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It is a characteristic of the IMP approach in studying business markets that the emphasis is placed upon rich description and efforts to understand the underlying processes behind interaction between organizations in networks, rather than on the formulation of managerial checklists and decision rules. For this reason, while IMP scholars have made some interesting and profound contributions to the explicit literature on management strategy, the overall contribution of the IMP approach to the strategy literature has been fairly slim. The purpose of this paper is to compare the IMP approach with five important schools of thought in strategy, with the aims of establishing what areas of agreement and disagreement exist and identifying whether the IMP approach can yield unique insights into strategy, strategizing, and the strategy process. We compare and contrast the IMP approach with, in turn, the rational planning …