Exploring Parenting Advantage

Abstract

The concept of parenting advantage offers a clear framework and guiding principle for corporate-level decision-making, including corporate portfolio management and corporate organization. After its introduction in the mid-1990s, the concept was quickly adopted by many standard textbooks on strategic management and became an integral element of the curriculum at most business schools. In this paper, we examine the reverberation of the parenting advantage concept by performing a systematic analysis of the existing literature, including a classification of the relevant publications and a detailed discussion of the key contributions in noted strategic management journals. Our analysis reveals that the concept was well received and was broadly applied to corporate functions, corporate tasks, specific industries, and business environments in qualitative studies. In contrast, we have not found any studies that empirically analyze the impact of the parenting advantage concept on corporate-level decision-making or any conceptual publications which transfer the concept into an instrument for managing the corporate portfolio. We conclude by drafting a future research agenda for the advancement of parenting advantage as an effective concept for corporate-level strategy.