A Study of Industry Evolution in the Face of Major Environmental Disturbances: Group and Firm Strategic Behaviour of Spanish Banks, 1983–1997*

This paper examines the story of the evolution of a specific industry through the application of dynamic strategic group analysis. In particular, we analyse the relationship between major environmental disturbances and changes that have occurred over time in the competitive structure of the industry regarding two closely related central questions. First, the way in which these environmental transformations have influenced group patterns and stability, and second, the way in which such environmental disturbances has affected the strategic positioning of individual firms. We resort to alternative theoretical perspectives in an attempt to answer both questions. The empirical setting is the population of Spanish banks over the period 1983–1997. We make use of a new grouping algorithm – the Model‐based Clustering or MCLUST – which may be enormously fruitful in future empirical works on strategic groups. This method allows researchers to obtain the optimal number of groupings over time in a much more objective way than the cluster techniques used until now. Compared to previous dynamic studies that only consider the largest firms, our research illustrates how a richer analysis of an industry dynamics can be obtained by using a dynamic analysis of strategic groups. Our results show that while there have been no industry‐wide identical groupings year to year, there is an important strategic stability at group and firm‐level punctuated by a high degree of strategic instability at times of major environmental disturbances.