On Application of Abductive Reasoning for Strategic Cases Solution
On Application of Abductive Reasoning for Strategic Cases Solution

Author(s): Martin Cenek
Subject(s): Business Economy / Management, Methodology and research technology
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: Strategic management; abductive reasoning; inference; logic; pragmatism;
Summary/Abstract: In corporate strategic management, the main value is knowing what, how, and when other players, who compete for a larger market share or better relationships with stakeholders or the company, are planning to do; this means solving strategic cases. The aim of this paper is to propose a procedure for solving strategic cases in the form of systematic rational inference of current and future moves of strategically relevant subjects in the form of a reconstruction of causal chains based on evaluation of facts and experimentation. The methodology proposed here is a part of a new method of corporate strategic management using a stakeholder approach based on game theory (which is being developed at the Faculty of Economics and Administration of Masaryk University) and use of abductive reasoning and Charles Sanders Peirce’s trichotomy of methods. Solvers of strategic cases find themselves in situations which need to be clarified, while only possessing partial information from the whole chain of events. It is necessary to widen our knowledge through inference to include an explanation of how the situation happened and a prediction of future events, which provide the desired focus of strategic management on the future.

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