Pettigrew has published many academic papers and books that consider the human, political, and social aspects of organisations and their strategies in contrast to the purely economic view in which the main unit of analysis is the firm or industry as typified by Michael Porter.
[1] Just before leaving Corby Grammar School, he joined a Brathay Exploration Group funded by the BBC and the Royal Geographical Society to Uganda, where he and 12 other boys worked with local archaeologists and social anthropologists.
Yet, the author artfully manages to combine the skills of business historian, methodological critic, and pragmatic counselor to produce a cutting-edge work that should be read by everyone who has an interest in organizational development."
He recalls how when he made his "way across then what was a fairly rickety (and in places non-existent) bridge from sociology by way of organisation strategy" such a view was "an unusual thing" since at the time "those with backgrounds in industrial economics ruled the roost" complete with their "overuse of simple distinctions such as 'strategy formulation' and 'strategy implementation' and 'strategy content' and 'strategy process' research.
He determines three benefits of such a longitudinal study: He claims that "most social scientists do not appear to give much time to time" and that, as a result, much of their work is an "exercise in comparative statics" and therefore recommends strategy researchers follow the approach of historians to "reconstruct past contexts, processes, and decisions" in order to discover patterns, find underlying mechanisms and triggers, and combine inductive search with deductive reason.