UC Berkeley

Purpose The study reconstructs the historical evolution of research on dynamic capabilities (DCs), perhaps the most influential framework in contemporary strategic management for explaining how firms achieve and sustain competitive advantage. By examining its development over nearly three decades, the study aims to explain how recurring theoretical and practical challenges shaped the framework’s evolution and growing centrality within strategic-management research. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a Historical Literature Review of 140 articles published between 1997 and 2026 in leading management and organization journals. The analysis combines systematic corpus construction, bibliometric structuring, reflexive thematic analysis and historical periodization to reconstruct the field’s evolution and identify major turning points. Findings DCs research evolved through five historical phases. Each phase emerged from the interaction between shifts in strategic-management thinking, changes in firms’ competitive environments, and unresolved questions within the DCs literature itself. Across these phases, the framework progressively expanded from an emphasis on resource reconfiguration toward a broader conception of strategic orchestration encompassing managerial capabilities, organizational renewal, ecosystem governance and environmental shaping. As this expansion unfolded, five persistent tensions became increasingly central to understanding how DCs operate: stability versus flexibility, organizational mechanisms versus managerial agency, microfoundations versus contingency, architectural integration versus causal ambiguity, and adaptation versus shaping. Rather than being resolved, these tensions were repeatedly reframed as the framework evolved across new theoretical and empirical domains. Originality/value This study moves beyond existing reviews that primarily synthesize contemporary perspectives on DCs. By adopting a historical lens, it explains how the framework evolved, why its core debates emerged, and how they became constitutive of its current form. Building on this reconstruction, the study develops an integrative framework that reconceptualizes dynamic capabilities as mechanisms of strategic orchestration through which firms continuously navigate and rebalance persistent strategic tensions while pursuing competitive advantage under conditions of ongoing change.