Strategic Issue Management as a Process: A Review of the Strategic Issue Categorization Literature

Organizations regularly experience strategic issues through abrupt and unforeseen changes within their business environments. Dealing with such strategic issues is critical for firms to ensure long-term survival and sustainable growth. Throughout past decades, management scholars have produced a steady output of insights on the antecedents, processes and consequences of the entire strategic issue management process, as well as the theoretical lenses with which to analyze them. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the state of knowledge in this field by organizing the existing literature into an integrative and comprehensive framework. We find that scholars within this stream of research have thus far primarily focused on the analysis of individual isolated strategic issues, employing an event-based perspective on strategic issue categorization. These findings oppose 1) practical evidence suggesting a long-term effect of strategic issues and their categorization on organizations and 2) findings from related research streams suggesting that a continuous confrontation of employees with threats leads to a decrease of organizational energy, which negatively affects an organization. Through our structured analysis, we have also identified several alleys for fruitful future research. Expanding research efforts by taking a process perspective to strategic issue management and incorporating past categorization behavior will assist scholars to achieve a better understanding of strategic issue management.