Microfoundations in Strategy: Content, Current Status, and Future Prospects

Microfoundations have been one of the key themes in strategy research over the last decade or so. Fundamentally, microfoundations seek to understand collective (e.g., firm)-level constructs in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. This chapter briefly discusses the nature of microfoundations, provides an exposition of the microfoundational currents in contemporary strategy thinking, and discusses the key challenges that need to be addressed to advance microfoundational research. Chief among these challenges are the development and application of proper empirical methods and developing models of decision-making that are particularly relevant in a strategy context. The latter task involves going beyond expected utility or bounded rationality models and developing models that can address genuine (“deep”) uncertainty.