Introduction

This chapter aims to put the corporate configurations model into the context of the academic theories and consultancy frameworks that exist in the area of corporate strategy. As stated at the beginning of the book, the reality is that most of the strategy research and literature focuses on the strategies of business units rather than the overall corporate level strategy. Indeed, even where the theory or framework states that it is considering corporate strategy, in many cases it merely regards the total organisation as a single entity without highlighting the specific role of the corporate centre.

Two main bodies of work, one by Henry Mintzberg and the other by Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell, do deal with the specific role of the corporate centre in multi-business groups and hence they are considered in some detail here. However, before comparing in detail our model with other existing work, this chapter briefly looks at the different types of corporate strategy so that the more detailed analysis is placed in an appropriate context.

The corporate configurations model is then analysed in terms of the fundamental theoretical building blocks of strategy theory, namely the Resource Based View of the firm with its related theory of Dynamic Capabilities, and Transaction Cost Economics. This is done because our model was, as already stated, developed from first principles rather than being deduced from studying a number of successful multi-business groups. Hence the four corporate configurations should be capable of rational, economic justifications in terms of the...