Concluding Remarks on Business Strategy: Insights & Implications from a Textual Analysis

Organizations use strategy as a means of adding coherence and direction to the actions of those under their employ. As a theory and praxis, business strategy is sufficiently established to be considered common knowledge if not close to the core of its operational ideology. Whereas strategy is well established as a focus of organizational reality, there is benefit from interrogating its framing in academic research. This study is a mixed-methods, thematic, textual analysis of an author-created corpus comprised of the conclusion sections from the top 50 most-relevant, academic papers identified using the keyword phrase business strategy. This corpus provided a basis for generating insights as to how business strategy has been “concluded” within organizational contexts. Words of merit, bigrams of merit, and AFINN-based sentiment scores were generated in RStudio. Among the results, the words digital, future, and AI, and the bigram phrases digital transformation, digital strategies, and innovative activities, stood out as key topics of strategic focus. Five themes were identified at both the word and bigram level of analysis: a) business strategy, b) research focus, c) organization, d) advancement, and e) competitive edge. A sixth theme, media, was identified at the bigram level. The results suggest a statistically significant, positive sentiment (t (49) = 14.785, p