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Managerial cognition is a fundamental area informing all sub-fields in strategy, and therefore, a systematic review of the methodological choices of premier strategy publications aids cognition researchers in choosing methods. However, past studies have given little attention to the methods recently published in premier journals. This chapter both illustrates a common cognitive method – content analysis – and uses it to analyze the methodological content of 573 publications from two prominent management journals. Our findings provide cognition scholars with useful information about current methodological standards. Our findings also will help students choose methods courses and will spark a healthy debate about methodological expectations.

The role and contributions of blue and gray collar employees in strategy making in practice are generally ignored, and left out of scientific inquiry. However, the authors argue that they are “hidden actors” in the strategy making process, and “silent heroes” of the strategy. Their participative role is generally seen limited to operational phases of strategy. Nevertheless, recent literatures have fruitful implications on blue and gray collars workers’ contributions in formulation phase. Upper echelon (Hambrick, 1987; Hambrick & Mason, 1984) and strategy as practice (SAP) literatures (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009; Whittington, 2006) are suggested to be closely scrutinized since the former has incorporated the middle- and low-level teams of management in the explanation (Carpenter, Geletkancz, & Sanders, 2004), and the latter takes “practice” as a prominent research perspective, and thus enable us to approach strategy phenomena from a wider context of practitioners, practices, and praxis (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007; Jarzabkowski & Wilson, 2002). Overall, this chapter suggests that future studies could question the hidden assumptions behind strategy approaches to trace the assumed image and role of blue and gray collars in strategy making, and go further to integrate their deserved role in strategy process, content, context, and cognition.

This study analyses and presents the main differences that exist in the quality of management as practised by Cooperative and Non-Cooperative companies in the Basque Country within the industrial and company services sectors. The results obtained suggest that the quality level of cooperative company management is higher than that shown in the non-cooperative sector, the principal differences in quality of management being related to aspects where the social commitment of a company is reflected. These results prove to be more conclusive within the subgroup of cooperatives that are incorporated within the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC).

This article explores the effect of technological similarity in acquisitions on invention quantity and quality. In doing so, we confirm previous findings in the literature suggesting that technological similarity exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with innovative output and a negative relationship with average invention quality. However, we identify the nature of the technology as an important moderating factor for both relationships. We distinguish between two types of technologies, complex and discrete, and suggest that at high levels of technological similarity, invention quantity and average quality increase more in complex technology industries as compared to discrete technology industries. These effects are attributed to innovation cumulativeness and the interdependencies developed between patent rights in complex technology settings. A study of acquisition and patenting activity in two industries over a sixteen-year period provides empirical support to our claims.