Mellahi, K., Frynas, J., Sun, P., & Siegel, D. (2016). A Review of the Nonmarket Strategy Literature: Toward a Multi-Theoretical Integration. Journal of Management, 42(1), 143-173.

Reading outside your immediate research-focus can be both bewildering and very rewarding. My focus the past years has been on strategy in regards to public organisations. Certainly there are frequent references to strategy in the private sector – but actually diving into an article like this one, is both bewildering and rewarding.

Superficially, one might think non-market strategy and strategy in public agencies should be quite similar, since public agencies do not interact with markeds the same way as businesses. The illusion of similarity soon dissipates as you read about what non-market strategy is all about. I’ll return to that. Burrowing deeper, however, there are some possible bridges between the literature on non-market strategy in market-place organisations and public agencies. I’ll return to that as well.

First things first. The article delves into research on non-market strategy: especially CSR and CPA (corporate social responsibility and corporate political activity). It details how a selection of 214 articles was chosen and how they were analyzed. 163 of the papers were empirical and 51 were conceptual. Of the empirical papers, 153 were focused on the performance outcomes of CSR and 51 on CPA. There was, in other words, a large amount of research which the authors used as data for this article. The result is a plethora of details which at times is quite a challenge to follow. However: the authors supply an integrative framework which comes to assistance in ordering the huge amount of perspectives.

The article details which theoretical frameworks the underlying articles have used. The most common are Agency Theory, Institutional Theory, Resource-based view (RBV), Resource-dependence theory (RDT), Stakeholder Theory and a group of “Others”. The overview of the use of these theoretical perspectives alone is very helpful in gaining oversight over the academic field of non-market strategy. Then the authors also present an “integrative model of the nonmarket strategy-performance relationship”.  Such models clarify and give the readers a mental image of how elements fit together – at least in this paper’s discussion.

A very interesting chapter was Insights From Related Non-Business Disciplines – where there are also possible links to social contract and Habermasian theories as possible avenues forward.

Leaving the directly market-place related content aside, there is still a lot to gain in this article on strategy for public sector. I will certainly look closer into how theoretical perspectives are applied in some of the references papers. Another perspective is the focus  on how CPA and CSR may be complementary, the discussion on mediating factors between CPA, CSR and performance and not least the effect of contextual factors (legal, political, and social).  All these dimensions are in differing ways applicable also to public agencies

Therefore, for me this article was very helpful – and it gives me a ton of new articles to look further into.