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Biography

Charles Booth has been a senior lecturer in Strategic Management at Bristol Business School since 1994. Prior to that he was an ESRC Management Teaching Fellow, also at Bristol. Before taking up his fellowship he worked in local government for ten years, initially in a service delivery role and latterly with responsibilities for policy development in the areas of housing and economic development. He has an MA in Business and Public Sector Strategy from Kingston Polytechnic and is currently completing a PhD, which is an investigation into networks and partnerships in UK local governance.

His main teaching and research interests are in strategic management and the management of change. He is also interested in critical approaches to management and in the history and philosophy of management and organization theory. He set up and runs two Web mailing lists (critical-management and management-history) and he is an Associate Editor of an electronic journal in the field of management and organization theory, the Electronic Journal of Radical Organisation Theory.

Why Use the Web to Study Strategy?

Strategic management is a complex and multifaceted subject. It overlaps with a number of other subjects in management and organisation theory and practice. In so far as a precise definition of the strategic management field can be given, it is concerned with the ways in which organisations relate to their political, ecological, economic, social and technological environment, to their competitive markets, and to their many stakeholders. A common distinction is made between strategy process (how strategies are developed), strategy content (what strategies are developed) and strategy context (why strategies are developed).

One of the reasons that strategic management is so complex is that organisations are operating in increasingly complex and dynamic environments. Understanding the nature of these environments and tracking changes within them are crucial tasks that managers face. In order to do so effectively, they need to be able to manage information. This involves both obtaining information and making sense of it. The Web is a very rich source of information, although much of it may be flawed: irrelevant, inaccurate, out of date, biased, and so on. Using the Web as an information source therefore carries dangers as well as opportunities. One of the aims of this chapter is to point students towards reasonably reliable sources of information.

Using the Web has many benefits for students of management. It is an increasingly fertile source of academic as well as practical material. Management academics are beginning to use the medium to exchange and disseminate their ideas. Business schools, libraries, publishers and scholarly societies, as well as individual academics, are creating Web sites which are increasingly useful to business and management students at all levels. This chapter aims to direct students toward useful sources of academic and theoretical material available on the Web.

The third aim of this chapter is to help students make a start in exploring Web sites for strategic management. The Web is a highly dynamic phenomenon: it grows and changes daily. No guide could ever hope to be fully comprehensive in these circumstances. By visiting the sites in this chapter, exploring them, and following links to other sites of interest, students will rapidly develop their own sense of what is available, useful, interesting and important.

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