Revisiting the World Management Survey in Strategy: Applications to Theory and Replication

The academic field of strategy has a strong history of developing theories and frameworks to explain real-world phenomena but a relatively younger empirical literature testing these theories. Partly because of the nature of questions in strategic management, scholars have often relied on collecting their own data or using specialized, and often expensive, proprietary data. This limits the possibility of replication exercises, which are a key step to refining and reinforcing the theories that are most supported in practice. To support this effort, we revisit the World Management Survey: a crosscountry, crossindustry survey data set with over 20,000 observations at the establishment level that is collected through a rigorous and well-documented process and made free and accessible to researchers. Although it is not without influence in the strategy literature, we propose that it is underused and that better exposure to these data’s offerings has the potential to add significant value to the field.