STRATEGY MAKING AS ITERATED PROCESSES OF RESOURCE-ALLOCATION

Capitalizing on the Bower-Burgelman process model of strategy making i n a large, complex organization, we investigate the multilevel manager ial activities that lead firms facing similar new business opportuniti es to respond with different strategic commitments. Our field-based da ta provide evidence on (1) the role of 'corporate contexts' that refle cts top managers' crude strategic intent in shaping strategic initiati ves of business-unit managers; (2) the critical influence of early bus iness development results on increasing or decreasing middle managers' enthusiasm to the new businesses and top managers' confidence in thes e middle managers in a resource allocation; (3) the escalation or dees calation of a firm's strategic commitment to the new businesses as a c onsequence of iterations of resource allocation. We conclude that it i s useful to conceptualize strategy making in a large, complex firm as an iterated process of resource allocation.