A Guide to the Future of Strategy?: The History of Long Range Planning

At forty years old, Long Range Planning is the world's longest running academic journal devoted to strategic management. It is also unique among strategy journals in its editorial policy of spanning practical and academic concerns. As such, its archive provides an excellent guide to the consistent themes, fads and trends in the field's development. This article utilizes a number of methods, including the text data-mining tool Leximancer, to examine the themes and concerns of all 2366 LRP articles published by the end of 2006. Based on this survey, we outline strategic management's fundamental themes, identify those that may once have been regarded as fundamental but are no longer, and point to the issues that have emerged to become imperatives in strategy over the past decade, to question the conventional view about the ‘decline’ of planning. Based on our analysis of the changing focus of authors' concerns over time, we identify five emerging themes that we suggest may shape strategy over the next ten years.