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The purpose of this paper is to find out the most influential journals, articles, authors and the subject areas where Miles and Snow typology is used. The study identifies the opportunities for future research as well.

Review is based on 196 journal articles selected through a systematic and rigorous search process from the four databases: ProQuest, Business Source Complete, Willy and Science Direct. Total Citation, threshold citations, fractional citation and citation per year techniques are used for analyses.

Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), Academy of Management Journal (AMJ) and Journal of Marketing (JOM) are the most influential Journals. The most influential and prolific articles on the subject are from Hambrick (1983), Conant et al. (1990), Doty et al. (1993), Sabherwal et al. (2001), Desarbo et al. (2005) and Fiss (2011). Management, strategic management and marketing are the most studied subject areas.

Although there have been many reviews of the literature on this typology, the systematic review on Miles and Snow typology to find out the most influential journals, authors, articles and subject area has not been done before.

To analyze the relationship between an organization's generic strategy and its longevity.

Companies in the USA, comic book industry were classified in the Miles and Snow generic strategic types. An ANOVA test was then used to determine the relationship between these strategic types and organizational longevity (time from market entry to exit).

Results indicate a significant link between strategic type and longevity. Organizational strategy accounts for 35 percent of the variance in longevity. Companies with a defender strategy had the greatest longevity, and prospectors had the shortest.

The study is conducted in only one industry which may limit its generalizability.

This study provides insights into the role of organizational strategy on longevity, and can be used for strategic decision‐making as well as investment decisions.

This study is the first to link the Miles and Snow typology to organizational longevity. It also provides insights into the role of strategy in creative and knowledge‐based organizations.

State-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) goals are perceived as two-sided blades, providing goods or services to the public on one side and escalating the government’s wealth on the other side. Treating the SOEs, government encounters the problem of injection strategy or privatize them. At the same time, managers have the option to formulate the SOEs strategy to boost performance. By using Miles and Snow’s typology strategy and the above factors, this paper investigates those impacts on Indonesia’s SOEs’ performance. This study aims to propose strategic typology as the main predictor with other variables such as the size, ownership structure, market competitiveness and capital subsidy on SOEs.

The study uses archived SOEs’ financial data from 2014 to 2018 to predict the financial performance using ordinal logistic regression analysis. The additional factors, such as firm size, ownership structure, market concentration and capital subsidy, are incorporated.

The result demonstrates that SOEs strategic typology, market concentration, size, ownership structure and capital subsidy significantly affect Indonesia’s SOEs’ performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first elaborating government policies for SOEs, such as capital subsidy and state ownership, on the perspective of Miles and Snow’s strategy-performance relationship. Correspondingly, the paper contributes to examine the Indonesian characteristic SOE type with the performance. No single study has previously explored this relationship in the context of SOE in Indonesia.

The purpose of this paper is to take a contingency theory approach to examine how performance is affected by the relationships between the Miles & Snow strategic groupings and a variety of marketing strategy concepts, including a firm's service focus, service growth, market coverage, marketing initiative, market growth, Porter strategy, and market orientation.

Data for the study were gathered from a statewide survey among 125 chief executives of credit unions belonging to the Florida Credit Union League (FCUL). ROA figures were derived from government-mandated accounting reports in the state of Florida. ANOVA and correlation analysis were employed to analyze data.

This study shows that firms that match an aggressive Miles and Snow profile with a more aggressive approach to seven other strategy dimensions often enjoy higher market share relative to credit unions characterized by a different alignment of the various aspects of marketing strategy. The results also suggest that achieving such a fit is not relevant to maximizing a firm's ROA.

The research sample was biased toward medium to larger firms that may possess strategic resources superior to those of the smaller firms in the industry. Also, credit unions may tend to have somewhat less aggressive profit objectives compared to other institutions in the banking industry.

The findings outline to financial services executives the benefits of considering all dimensions of corporate strategy simultaneously, rather than one at a time.

The paper illustrates how aligning certain aspects of marketing strategy can boost particular performance indicators and provides insight as to what the most appropriate alignments are depending on the circumstances.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategy-performance relationship in a multi-industry setting for joint stock firms operating in Pakistan using Miles and Snow typology. The impact of firm size and industry on performance along with strategy is also investigated. The empirical research evidence on strategy-performance relationship for Miles and Snow typology is updated as well.

Scoring methodology is applied for identification of strategic types, including the reactor strategy. The consistency of the firms over time is also checked. Seven year archived financial data of 320 Pakistani joint stock firms from 12 industries are used for analysis. Descriptive statistics and analysis of variance is used for analysis.

Hybrid strategies are practiced by firms rather than pure strategies. The distribution of strategic types is uneven. There are mixed results for performance difference among strategic types for different industries and firm size. Defending and analyzing strategies are better than the prospecting strategies. Reactors performed better in some industries as well.

Proposed scoring methodology can be applied to identify all strategic types including reactors in the longitudinal studies. This can be replicated for other typologies or strategic group classifications. The process for identification of reactor strategy through a consistency check is a unique contribution to the literature, especially when archived financial data are used.

Our paper contrasts and validates the relevance of Miles and Snow (1978) and Robinson and Pearce (1988) strategic models, and their causal relationships with performance. The empirical study was carried out on a sample of 189 enterprises from the Spanish hospitality sector. The results confirm the relevance of both models, and the importance of the different strategies as a source to explain performance. The analysis uses structural equation models and variance analysis (ANOVA) methodologies.

To present the main findings of a study conducted in manufacturing firms in the UK to determine the applicability of generic strategies to small and medium sized firms (SMEs).

The Miles and Snow strategic orientation typology was used to examine the emphasis on the factors used to craft strategy and its subsequent impact on organizational performance. The study examined its applicability in two contrasting sectors: engineering and electronics.

Based on the responses obtained from 194 SMEs, the findings indicate that the main strategic orientation types present in this study are associated with different environment types; prospectors tend to perceive their environment as “dynamic” whereas defenders perceive their environment as “stable”. Distinct differences were found in relation to the emphasis of both orientation types on leadership, culture, strategy, and performance outcomes. Finally, the findings indicate that “prospectors” perform better than “defenders” and are twice as likely to be high performing. Smaller firms are more likely to be “prospectors” compared with firms employing over 100 staff.

The study confirms the applicability of the Miles and Snow typology to SMEs – a domain neglected in previous studies. The findings also depict the association between the attributes of the operating environment, organizational culture, leadership and strategy on both defenders and prospectors and the path to either high or low performance.

Previous studies have shown that small- and medium-sized manufacturing firms make a substantial contribution to national economies in terms of job and wealth creation (Daly & McCann, 1992; Schreyer, 1996). However, many smaller firms face unprecedented change arising from the increasingly competitive and changing environment in which they operate (Coopers and Lybrand, 1997; D’Aveni, 1994). Much of this competition often emanates from larger firms with greater resource capabilities. Firms of all sizes are increasingly turning to strategy as a means of achieving competitive advantage. Strategy research is mainly directed towards examining why firms differ in performance (Barnett & Burgelman, 1996; Schendel, 1996). Strategy has ‘undergone, in the 1990s, a major shift in focus regarding the sources of sustainable competitive advantage: from industry to firm specific effects’ (Spanos & Lioukas, 2001). This involves more than strategy formulation — it is about making choices based on competing alternatives and implementing the chosen direction using the organisational processes and systems (Shaw, Gupta, & Delery, 2002; Stopford, 2001). Other writers, such as Pettigrew and Fenton (2000), acknowledge that ‘soft’ aspects are an integral part of the evolutionary nature of strategy, and include cultural influences (Chakravarthy & Doz, 1992) and leadership (McNulty & Pettigrew, 1999).

Strategic typologies are applied to investigate strategy–performance relationship. The typology of Miles and Snow (1978) is one of them, but the methodology applied for identification of strategic types for archival financial data is questionable on three grounds: no standard procedure for categorization of strategic types; identification of reactor strategy is always ignored; and the behavior of firms’ strategic orientation over time is under-researched. Besides, the assumptions that viable strategies are expected to perform equally well, outperform reactors and distributed evenly are not overwhelmingly supported. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

A refined scoring methodology is developed and used for identification of all strategic types, including reactors, by investigating the consistency of the firms over time. Empirical analysis using seven years of data of 121 joint stock firms of the textile sector in Pakistan is performed to test the assumptions regarding presence, distribution and performance of strategic types.

There is significant difference in the distribution of the strategic types. Pure defenders and pure prospectors are non-existing, whereas a reasonable number of reactors are present. Overall difference in performance among strategies is generally insignificant and viable strategies outperformed reactors. The effect of size on performance is also insignificant. However, there is variation in performance of strategies with variation in size. Strategy is the better predictor of performance than size.

The transition of strategic stance of the firms over time and the identification of reactor strategy from archived financial data are the important outcomes of the proposed methodology. The proposed methodology can be used for any longitudinal study for identification of all possible strategic types and can also be used for any other typological research.

The purpose of this paper is to link firms’ strategic archetypes as formulated by Miles and Snow (1978) to the more recent literature on organizational ambidexterity. Examining these obvious linkages, the paper also addresses how these firms address their entrepreneurial, engineering and administrative problem domains in relationship with the firm’s strategic archetype.

Data were collected from 503 firms across the US. Measures previously validated were used to collect information related to the strategic archetype as well as the three problem domains. Multiple discriminant and regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Most of the hypotheses relating the entrepreneurial (exploration and exploitation), engineering (radical and incremental innovation) and administrative problem (adaptation and alignment) to the four strategic archetypes (defender, prospector, analyzer and reactor) were supported. Additionally, the authors found that the firms that had the closest alignment along the three problem domains outperformed the other firms.

Although the Miles and Snow typology has received considerable research attention, the obvious links with more contemporary research on organizational ambidexterity has been neglected. Through this integration, with more recent key strategic management concepts, this paper shows the utility and current relevance of the Miles and Snow archetypes.