ABSTRACT

This paper examines the role of narrative framing in the perception of strategic success by exploring the construction of notions of strategy in relation to the perspective of different actors in the same historical episode. Our article is about the UK music retailing industry from the late 1950s until the present. We narrate three stories/accounts – one focusing on the perspective of larger firms in the industry, acting as a normative business history narration, one focusing on the perspective of the mass of smaller firms attempting to survive as larger competitors expand, and one–an epilogue–looking at the recent past in which some of the smaller firms managed to survive while many of the dominant firms from the 1980s and 1990s have failed. We use this both to construct a more diverse historiography of the music retail industry in Britain while advancing the theoretical contribution that narratives of strategic success and failure often favor conceptualizations of dominance over resistance, while failing to reflect on the extent to which historical research itself is an act of sense-making that is bounded by periodization and theoretical priors.

摘要

本文探讨了叙事框架在战略成功感知中的作用，方法是根据同一历史情节中不同行为者的视角探索战略概念的建构。我们的文章是关于1950年代后期到现在的英国音乐零售业的。我们叙述了三个故事/帐户-一个以行业中大公司的观点为重点，作为规范的商业历史叙述，一个以大公司试图随着较大竞争对手的扩张而生存的规模为重点，而一个-结语–回顾最近的过去，一些较小的公司设法生存下来，而1980年代和1990年代的许多主导公司却倒闭了。