive research on the changes to competitive and corporate strategies undertaken by firms in connection with the disruptions in the environment. The course involves active student participation and discussions in a stimulating class environment and the critiques of seminal classic contributions and latest research in key strategy topics. It also involves you developing your own research ideas and learning to communicate them effectively. The focus of the module is on developing you for a scholarly research career.
This course surveys the major theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in strategic management research, particularly as it relates to the underlying strategic and organisational processes.
Strategic management is currently one of the liveliest areas in all of the social sciences, in part because of the importance of understanding how to best position organisations and get ahead of competition and in part because of the challenges to traditional theory that have emerged over the past 20 years. Strategy deals with charting the future directions of the firm and implementing these directions to maximise the long-term profits. Accordingly, strategic management and processes address the resources, capabilities and strategic positioning of the firm to create and sustain competitive advantage as well as the psychological and social challenges in implementing organisations’ strategies.
Methods/statistics core modules
This is the first in the sequence of Econometrics modules designed for Research MPhil students who intend to use econometric methods in their PhD research at Cambridge Judge Business School. It is taught in Michaelmas term.
This introductory module develops your capability in using linear regression and associated statistical techniques to examine causal relationships from primarily cross-sectional, observational data. By the end of the module you will be able to specify, estimate, test, interpret, and critically evaluate single equation regression models, with applications in subject areas of management, finance, and business economics.
To carry out empirical research that has the potential to make an original contribution to knowledge in management, finance, business economics and similar fields, it is necessary to exploit the richness and structure of longitudinal as well as cross-sectional, individual-level data. It is necessary to become competent in an array of micro-econometric techniques that help researchers to build into the design of their studies, a variety of complexities (in decision-making, for example) and also compensate for partial observability that is inherent in available data.
This module introduces you to research-level micro-econometric methods. It provides the background required to confidently choose applied techniques and methods suited to different types of data-sources and models. The focus is on how techniques relate to theory, on the insights that can be drawn from their application, and critical interpretation and appraisal of results.
You must have taken the Econometrics I course to take this course.
This course helps you understand a variety of predominantly quantitative research methods, as well as their embeddedness within various research designs. The course is divided into two independent content blocks, parts I and II, and is designed in such a way that part II can be attended without having attended part I previously. Upon completion you’ll have a good understanding of various research methods commonly used in management research, and will have applied this knowledge to your own research project.
Specifically, the course covers the following content areas, among others:
Part I
Research design
Experimental & quasi-experimental design
Survey design & analysis
Mediation & moderation
Part II
Multilevel design & analysis
Social network design & analysis
Big data research design & analysis
Meta-analysis
The course increases your understanding of organisational research methods and your sensitivity to the practical problems in conducting organisational research, and enables you to apply organisational research methods to your own research projects and interests.
Electives
The elective modules for the Strategic Marketing specialisation of the MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour are:
This research seminar helps you understand a variety of cutting-edge topics in organisational behaviour (OB). The overarching question we address is how these topics relate to individual, group and organisational effectiveness. Specifically, the course covers the following content areas:
making a theoretical contribution to OB
personality and values
creativity
culture
leadership
ethics
affect and cognition
artificial intelligence and its applications to organisational behaviour
The objectives of this course are to familiarise you with classic and current articles that have shaped the field of organisational behaviour, and to prepare you to develop and conduct organisational behaviour research yourself.
You are introduced to the foundations necessary to conduct research in the three areas of marketing, operations & technology management, and finance, with a view to developing your own skills as researchers in these areas and in business in general. This course covers standard models of:
individual choice under certainty and uncertainty
production theory
general equilibrium
monopoly pricing, price discrimination
information economics
behavioural economics
The course gives you some fundamental knowledge of competitive markets, enabling you to leverage your course knowledge to do original research and write papers in your chosen field of research in a business school.
This course is a survey of 3 distinct yet related areas: marketing, innovation and emerging economies. Marketing is the study of the interaction between organisations and markets. Innovation is the study of the commercial exploitation by organisations of new ideas. Emerging economies, such as India and China, are the big economic phenomenon of the contemporary global scene and the theatre in which new opportunities for marketing and innovation are unfolding in real time. This course takes a strategic perspective on these topics, viewing them all from the perspective of the firm and its performance.
This course focuses on some key theories and central debates that help us conceptualise the relationship between information systems, innovation, and strategic change. The main texts will draw from information systems, sociology, sociology of technology, and organisation theory. The course examines 3 key themes:
the role of new information technologies in processes of innovation and strategic change within and between industries
the role of information systems in enabling innovative work practices and the organisational issues involved in implementing and using technological innovations
the relationship between information technology and processes of globalisation
This course focuses on 3 elements of qualitative research methodology:
research philosophy, in which you are introduced to some basic philosophical concepts and tools – particularly in the area of epistemology
qualitative research methods, where we look at the principal types of qualitative data used in management research and the practical and epistemological issues associated with their collection, analysis and use
research design, in which you will come to understand the links between theory, methodology and choice of research techniques; the principles and practice of research design and data access and collection using experiment, observation, interviews, surveys and archival and database retrieval; and issues of research validity, reliability, bias and ethics
In a large number of empirical contexts in finance and management, data are temporarily ordered in the form of time series. The Time Series Econometrics module introduces you to concepts and methods that are appropriate for empirical research in such settings, covering methods for exploratory time series analysis, estimation of dynamic causal effects and forecasting.
Taught by the Faculty of Economics.
This course offers an introduction to the behavioural approach to economics. Among the topic covered are behavioural game theory, intertemporal decision making, neuroeconomics, cognitive biases, decision-making heuristics and addiction. The course includes both theoretical and empirical material, but a recurring theme is the importance of experimental findings both in the laboratory and in the field.
Taught by the Faculty of Economics.
The course introduces you to the economics of networks. This area of research has emerged in the last 2 decades and it has introduced a set of tools for economists to incorporate network structure in the analysis of individual behaviour and economic outcomes. Topics covered include the formation of networks, the provision of local public goods, coordination, learning, trading, and financial networks. A central focus of the course is the interplay between theory and experiments.
Taught by the Faculty of Economics.
The Industrial Organisation course provides a rigorous treatment of the main concepts in industrial organisation. The course covers both theory and applications.
Taught by the Faculty of Economics.
This course is on development economics and deals with the economic problems of poor countries. It considers some of the main theoretical and analytical issues in development economics as well as the historical development process of now-developed countries. The topics covered are growth, development, poverty, inequality, education, technology, innovation, mutual insurance, finance, savings, weather, climate, health, pandemics, representative democracy, religion, social capital and conflict.
One of the following 2 courses, depending on year:
This seminar-based module is an overview of quantitative modelling approaches to research on marketing problems. 3 major areas are covered:
In each session you’re required to read, analyse and comment on selected papers surrounding the key themes of that session. At least half of every session will be devoted to student presentations and group discussion. Having completed the module, you’ll possess some basic knowledge of quantitative modelling in marketing. You’ll also be able to leverage your course experience to develop an in-depth understanding of relevant topics for a research career at a business school.
This seminar-based module is an overview of issues related to consumer behaviour research in marketing. The module includes readings on marketing research as well as cognate home disciplines such as psychology and behavioural economics. Two major areas are covered:
The information processing perspective
The behavioural decision perspective
In each session you’re required to read, analyse and comment on selected papers surrounding the key themes of that session. At least half of every session will be devoted to student presentations and group discussion. Having completed the module, you’ll possess some basic knowledge that will help you appreciate and conduct consumer behaviour research. You’ll also be able to leverage your learning experience to develop an in-depth understanding of relevant topics for a research career at a business school.
One of the following 2 courses, depending on year:
This course critically examines research that has been conducted in unconventional contexts and that investigates grand challenges, eg poverty, inequality, conflict and climate change. The major themes that are explored include gaining access to novel and unconventional research sites, field-level ethical and moral issues when investigating grand challenges, novel research methods, eg online/digital ethnography, the researcher-practitioner interface, theorising from data gathered from unconventional contexts, and publishing research conducted in novel and unconventional contexts and that investigates grand challenges.
This course is for students who wish to pursue a research career in a business school and consists of a mix of lectures and seminar-based sessions in which you read, analyse and comment on selected papers. Following the course, you’ll be able to leverage your course knowledge to do original research and write papers in your chosen field of research.
Topics covered include:
static games of complete information (normal form games)
modelling strategic interactions
iterated dominance and rationalisability
Nash equilibrium
application: imperfect competition
mixed strategies
dynamic games of complete information (extensive form games)
extensive form and Nash equilibrium
subgame perfect equilibrium
application: product differentiation
repeated games and one-step deviation
static games of incomplete information
motivation
Bayesian Nash equilibrium
dynamic games of incomplete information
perfect Bayesian equilibrium
signalling
It may be possible that your elective coursework modules can include modules from other research courses offered by Cambridge Judge Business School or other University of Cambridge departments that are not in the above list, upon approval by the Degree Committee.
