CHAPTER ONE

 INTRODUCTION

    1.1     Background of the Study

Strategic management is a disciplined approach that utilizes the principles and process of management to identify the corporate objective or mission of any business. It determines an appropriate target to satisfy the objective, recognize existing opportunities and constraints in the environment, and device a rational practical way by which an objective can be achieved. Strategic management is a technique used by organizations to create favorable future as well as help helping them to prosper. The key to strategic management is to understand that people communicating and working together will create this future (Harfield, 1998). 

In other words, strategic management emanates from both the process and philosophy for determining and controlling the organizational relationship in its dynamic environment. As a process, it attempts to define approaches and techniques aimed at assisting the management in adapting to the dynamics of today, through the use of objectives and strategies. Strategic management endeavours to achieve effective and efficient programs to accomplish the organization’s mission. As a philosophy, it changes how the manager looks at competitors, customers, markets and even the organization itself. Its primary objective is to stimulate management’s awareness of the strategic implication of environmental events and internal decision. Contemporary organizations see strategic management to be concerned primarily with actions organizations take to achieve competitive advantage and create value for the organization and stakeholders (Porter, 1981).

Lawrence and William (1988) define strategic management as a stream of decisions and actions, which lead to the development of an effective strategy or strategies to help achieve corporate objectives. The strategic management process is the way in which strategists determine objectives and make strategic decisions. Strategic management’s main focus is the achievement of organizational goals taking into consideration the internal and external environmental factors.

Porter (1985) argues that the essence of formulating comprehensive strategy is relating a company to its environment. Strategic management permits the systematic management of change. It enables organization to purposefully mobilize resources towards a desired future.

Chandler (1962) posits that any effective successful strategy is dependent on structure, thus to achieve any effective economic performance the organization needs to alter its structure. Strategic management is congruent with the quality movement's emphasis on continuous improvement. Indeed, the emphasis on anticipating the needs of stakeholders is a critical component of external analysis. 

Shrivastava (1986) eulogizes better on the meaning of strategic field using five operational criteria, derived from Giddens (1979). These indicate its ideological nature: the factual under-determination of action norms; universalization of sectional interests; denial of conflict and contradiction; normative idealization of sectional goals; and the naturalization of the status quo. Shrivastava concluded that strategic management was undeniably ideological, and that strategic discourse helped legitimize existing power structures and resource inequalities. Drawing from the above Shrivastava (1986) sought emancipation in the 'acquisition of communicative competence by all subjects that allows them to participate in discourse aimed at liberation from constraints on interaction'. He also called on researchers 'to generate less ideologically value-laden and more universal knowledge about strategic management of organizations'.

Knights and Morgan (1991) opine that corporate strategy is a set of discourses and practices which transform managers and employees alike into subjects who secure their sense of purpose and reality by formulating, evaluating and conducting strategy'. Managers cannot stand outside of ideology to impose their strategies on unwitting workers. Rather, they too are entangled in discursive webs. Strategy constructs a myth of commonality of organizational purpose by positing lofty and unattainable aspirations (Harfield, 1998). While projecting solidarity of purpose and the universality of the interests of senior managers and stockholders, the discourse of strategy legitimates organizational hierarchy with differential influence and rewards. The importance attached to strategy also implies that employees who work outside of what is identified as the strategic core of an organization make a lesser contribution and therefore cannot be expected to participate, even marginally, in decisions for which others are responsible. It also provides a rationale for differentiating the pay and conditions of 'core' and 'peripheral' employees. The need to assert the status of an elite group of 'strategic managers' is perhaps particularly acute in advanced economies where manual labour is declining and traditional divisions between task execution and conception are loosened up. From the foregoing we can draw our inference that effective successful strategy is dependent on structure, thus to achieve any effective economic performance the organizations needs to alter its structure. Strategic management is congruent with the quality movement's emphasis on continuous improvement and increase performance of an organization.