Strategy in transition: evolving beyond competitive advantage

This study revisits a central assumption in strategic management: that the primary purpose of strategy is to generate competitive advantage. It asks whether competitive advantage remains an adequate organising principle for evaluating strategic outcomes in increasingly networked organisational environments. Combining bibliometric analysis with conceptual development, the study examines the evolution of strategy and competitive advantage discourse over more than five decades of scholarship. Using a Web of Science dataset of over 4,000 peer-reviewed articles published between 1970 and 2025, the analysis traces the co-citation and keyword networks structuring the field. The findings show that although competitive advantage remains the dominant organising construct in strategy research, the surrounding conceptual environment has expanded to include collaboration, ecosystems, sustainability, and digital transformation. To address the limitations of a binary success-failure logic, the study introduces a matrix of strategic consequentiality and the concept of endogenous strategic liability, extending strategy-as-practice debates on the broader consequences produced through strategising.