Richard Whittington has done as much as any scholar of his generation to broaden and deepen the theoretical underpinnings of the field of corporate strategy. While best known for studying strategy as practice at the level of the individual organization, in this book Whittington takes a more macro view: focusing primarily on two institutional forms of practice, corporate strategy departments, and consulting firms that devote a large proportion of their total business to advising companies on strategy and, in more recent years, helping them with implementation. Whittington aims to broaden the purview of practitioners and students by showing how the field has evolved institutionally. He wants further to show how, in response to exogenous forces like cultural changes and changes in technology, corporate strategy has transformed from its early top-down, secretive, hierarchical form to a more open, inclusive, and participative form, akin to the way the process of innovation has changed from a closed, self-reliant, and directed form to a more open and collaborative version.

Whittington argues that, as a profession, strategy has suffered in comparison to investment banking and venture capital, the other professional services that most attract MBA students but matter less to corporate managers. Christopher McKenna in his history of consulting as a profession, The World's Newest Profession (2006), asserts that, in the twentieth century, leading consulting firms aimed to build and maintain their status by hiring outstanding performers from leading MBA programs. But Whittington theorizes that strategy consulting has two limitations that do not afflict the other services, permeability and precariousness, and that these dilute the professionalism of the practice in various ways. Entrants to strategy consulting require less specialized knowledge, and their engagements are undertaken at the grace and favor of the CEO, a position that changes with alarming and unpredictable frequency. Whittington also alludes to the egregious ethical lapses and legal infractions that have been uncovered at leading consultants—McKinsey in particular—as signs that the traditional secrecy of professional strategists has been maintained not only to protect client privacy and the secrets of the trade but also, too often, to hide malfeasance.

Is strategy a practice or an academic field or both? How do new practices and new ideas take effect? Did this change in the twentieth century? As readers of Business History Review are more likely to practice history than contextualization, which is not the same thing, it's important to note that for his account of the emergence of a field of practice, this author has chosen an odd starting point. Whittington spent the year 2006 as a fellow at the Harvard Business School, which he accurately names “ground zero for Corporate Strategy” (p. viii). Judging from his acknowledgements, at least some of his interviews at the time included veteran HBS academics. It is curious, then, that he dates the origin of corporate strategy as a practice not to the mid-1940s, when strategy originated as a core course in the business policy area, but to 1960, two years before Alfred Chandler published Strategy and Structure, the book that most obviously demonstrated his intellectual debt to Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, and three years before Bruce Henderson founded the Boston Consulting Group, which revolutionized strategic thinking with its growth share matrix. This way of framing the origins of strategy as applied to business thus credits the emergence of the business of strategy consulting and the first peer-reviewed publication that spanned academic disciplines to give the field a theory base but entirely omits the two figures whom HBS long credited with being “fathers” of corporate strategy, Kenneth R. Andrews and C. Roland Christensen. Apart from Andrews's Concept of Corporate Strategy (1971), these men published little peer-reviewed work, but through their inspired teaching and their development of the case literature they shaped strategy as an academic field. They also influenced corporate practice, serving as personal strategy consultants and board members for numerous firms, and for the Harvard Business School in particular. The intellectual connection between Chandler and friendly economists—HBS colleague Michael Porter and Oliver Williamson, in particular—did ground the field of strategy as a research subject, but consulting firms like the Boston Consulting Group and Bain and Company would likely not have become as influential as they did had Andrews and Christensen not arrived at HBS fifteen years earlier, having served as officers in World War II (Andrews as a major in the Army Air Force Statistical Control School held at HBS and Christensen as captain in the Army Quartermaster Corps), and persuaded their older colleagues in business policy to adapt the new ideas, tools, and techniques successfully used in the military to business management. It is worth pondering that despite the preference by academics for journal publication, scientific management too achieved its highest point of influence in multiple countries via the consulting practices of Frederick Winslow Taylor's disciples a decade or more before Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).

This book is not for strategy novices. Though Whittington offers many informative examples and a few extensively developed case studies of well-known corporations like Shell and General Electric, where strategy played a critical role, he confines his description and argument mainly to structures and mechanisms, assuming prior familiarity with the central ideas of strategy. Those already acquainted with the works of Chandler, Porter, Henry Mintzberg, and Igor Ansoff, among many others, know them to be academics and/or corporate strategists of considerable renown, but Whittington hardly discusses how their counsel affected client performance. Consulting firms with extensive strategy practices like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Monitor, and Gemini may have been household names, but other than reporting their failure or survival as businesses Whittington makes little attempt to gauge their effectiveness in terms of what their clients achieved by following their advice. For those who are already familiar with the content of strategy as an academic field, the book is an enlightening compendium of the recent academic literature, a reference work punctuated with engaging, sometimes spicy, anecdotes. For those who are not, it is entertaining but baffling.