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Dynamic capabilities in the dock: A case of reification?

In his award-winning So!apbox essay, Donald Hambrick observed that the strategic management field ‘is rapidly being pulled apart by centrifugal forces. Like a supernova that once packed a wallop, our energy is now dissipating and we are quickly growing cold’ (2004: 91), and included dynamic capabilities as one of the constructs that appeared to be most detrimental to the field’s stability. At first sight, as scholars interested in dynamic capabilities, we conceded that Hambrick appeared to be right. Navigating the literature we encountered a plethora of dynamic capability definitions, a countless number of capability types (e.g. R&D, marketing, etc.) labelled as ‘dynamic’ and a variety of formulaic expressions under the generic umbrella of ‘to adapt and change firms need dynamic capabilities’. Yet, after nearly two decades, a rising number of over 100 articles, special issues and conference presentations (Di Stefano et al., 2010) seem to suggest that dynamic capabilities were, instead, one of the centripetal forces that helped keep the field together. So we were faced with a puzzle: were dynamic capabilities the last flash of the dying supernova, or could they rather save strategic management from its anticipated self-destruction? More recently, dynamic capability research appears to have become an academic conversation polarized between equally passionate critics and supporters. Perhaps a paramount example is the exchange between Arend and Bromiley (A&B) and Helfat and Peteraf (H&P) on the future of dynamic capabilities published in Strategic Organization in 2009: whereas A&B suggested that the dynamic capability construct should be abandoned due to its weak theoretical foundations and inconsistencies, H&P called for further developmental efforts given the infancy of the field and its growing relevance. Not surprisingly, this paradigmatic match between advocates of rigour and defendants of relevance (Hirsch and Levin, 19991) has regularly appeared in Strategic Organization’s2 ‘Most-Read’ rankings, together with Hambrick’s (2004) call for the consolidation of strategic management. How to solve this dilemma, then: should we discard dynamic capabilities or persist with them? In the face of the possibility of either the demise of strategic management (Hambrick, 2004) or the discovery of its ‘Holy Grail’ (H&P, 2009: 99), we decided to let the evidence speak for itself. In this essay, we intervene in the debate between A&B and H&P to propose that a specific developmental process of conceptual and empirical work might explain their different assessment of dynamic capabilities. A remarkable number3 of prior reviews on dynamic capabilities have focused on conceptual inconsistencies and contradictions (e.g. Barreto, 2010), but have not taken fully into account the effects of a process which often leads researchers to cease ‘to specify the assumptions that underlie the concept or construct and treat it like a general-purpose solution to an increasing 457977 SOQ10410.1177/1476127012457977Strategic OrganizationGiudici and Reinmoeller 2012