• be familiar with and be able to analyze, compare and critically reflect upon the concepts, theories and perspectives relating to strategy that have been presented and discussed during the course
• understand and be able to explain and reflect upon strategy in a broader, cultural historical perspective
• be able to put the concepts, theories and perspectives of the course to empirical use in an analysis within a strategic horizon
• exemplify concepts and theories by relating them to present day challenges met by contemporary organizations

The course reflects upon the challenges in the short history of business strategy, which takes its beginning in the 1960s, and commences by looking at the role of the organizational environment. However, the course will also go beyond business strategy, and through work with literature and philosophy, we will sketch a broader history of strategy as strategic sight. We start with the structure of the industry within which a firm operates and investigate its implications for the possible performance of a firm and the strategic directions necessary to attain abnormal returns. Despite the appeal of rational, systematic, and scientifically enhanced analysis of the organizational environment and its internal resource base in order to compute ideal courses of action (as is typical for a top-down planning approach to strategy, for instance), many questions  remain. In the course, we will therefore look at both the more rational (and often predominantly North- American approaches) to marshalling the business environment, as well as the more critical (and often more European) approaches that have come to understand strategy from sociological, philosophical, critical or ecological perspectives. We also question the notion of ‘change’ as an opposition to ‘stability’ and investigate how ‘strategy’ can be initiated in light of continuous changes, complex and contingent environments and the implications of organizational cultures and habitualized work routines which may resist change attempts initiated by managers. We start from the more formal investigation of the strategic context and the possibilities for strategic analysis and control. We then move towards the ‘inside’ of the firm, where we discuss resource bases, competences and capabilities of the firm. From here, we move on to reflect on how strategy practice enables the strategist to distinguish a limited range of phenomenon from their undifferentiated surroundings through strategic sight.