Apologies for the duplicate or cross-postings:
The question -- bus policy or strategy (how about business models?) -- is timeily with the pubication of these two articles by Hambrick et al, and Nag, et al (cited in full below) that provide slices of what Kuhn referred to in his foundational work on the philosophy of science. I am old enough to remember (and have!) those blue Irvwin tomes on strategy, though "way back then" (before Facebook) strategy was a combination of what to do, and how to do it, with an emphasis on what might be feasible. At my own school (admittedly chiilled out much of time due to weather), we changed our core Business Policy course to something more descriptive - business, corporate, and global strategy.
Hambrick, D.C. and Chen, M-J, "New Academic Fields as Admittance-Seeking Social Movements: The Case of Strategic Management," Academy of Management Review.
Nag, R., Hambrick, D.C., and Chen,M-J, "What Is Strategic Management, Really? Inductive Derivation of a Consensus Definition of the Field," Strategic Management Journal.
While I'm not sure that strategy is "there" yet, after all many of us view strategy as distinctive in it focus on firm performance, but less distincitve in terms of one or few dominant theories. The fact that it is contested space says much about its centrality among a number of disciplines, for ideological or positioning purposes. Entrepreneurship is the most recent field to be undergoing this self-flaggratoin, and is at least at a similar fork in the road that strategy found itself several years back. I am hopeful, given the incredible practical imporance of e-ship research questions (sometime theoretically motivated, but many times motivated by curiuosity about an important and practical problem}.
Ultimatlely, the prime task of a researcher and teacher is to aggregrate similar constructs, and determine when novel constructs deserve their own space. With my classes (this is the teaching side speaking), I ask students to be be cynical or at least critical of any business situation that does not connect the dots between strategy and action. It can be called business policy (strategy + some aspect of execution) or business models (sounds good to VCs), but ultimately both have to clearly define their bets in terms of competitve arenas, differentiators, vehicles (like organic vs. alliance or acqusition), staging and pacing (the path to possible succees), and economic logic -- I.e. how does all this stuff enventually make money.
As a field, I think that strategy researchers agres on my last paragraph (if not, I will hear from you). That is good news because, once we get past the sematics (a non-trivial but addressible issue), we are in good shape to help students diagnose whether their focal firm has a good strategy, why its bad, why its implementation is bad, and what the firm should try to do to make the startegies' economic logic click! (sound effect here -- k-ching, k-ching, K-CHING).
Warm regards, Mason
(608)262-9449
mcarpenter@bus.wisc.edu