When LRP was first published, oil was $3 a barrel, and England held the World Cup: who wouldn't go back to those days, given the chance? Since 1968, the journal's pages have seen the ebb and flow of approaches, methods, tool, fads, cases and analyses, structures and frameworks. The authors plunge into the LRP archive of nearly 2,500 articles, using text-mining software to analyse the appearance of key-words in their titles and abstracts, with the aim of tracing the history of strategic management's core concerns and drawing lessons for its future development.
They note the smooth transition from planning to strategy as the primary term, and find that organisation and process, creativity and innovation, and change have been ever-present.
But the great variety of words is, at last, settling down to a set they feel must define what strategy is fundamentally all about. Noting the move from strategy to strategizing, they propose the advantages of being or becoming strategised as a conceptual stance.
Following their exhaustive tour of the past, and its implications for the present, they identify the ‘centred eclecticism’ signalled by the stabilising of strategy's fundamental terms — together with concerns for the handling of knowledge by the ‘strategist as politician’, an aesthetic care for individualized strategy, a revaluation of forecasting, and an end to the smug dismissal of the past as an inevitably limited and outmoded ‘straw man’ – as offering valid approaches to the future.

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