Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice

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Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice The Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice provides the first comprehensive overview of an emerging and growing stream of research in strategic management. An international team of scholars has been assembled to produce a systematic introduction to the various epistemological, ontological, methodological and theoretical aspects of the Strategy as Practice approach. This perspective explores and explains the contribution that strategizing makes to daily operations at all levels of an organization. Moving away from a disembodied and asocial study of firm assets, technologies and practices, the Strategy as Practice approach breaks down many of the traditional paradigmatic boundaries in strategy to investigate who the strategists are, what strategists do, how they do it and what the consequences or outcomes of their actions are. Including a number of detailed empirical studies, the handbook will be an essential guide for future research in this vibrant field. damon golsorkhi is Assistant Professor of Strategic Management and Sociology at Rouen Business School, France. linda rouleau is Professor in the Department of Management at HEC Montreal, Canada. david seidl is Professor of Organization and Management at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. eero vaara is Professor of Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland and Permanent Visiting Professor at EMLYON Business School, France. He is also Chair of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS).

Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice DAMON GOLSORKHI , LI NDA ROULEAU, DAVI D SEI DL AND EERO VAARA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521517287 © Cambridge University Press 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-78969-4

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-51728-7

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of figures viii List of tables ix List of contributors x Introduction: What is Strategy as Practice? Damon Golsorkhi, Linda Rouleau, David Seidl and Eero Vaara

PA RT I .

1

ONTOLOGICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS

1. Practice in research: phenomenon, perspective and philosophy 23 Wanda J. Orlikowski 2. Epistemological alternatives for researching Strategy as Practice: building and dwelling worldviews 34 Robert Chia and Andreas Rasche 3. Practice, strategy making and intentionality: a Heideggerian onto-epistemology for Strategy as Practice 47 Haridimos Tsoukas 4. Constructivist epistemologies in Strategy as Practice research 63 Simon Grand, Johannes Rüegg-Stürm and Widar von Arx 5. Constructing contribution in ‘Strategy as Practice’ research 79 Karen Golden-Biddle and Jason Azuma 6. The challenge of developing cumulative knowledge about Strategy as Practice 91 Ann Langley

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Contents

PA RT I I . T H E O R E T I C A L D I R E C T I O N S 7. Giddens, structuration theory and Strategy as Practice 109 Richard Whittington 8. An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice 127 Paula Jarzabkowski 9. A Bourdieusian perspective on strategizing 141 Marie-Léandre Gomez 10. A Wittgensteinian perspective on strategizing 155 Saku Mantere 11. A Foucauldian perspective on strategic practice: strategy as the art of (un)folding Florence Allard-Poesi 12. A narrative approach to Strategy as Practice: strategy making from texts and narratives 183 Valérie-Inès de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud

PA RT I I I . M E T H O D O L O G I C A L T R A C K S 13. Broader methods to support new insights into strategizing 201 Anne Sigismund Huff, Anne-Katrin Neyer and Kathrin Möslein 14. Critical discourse analysis as methodology in Strategy as Practice research 217 Eero Vaara 15. Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution Dalvir Samra-Fredericks

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16. Researching strategists and their identity in practice: building ‘close-with’ relationships 243 Phyl Johnson, Julia Balogun and Nic Beech 17. Studying strategizing through narratives of practice 258 Linda Rouleau

168

Contents

PA RT I V.

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A P P L I C AT I O N VA R I AT I O N S

18. Institutional change and strategic agency: an empirical analysis of managers’ experimentation with routines in strategic decision-making 273 Gerry Johnson, Stuart Smith and Brian Codling 19. Unpacking the effectivity paradox of strategy workshops: do strategy workshops produce strategic change? 291 Robert MacIntosh, Donald MacLean and David Seidl 20. Struggling over subjectivity: a critical discourse analysis of strategic development 310 Pikka-Maaria Laine and Eero Vaara 21. Strategizing and history 326 Mona Ericson and Leif Melin Author Index Index

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344

Figures

7.1 Forms of interaction in structuration theory 112 7.2 A structurationist view on technology-in-practice 117 7.3 A structurationist view on organizational practices in a student hall 118 8.1 An activity framework for studying Strategy as Practice questions 130 12.1 Strategy making from texts and narratives 193 13.1 Further explosion of the strategizing agenda 203 13.2 Strengths of different research strategies 205 13.3 Summary of Jarzabkowski and Matthiesen (2007) in a figure adapted from Huff (2009) 213

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14.1 CDA as abduction (modification of a figure presented in Vaara and Tienari, 2004) 224 16.1 Methodological implications 249 17.1 Activities of middle managers in organizational restructuring (underlying types of practical knowledge) 263 18.1 A model of actors’ engagement with institutional change 275 18.2 Episodes observed 276 18.3 Performative modes of improvising old institutional routines 286

Tables

2.1 Contrasting a building and dwelling epistemology 39 3.1 Action, intentionality and strategy making: a Heideggerian framework 58 5.1 Opportunities for contribution in Strategy as Practice research 86 7.1 Giddens in the study of strategy practice 119 12.1 A consumption perspective on strategy formation 194

13.1 Additional explanatory perspectives for understanding strategizing 214 17.1 Narratives of practice according to Balogun et al.’s (2003) criteria 262 19.1 Background data on each organization 293 19.2 Overview of data set 295 19.3 Critical aspects of workshop activity and self-reported outcomes 298

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Contributors

Florence Allard-Poesi is Professor of Strategic Management and Organizational Theory at the University of Evry Val d’Essonne and member of the Institute of Management Research at the University Paris Est. Her research focuses principally on sensemaking in organizations and the role that strategic practices play in this context. She also works on the methodological and epistemological problems that these issues present. Her recent work has been published notably in Organization, and in Les études critiques en management, une perspective française, Golsorkhi, Huault and Leca (eds) (2009). Jason Azuma MPH, is a doctoral student in organizational behaviour at the Boston University Graduate School of Management. As a former healthcare consultant he maintains an interest in the clinical health services and organizational change. Academically, he is working with the concepts of identity work and Strategy as Practice in order to examine how individuals express agency within organizational contexts. Julia Balogun is Sir Roland Smith Chair of Strategic Management and Director of the Strategic Management Centre at Lancaster University Management School. She is also an Advanced Institute of Management Ghoshal Fellow. Her research interests centre on strategy development and strategic change, with a particular interest in how large corporations transform themselves to both retain and regain competitive advantage. She adopts a sociological perspective, focusing on how strategists accomplish their work through, for example, sensemaking and discourse. Her publications include articles in international journals

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such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies and Human Relations. She also sits on several editorial boards, including Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management and Organization Studies. Nic Beech is Professor of Management at the University of St Andrews and is a lead fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management. He is Deputy Director of the Institute for Capitalizing on Creativity and his research is in the social construction of identities, managerial practices and change. He has a particular interest in the organization of music and organizational vitality. His books include Exploring Identity: Concepts and Methods (with A. Pullen and D. Sims), Reflective Learning in Practice (with A. Brockbank and I McGill) and HRM a concise analysis (with E. McKenna). Robert Chia is Emeritus Professor at the University of Aberdeen and a part-time Professor of Management at the University of Strathclyde Business School. He is the author/ editor of three books and a significant number of international journal articles and book chapters in a variety of management sub-fields including: strategic foresight and peripheral awareness; critical cross-cultural studies; the role of management education; and philosophy and organization theory. Some of his most recent publications include: ‘Researching Strategy Practices: A Genealogical Social Theory Perspective’ (Organization Studies 2009, with A. Rasche); ‘Strategy as Practical Coping: A Heideggerian Perspective’ (Organization Studies 2006, with R. Holt); Strategy without Design (Cambridge University Press 2009, with R. Holt).

List of contributors

Brian Codling has a BSc and was awarded his MPhil from Cranfield University where he joined the School of Management as Research Fellow in 1991. Prior to this he was a general manager in the chemical industry. His research interests lay in the area of the effect of culture on the pace of organizational change. He has published in the Academy of Management Review. In semiretirement he is now Chairman of an NGO involved in education and the conservation of rare breed animals. Mona Ericson is Associate Professor at Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. Her research topics are human activity, process and rationality in the fields of strategic change and business growth. Her more recent publications include: ‘As in the Composition of a Fugue: Capturing the Flow of Strategic Business Activities’ (International Journal of Qualitative Methods 2008); ‘Exploring the Future Exploiting the Past’ (Journal of Management History 2006); and Business Growth: Activities, Themes and Voices (2007). Karen Golden-Biddle is Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar in the School of Management at Boston University. In her research she examines how people create change and innovation in and through organizations. Her particular focus is the health sector, where her studies have identified important but overlooked everyday activity necessary to implement new roles and care delivery models that improve the quality and safety of patient care. She also examines how scholars use qualitative data to theorize process phenomena in organizational studies. Recent representative publications include: ‘Negotiating a New Role in a Gendered Order: A Cultural Lens’ (Journal of Negotiation and Conflict Management Research 2009, with T. Reay); ‘Making Doubt Generative: Rethinking the Role of Doubt in the Research Process’ (Organization Science 2008, with K. Locke and M. Feldman); Composing Qualitative Research (2007, with Karen Locke); and ‘Legitimizing a New Role: Small Wins and Micro-processes of

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Change’ (Academy of Management Journal 2006, with T. Reay and K. Germann). Damon Golsorkhi is Assistant Professor in Strategy and Sociology at Rouen Business School and is on the cusp of obtaining his PhD from the Université de Paris Dauphine in France. His research interests are at the juncture of OMT and sociology. More precisely, his research interests focus on Strategy as Practice, power and domination, social change and social movements. With David Courpasson and Jeffrey Sallaz, he is currently editing a volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations on Rethinking Forms of Power in Organizations, Institutions, and Markets. Marie-Léandre Gomez is Assistant Professor at ESSEC Business School in France. Her research interests are on practice-based studies on strategizing and knowing. She has conducted research on strategic planning and controlling practices in large companies and research on strategizing and knowing in the field of haute cuisine. Simon Grand is a researcher and entrepreneur at the University of St Gallen HSG. He is the founder and academic director of RISE Management Research, a research centre studying the strategic entrepreneurship and management of innovation and change, in the areas of software engineering, pharma / life sciences, artificial intelligence, fashion design and banking (see www.rise.ch). He is a founding partner of TATIN Scoping Complexity (see www.tatin.info), an international company of specialists in strategy design and design-based innovation. His research interests are in the areas of entrepreneurial strategizing and organizing, technological innovation and strategic change, as well as the epistemological and theoretical foundation of Strategy as Practice research. Publications include ‘Resource Allocation beyond Firm Boundaries: A Multi-Level Model for Open Source Innovation’ (Long Range Planning 2004, with G. von Krogh, D. Leonard and W. Swap). Anne Sigismund Huff is Permanent Visiting Professor of Strategy and Innovation at the TUM

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List of contributors

Business School in Munich, Germany and an Academic Director of CLIC, the Center for Leading Innovation and Cooperation at HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management. She has previously held positions at the London Business School, Cranfield University and the Universities of Colorado, Illinois and UCLA. Her research interests focus on open innovation, service innovation and strategic change. Recent books include: 2002, Mapping Strategic Knowledge (with Mark Jenkins); When Firms Change Direction (2000, with James O. Huff); Strategic Management (2009); and Designing Research for Publications (2009). Paula Jarzabkowski is Professor of Strategic Management at Aston Business School and an Advanced Institute of Management Ghoshal Fellow. Her research interests focus on the social practices of strategy making between actors at multiple levels, inside and outside the organization, using longitudinal ethnographic methods. Most of her research is conducted in pluralistic contexts such as regulated commercial firms, professional firms and public sector organizations, which are beset by contradictory and competing strategic demands. She publishes on these topics in a number of leading journals, such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies, as well as publishing the first book on Strategy as Practice, Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach (2005). Gerry Johnson is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Lancaster Management School and Senior Fellow of the UK Advanced Institute of Management Research. He received a BA in Social and Physical Anthropology from University College London and his PhD from Aston University. His research interests are in the field of strategic management process and practice. Recent publications have been in the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, the British Journal of Management and the Journal of Management Studies. He is also the co-author of Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources (Cambridge University

Press, 2007 with Ann Langley, Leif Melin and Richard Whittington) and Europe’s best-selling text on strategy, Exploring Corporate Strategy (with Kevan Scholes and Richard Whittington). Phyl Johnson is a partner in the Strategy Explorers consulting firm. She is a chartered psychologist, psychotherapist and visiting academic at CASS Business School in London. She is the former Director of Executive Development and Lecturer in Organization Behaviour at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Phyl works with senior executive directors and non-executive directors in her research and consulting practice. She has written about CEO identity work, women directors, family business boardrooms, research methods and strategic decision-making. Pikka-Maaria Laine is a Lecturer in Management at Lapland University. Her research interest focuses on discourse and practice theoretical approaches on strategic management and leadership, management learning, identity, gender and resistance. She also runs her own company coaching strategic and organizational development. Ann Langley is Professor of Strategic Management at HEC Montréal, Canada and Canada Research Chair in Strategic Management in Pluralistic Settings. She obtained her undergraduate and master’s degrees in the UK and completed her doctorate at HEC Montréal after working for several years in the private and public sectors as an analyst and consultant. Her current research focuses on strategic change, leadership, innovation and the practice of strategy, notably in health care organizations. She has published two books and over fifty articles. In particular, she is co-author with Gerry Johnson, Leif Melin and Richard Whittington of Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Valérie-Inès de La Ville is Professor of Management and Strategy at CEREGE in the University of Poitiers and was the Research Executive of the European Center of Youth

List of contributors

products in Angoulême. Her research interests are in the social dimensions of managerial discourses and narratives and their role in strategy making. She has published or co-published, among others, in La Revue Française de Gestion and Journal of Management Inquiry. Robert MacIntosh holds a chair in strategic management at the University of Glasgow. He is a chartered engineer and his research focuses on strategy development, change and organizational vitality. He also has an interest in research methods in the field of management research and he has published in a range of journals including Journal of Management Studies, Strategic Management Journal, Human Relations and the British Journal of Management. A selection of recent publications includes ‘Health in Organization: Toward a Process-based View’ (Journal of Mangement Studies 2007, with D. MacLean and H. Burns) and Complexity and Organization: Readings and Conversations (2006, with Donald MacLean, Ralph Stacey and Doug Griffin). Donald MacLean is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Management at the University of Glasgow where he is also Professor of Strategic Management. His interests lie in the development of innovative approaches to strategy, leadership and management and in regional development. He is a member of the faculty of the Institute of Directors in Scotland and of the Complexity and Management Centre of the University of Hertfordshire. A selection of recent publications includes ‘Complexity and Strategy: An Empirically Informed Critique’ (British Journal of Management 2005, with Kate Houchin) and ‘Paradox as invitation to act in problematic change situations’ (Human Relations 2004, with Nic Beech, Harry Burns, Linda de Caestecker and Robert MacIntosh). Saku Mantere is Acting Professor of Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics and Business Administration, Helsinki, Finland. He studies strategy work in organizational centres and peripheries, being particularly interested in middle management

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agency and strategy discourse. His work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies and Strategic Organization. Leif Melin is Professor of Strategy and Organization at Jönköping International Business School and the founding Director of CeFEO – Center for Family Enterprise and Ownership. Melin’s research interest includes several topics related to strategizing and strategic change applying the Strategy as Practice perspective, for example strategic dialogues as an important practice. His recent publications include Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources (Cambridge University Press, 2007, with Gerry Johnson, Ann Langley, and Richard Whittington) and Strategic Planning Champions: Social Craftpersons, Artful Interpreters and Known Strangers (2008, with M. Nordqvist). Kathrin M. Möslein holds the Chair for Information Systems I – Innovation and Value Creation at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. She is also a member of the team of directors of the Center for Leading Innovation and Cooperation (CLIC) at HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management. Kathrin is a founding member and, since 2007, Vice President of the European Academy of Management (EURAM). Her current research focuses on innovation, cooperation and leadership systems. Eléonore Mounoud is Associate Professor in Corporate Strategy and Organization Studies at Ecole Centrale Paris. She was educated at INA-PG in Paris where she graduated in agricultural engineering. She then worked for firms and research agencies as a consultant about environmental issues and technologies. She studied the management of innovation at Ecole Centrale Paris and holds a PhD in corporate strategy from HEC School of Management (Paris). Her research interests are in the social dimensions of managerial discourses, their role in strategy making and the study of managerial practices. Her fields of interest are emerging industries and innovations in

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List of contributors

environmental and information technologies. She has co-published in Management International, Revue Française de Gestion, International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management and Journal of Management Inquiry. Anne-Katrin Neyer is Assistant Professor at the Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Leading Innovation and Cooperation (CLIC) at the HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management. Prior to joining the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the UK’s Advanced Institute of Management Research at London Business School. Her current research focuses on social interactions and their influence on idea generation in a technology-mediated context. She has published on these topics in journals such as Human Resource Management, International Studies of Management and Organization and European Management Journal. Wanda J. Orlikowski is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies in the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her primary research interest focuses on the dynamic relationship between organizations and information technologies, with particular emphases on organizing structures, cultural norms, communication genres and work practices. Some of her recent publications include: ‘Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work’ (Organization Studies 2007); ‘Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization’ (Annals of the Academy of Management 2008, with S. V. Scott); ‘Understanding Shifting Power Relations within and across Fields of Practice’ (Academy of Management Journal 2009, with N. Levina). Andreas Rasche is Assistant Professor of Business in Society at Warwick Business School. His research focuses on the practice of strategic management in organizations and global business citizenship. Recent publications include: ‘Researching Strategy Practices – A Genealogical Social Theory Perspective’

(Organization Studies 2008, with Robert Chia); ‘As If It Were Relevant – A Social Systems Perspective on the Relation Between Science and Practice’ (Journal of Management Inquiry 2009, with Michael Behnam); and The Paradoxical Foundation of Strategic Management (2007). Linda Rouleau is a Professor in the Management Department of HEC Montreal. She is teaching strategic management and organization theories. Her research work focuses on micro-strategy and strategizing and on the transformation of control and identity of middle managers in a context of organizational restructuring. She is co-responsible for the GéPS (Study Group of Strategy as Practice, HEC Montreal) and research member of the CRIMT (a Canadian research centre on globalization and work). In the last few years, she has published in peer reviewed journals such as Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Journal of Management Inquiry, Strategic Organization, etc. She has been co-editor of two special issues (Revue Française de Gestion, 2007 and International Management, 2008). In 2007, she published a book on the evolution of organization theories (PUQ). She is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Management Studies and M@n@gement. Johannes Rüegg-Stürm is Professor for Organizational Behaviour at the University of St Gallen HSG and Managing Director of the Institute of Management (IfB-HSG). His research interests are in the area of entrepreneurial integrative management, strategizing and strategic change, process theories of management and organization, systemic-constructivist and contextualist approaches in management and strategy research, practice turn in management theory, management of healthcare organizations. Recent publications include: The New St. Gallen Management Model – Basic Categories of an Approach to Integrated Management (2004); ‘Jenseits der Machbarkeit: Idealtypische Herausforderungen tiefgreifender unternehmerischer Wandelprozesse aus einer systemisch-relational-konstruktivistischen Perspektive’ (Managementforschung 2000); ‘Integrative Management-Ethik in

List of contributors

Krankenhäusern’ (Baumann-Hölzle, R. and Arn, Ch. (eds) Ethiktransfer in Organisationen 2009). Dalvir Samra-Fredericks is Reader in Organizational Behaviour at Nottingham Business School. Her research interests pivot upon blending ethnographic and ethnomethodological aspects and centrally include audio-video-recordings of managerial elites/strategists doing their everyday work over time and space. This research has been published in a number of journals, including Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Organization and Management Learning. More recently, she has co-guest edited a symposium issue (2008) and a special issue of Organization Studies (2009). David Seidl is Professor of Organization and Management at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He studied management and sociology in Munich, London, Witten/Herdecke and Cambridge. He earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2001. Current research focuses on corporate governance, organizational change and strategy. He has published amongst others in the Journal of Management Studies, Organization, Organization Studies and Human Relations and has (co-) produced several books, including Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies (2005) and Organizational Identity and Self-Transformation (2005). Stuart Smith was Professor Emeritus at Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. He had undergraduate degrees from Imperial College, London in engineering and psychology from the University of Sheffield followed by a PhD from the Social and Applied Psychology Unit (SAPU) at the University of Sheffield. He was Professor of Change Management and joint Director of the Change Management Research Centre at Sheffield Business School until 1997 when he retired. Recent publications have been in Academy of Management Review, International Journal of Operations and Production Management and International Journal of Production Economics. He died in 2007.

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Haridimos Tsoukas is the George D. Mavros Research Professor of Organization and Management at the Athens Laboratory of Business Administration (ALBA) Graduate Business School, Greece, and Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of Organization Studies. He has published widely in several leading academic journals, including Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Studies, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations and others. His research interests include: knowledge-based perspectives on organizations; the management of organizational change and social reforms; the epistemology of practice; and epistemological issues in organization and management studies. He has edited several books, including The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory: Metatheoretical Perspectives (2003, with Christian Knudsen); Organizations as Knowledge Systems: Knowledge, Learning and Dynamic Capabilities (2004, with N. Mylonopoulos); and Managing the Future: Strategic Foresight in the Knowledge Economy (2004, with J. Shepherd). He is the author of several books, including Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology (2005). Eero Vaara is Professor of Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, and Permanent Visiting Professor at EMLYON Business School, France. He is also the Chair of EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies). His research interests focus on strategy and strategizing, organizational change, multinational corporations and globalization, the role of the media in organizing and management, and methodological issues in organization and management research. He has lately worked especially on narrative and discursive perspectives. His work has been published in leading academic journals and books. Widar von Arx recently completed his PhD at the Universitiy of St Gallen. His research

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List of contributors

interests include a practice perspective on managerial action, sociology of knowledge, context and action, micro-practices of power, and communication in the construction and implementation of strategic initiatives. His latest publications include Die dynamische Verfertigung von Strategie: Rekonstruktion organisationaler Praktiken und Kontexte eines Universitätsspitals (2008). Richard Whittington is Professor of Strategic Management at the Saïd Business School and Millman Fellow at New College, University of

Oxford. He is author or co-author of nine books, including What is Strategy – and Does it Matter? (2nd edition, 2000), The European Corporation (2000), The Handbook of Strategic Management (2002), Exploring Corporate Strategy (8th edition, 2008) and Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources (2008). He is a senior editor of Organization Studies and serves on the editorial boards of Organization Science and the Strategic Management Journal. His current main research interest is the historical and comparative evolution of strategy as a practice.

Introduction: What is Strategy as Practice? DA M ON G O L SO R K H I, L INDA ROULEAU, DAV I D SE ID L and E E RO VAARA

Strategy as Practice as a research approach In recent years, Strategy as Practice has emerged as a distinctive approach for studying strategic management, organizational decision-making and managerial work (Whittington 1996; Johnson et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007). It focuses on the micro-level social activities, processes and practices that characterize organizational strategy and strategizing. This provides not only an organizational perspective into strategy but also a strategic angle for examining the process of organizing, and thereby serves as a useful research programme and social movement for connecting contemporary strategic management research with practiceoriented organizational studies. Strategy as Practice can be regarded as an alternative to the mainstream strategy research via its attempt to shift attention away from merely a focus on the effects of strategies on performance alone to a more comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what actually takes place in strategic planning, strategy implementation and other activities that deal with strategy. In other words, Strategy as Practice research is interested in the ‘black box’ of strategy work that once led the research agenda in strategic management research (Mintzberg 1973; Mintzberg and Waters 1985; Pettigrew 1973), but has thereafter been replaced by other issues, not least because of the increasing dominance of the micro-economic approach and a methodological preoccupation with statistical analysis. Because of its micro-level focus, studies following the Strategy as Practice agenda tend to draw on theories and apply methods that differ from the common practices of strategy scholars. In this way, Strategy as Practice research can contribute to the evolution of

strategic management as a discipline and body of knowledge with new theories and methodological choices. It would, however, be a mistake not to link Strategy as Practice research to the broader ‘practice turn’ in contemporary social sciences. In fact, ‘practice’ has emerged as a key concept for understanding central questions about how agency and structure, and individual action and institutions are linked in social systems, cultures and organizations (Bourdieu 1990; Foucault 1977; Giddens 1984; de Certeau 1984; Sztompka 1991; Schatzki 2002). This practice turn is visible in many areas of the social sciences today, including organizational research (Brown and Duguid 1991; Orlikowski 2000; Nicolini et al. 2003). It is about time that we utilized this paradigm to enrich our understanding of organizational strategizing. ‘Practice’ is a very special concept in that it allows researchers to engage in a direct dialogue with practitioners. Studying practices enables one to examine issues that are directly relevant to those who are dealing with strategy, either as strategists engaged in strategic planning or other activities linked with strategy, or as those who have to cope with the strategies and their implications. By so doing, studies under this broad umbrella promise to accomplish something which is rare in contemporary management and organization research: to advance our theoretical understanding in a way that has practical relevance for managers and other organizational members. Like any emergent research approach, Strategy as Practice can either develop into a clearly defined but narrow theoretico-methodological perspective, or it can grow into an open and versatile research programme that is constantly stretching its boundaries. A key motivation behind this handbook is to 1

2

Introduction

actively pursue the latter alternative. By spelling out and elaborating various alternative perspectives on Strategy as Practice, we wish to contribute to the expansion and further development of this research approach. Although there stands a risk of eclecticism and ambiguity, we believe that the benefits of theoretical and methodological innovation and continued discussion outweigh such concerns. Our view of Strategy as Practice emphasizes the usefulness of studying ‘practical reason’ – the starting point in Dewey’s (1938), Bourdieu’s (1990) or Tuomela’s (2005) analyses of social practice, for example. According to this view, we must focus on the actual practices that constitute strategy and strategizing while at the same time reflecting on our own positions, perspectives and practices as researchers. This includes a need to draw from, apply and develop various theoretical ideas and empirical methods. This handbook represents a unique collection of ontological, epistemological, theoretical and methodological perspectives on Strategy as Practice, as written by leading scholars in the field. When compiling this volume, we as editors had three specific goals in mind. First, as explained above, we wished to open up and not limit the ways in which people think about and conduct Strategy as Practice research. This is shown in the multiplicity of approaches presented in the different chapters, complementary to each other in various ways. In this endeavour, we emphasize the need to study both concrete instances of organizational strategizing and broader issues, such as the institutionalization of strategy as a body of knowledge and praxis. Second, we were determined to promote critical thinking. This is important to make sure that Strategy as Practice research does not dissolve into a restricted study of top management, but includes analysis of how others contribute to strategizing and how they at times may resist strategies and their implications (McCabe forthcoming). Moreover, reflection on strategy as a body of knowledge (Knights and Morgan 1991) and praxis (Whittington 2006) that has all kinds of power implications must continue. Third, unlike many handbooks, we emphasize the future. Thus, the chapters included in this book not only provide overviews of what has already been done in

this field but also spell out theoretical or methodological ideas for the future. The rest of this introduction is organized as follows. First, there is a brief overview of the practice turn in social science, followed by a review of strategy-as-practice research. We will then introduce the contributions of this handbook, starting with ontological and epistemological questions and proceeding to the various alternative theories. Finally, several methodological choices are laid out, along with exemplary studies of Strategy as Practice.

The practice turn in social sciences The purpose of this section is to highlight central ideas in the so-called practice turn in social sciences. A comprehensive review of the various perspectives is, however, beyond the scope of this introduction (see e.g. Schatzki et al. 2001; Reckwitz 2002). To begin with, it is important to note that representatives of several schools of thought have contributed to our understanding of the central role of practices in social reality. These include philosophers (Wittgenstein 1951; Foucault 1977; Dreyfus 1991; Tuomela 2005), sociologists (Giddens 1984; de Certeau 1984), anthropologists (Bourdieu 1990; Ortner 2006), activity theorists (Vygotsky 1978; Engeström et al. 1999), discourse analysts (Fairclough 2003), feminist scholars (Martin 2003) and many others. Although there is no single motive behind this collective interest, three things should be emphasized. First, a focus on practice provides an opportunity to examine the micro-level of social activity and its construction in a real social context or field. Thus, a practice approach allows one to move from general and abstract reflection on social activity to an increasingly targeted analysis of social reality. This is not to say that all practice-oriented research would have to engage in ethnographic, discourse or conversation analysis, or activity theory, or any other type of micro-level empirical study. On the contrary, a key part of the practice literature has been very theoretical in nature. Nevertheless, the advantage a practice approach brings to areas like strategy

Introduction

lies predominantly in its ability to elucidate the micro-level foundations of social activity in a particular setting – in either theoretical or empirical studies. Furthermore, the flexibility in the notion of practice makes it possible to analyse activities from multiple angles. Activity can be studied as more or less intentional action, cognition, embodied material practice, discourse or text – and the list does not stop here. Second, the practice approach breaks with methodological individualism by emphasizing that activities need to be understood as enabled or constrained by the prevailing practices in the field in question. Thus, a practice approach to strategy should not merely focus on the behaviours or actions of managers but seek to examine how these behaviours or actions are linked with prevailing practices. A fundamental insight in practice theories is that individual behaviours or actions – however they are defined – are always related to the ways in which social actors are supposed to think or feel or communicate in and through language in a given situation. Moreover, most practice theories emphasize the latent connection to material aspects of social reality. That is, specific behaviours or actions are closely linked with or mediated by material resources. Third, the notion of practice allows one to deal with one of the most fundamental issues in contemporary social analysis: how social action is linked with structure and agency. Although views on the linkage of practice and activity differ, most scholars emphasize the potential of the concept of practice to explain why and how social action sometimes follows and reproduces routines, rules and norms and sometimes doesn’t. For example, Giddens’ (1984), Foucault’s (1980) and Bourdieu’s (1990) seminal work all focus on ‘practice’ as a key theoretical concept when dealing with social activity. For Giddens (1984), structuration is the key issue; practices are reproduced and at times transformed in social action, thus reifying social structures. For Foucault (1977, 1980), the point is that we are all constrained and enabled by discursive practices that include all kinds of social practices in addition to pure discourse. And for Bourdieu (1990, 1994), practices constitute an essential part of all human activity; they are part of a grammar of dispositions

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(inculcated in habitus) that defines what can and will be done in social fields. This all may give the impression that a metatheory of social practice exists that could be applied to areas such as strategy research. The fact remains, however, that a closer look at the various perspectives referred to above reveals fundamental epistemological, theoretical and methodological differences. This multiplicity of perspectives does not, however, have to be seen as an impediment to the development of practice-based approaches, but a richness that can help us to better understand various aspects of social activities and practices in contexts such as strategy-as-practice.

Overview of Strategy as Practice research Strategy as Practice research developed from several sources. Classics of strategy process research (Pettigrew 1973; Mintzberg et al. 1976; Mintzberg and Waters 1985; Burgelman 1983) and various attempts to broaden and renew strategic management (Eisenhardt 1989; Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991; Knights and Morgan 1991; Johnson and Huff 1998; Langley 1989; Oakes et al. 1998) can be seen as its intellectual roots. However, despite its many important predecessors, it has only been within the last few years that Strategy as Practice has established itself as a clearly defined sub-field in strategy research, bringing together like-minded colleagues whose ideas might otherwise have ‘remained marginal and isolated voices in the wilderness’ (Johnson et al. 2007, p. 212). Since the publication of the seminal Journal of Management Studies special issue on ‘Micro Strategy and Strategizing’ (Johnson et al. 2003), which defined the Strategy as Practice research agenda for the first time, we have seen more than fifty journal articles in leading journals, five special issues, four foundational books and numerous book chapters, not to speak of the wealth of conference papers presented every year since. In the following we will provide a short overview of this research stream (see Appendix). We will first focus on the contributions that have aimed at developing the Strategy as

4

Introduction

Practice research agenda and then turn to important themes within this area.

Development of the research agenda Important efforts have been made to define and develop the Strategy as Practice approach per se. This includes analyses that have focused on the role and characteristics of strategy-as-practice research in relation to other sub-fields of strategy. The first paper to do so was Whittington (1996), who positioned Strategy as Practice with reference to the policy, planning and process approaches as the major perspectives on strategy. Given the affinities of the Strategy as Practice approach with the process approach it is not surprising that others have elaborated on the similarities and differences between the two (Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington 2007; Chia and MacKay 2007). In addition, there are several works that show how Strategy as Practice can be understood as a complementary approach to the resource-based view in general (Johnson et al. 2003, 2007) and dynamic capabilities in particular (Regnér, 2008). Strategy as Practice research has included explicit publications that have developed the research agenda and offered explicit frameworks. This includes the seminal paper by Johnson et al. (2003), in which the Strategy as Practice approach – at that time labeled ‘activity-based view of strategy’ – was introduced for the first time and characterized as concern ‘for the close understanding of the myriad, micro activities that make up strategy and strategizing in practice’ (p. 3). This characterization was refined by Whittington (2006), who emphasized that the strategizing activities needed to be understood in their wider social context: actors are not working in isolation but are drawing upon the regular, socially defined modus operandi that arise from the plural social institutions to which they belong. Based on this, Whittington proposed an overarching framework of ‘practitioners’ (i.e. those who do the actual work of making, shaping and executing strategy), ‘praxis’ (i.e. the concrete, situated doing of strategy) and ‘practices’ (i.e. the routinized types of behaviour drawn upon in the concrete doing of strategy) as the three building blocks that make up strategizing.

This framework was further developed by Jarzabkowski et al. (2007), who argued that, due to pragmatic reasons, empirical works would do well to focus on the relation between any two of the building blocks while (temporarily) bracketing out the third. In their review of the Strategy as Practice literature of the time, they show how all papers can be placed within this framework, identifying particular gaps from which they develop a research agenda for future work. Johnson et al. (2007) proposed another overarching framework which positions different research projects according to the level of analysis (the level of actions, the organizational level and the field level) and according to whether they are concerned with content or process issues. The authors use this framework to examine the strength and distinctiveness of the existing research and propose their own agenda for future work. A more recent literature review and research agenda on the basis of this framework is provided by Jarzabkowski and Spee (2009). In addition, there are several other publications that provide introductions to and overviews of Strategy as Practice research (e.g. Jarzabkowski 2004, 2005; Whittington 1996, 2002; Whittington et al. 2003). There are several useful discussions of various theoretical perspectives on Strategy as Practice research. Jarzabkowski, for example, explored activity theory (Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005), different theories of social practice (Jarzabkowski 2004) and structuration theory in particular (Jarzabkowski 2008). Dennis et al. (2007) compared potential contributions from theories of social practice, convention theory and actor-network theory. In Johnson et al. (2007), we find an exploration of situated learning theory, actor-network theory, the Carnegie tradition of the sensemaking and routines perspective, and institutional theory. In addition, Chia and Holt (2006) have explored the potential of the Heideggerian perspective, Campbell-Hunt (2007) complexity theory, Seidl (2007) systemicdiscursive theories (such as those by Wittgenstein and Lyotard) and Vaara et al. (2004) critical discourse analysis as a fruitful basis for Strategy as Practice research. There also are a few methodological reflections on Strategy as Practice, although explicit contributions have been rare. Balogun et al. (2003) is

Introduction

the first paper to address this issue and to suggest particular methodological approaches. The paper summarizes the particular methodological challenges of Strategy as Practice research as follows: ‘The growing need of researchers to be close to the phenomena of study, to concentrate on context and detail, and simultaneously to be broad in their scope of study, attending to many parts of the organization, clearly creates conflicts’ (p. 198). This issue is also taken up in a separate chapter in Johnson et al. (2007), providing illustrations of various methodological choices and their respective advantages and disadvantages. Rasche and Chia (2009) also deal with methodological challenges briefly in a separate section of their paper, which propagates ethnographic approaches as most suitable for Strategy as Practice research. However, others have criticized the predominant definitions and approaches to Strategy as Practice research. In particular, Robert Chia and his colleagues have provided alternative perspectives on the analysis of strategy (Chia and MacKay 2007; Rasche and Chia 2007). Rather than building on the proposed frameworks, they criticize current research for its lack of distinctiveness and call for a more focused approach which breaks away from the methodological individualism that still dominates Strategy as Practice work. In addition, Clegg, Carter and Kornberger (Clegg et al. 2004; Carter et al. 2008) have critiqued the conceptual and methodological bases of much of the research in this area. In a nutshell, they have argued for more theoretically advanced and critically oriented studies to explore fundamental issues of identity and power. This critique served as a key motivator for the expansion and development of the Strategy as Practice research agenda in this handbook.

Central themes in Strategy as Practice research Strategy as Practice research has examined various important themes, including strategizing methods in different settings, formal strategic practices, sensemaking in strategizing, discursive practices of strategy, roles and identities in strategizing, tools and techniques of strategy, and power in strategy.

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The thrust of existing research has focused on ways in which strategizing is conducted in specific organizational settings. In fact, most studies in this area have concentrated on organizational processes, activities and practices in particular contexts. Apart from studying business organizations, such as venture capital firms (King 2008), financial services organizations (Ambrosini et al. 2007), airlines (Vaara et al. 2004), clothing companies (Rouleau 2005) or multi-business firms (Paroutis and Pettigrew 2007), scholars have also examined strategizing in orchestras (Maitlis and Lawrence 2003), cinemas (Rouleau et al. 2007), hospitals (Von Arx 2008) and universities (Jarzabkowski 2003, 2004, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008). These analyses have also revealed general patterns of strategizing; for example, Regnér (2003) showed that there are significant differences in the way that people in the centre of a firm strategize compared to those who work on the periphery. Researchers have also focused special attention on formal strategic practices. Studies have examined the strategic roles of strategy workshops (Hendry and Seidl 2003; Hodgkinson et al. 2006; Bourque and Johnson 2008; Whittington et al. 2006), strategy meetings (Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008), committees (Hoon 2007), formal teams (Paroutis and Pettigrew 2007) and various formal administrative routines (Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002). Nevertheless, it has been argued that these formal practices receive far less attention than they should. For this reason, Whittington and Cailluet (2008) have dedicated an entire special issue of Long Range Planning to the exploration of new avenues for research on strategic planning. A significant part of Strategy as Practice research to date has been devoted to the study of sensemaking in strategizing. In contrast to earlier works on cognitive aspects, Strategy as Practice scholars have been interested in the social dimensions of sensemaking. Accordingly, researchers have focused on the socially negotiated nature of sensemaking (Balogun and Johnson 2004, 2005), the political contests around the framing of strategic issues (Kaplan 2008), the interaction between individual-level and organizational-level sensemaking (Stensaker and Falkenberg 2007) and the influence

6

Introduction

of the wider societal context on sensemaking activities at the organizational interface (Rouleau 2005). The interest in sensemaking aspects is somewhat related to a further, nascent area of contribution: the role of material artefacts in strategizing. Heracleous and Jacobs (2008), for example, show how material artefacts are purposefully employed in change interventions in order to stimulate particular sensemaking processes. Whittington et al. (2006) discuss physical objects as particular means of communication. Studies on the discursive aspects of strategy have become increasingly popular in recent years. A seminal paper by Knights and Morgan (1991) examines the historical emergence of strategic management discourse, its assumptions and implications on management. Hendry (2000) provides another influential account of strategy as an essentially discursive practice. In addition, the seminal narrative analysis of Barry and Elmes (1997) elaborates on the role of strategic storytelling. Based on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Samra-Fredericks (2003, 2004, 2005) has examined the rhetorical micro-processes of strategizing and the ways in which conversations impact strategy. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, Vaara and his colleagues have examined how discursive practices make up strategy (Vaara et al. 2004), how strategy discourse is appropriated and resisted (Laine and Vaara 2007) and how discourses may impede or promote participation in strategic decision-making (Mantere and Vaara 2008). Phillips et al. (2008) have followed suit to provide an integrative model of the role of discourse in strategic decision-making. Sminia (2005) examines strategy as layered discussions, where strategic reflections often take place indirectly and implicitly within discussions on other matters. Coming from a somewhat different perspective, Seidl (2007) points to the differences between different types of strategy discourses and the problematic relations between them. Researchers have also examined the role and identity of managers and other organizational members engaged in strategy and strategizing. Accordingly, a great deal of research has been devoted to the strategic role of middle managers (Rouleau 2005; Mantere 2005, 2008; Sillince and

Mueller 2007; Balogun and Johnson 2004, 2005). Other groups of actors that have received specific attention are consultants (Nordqvist and Melin 2008; Schwarz 2004) and regulators (Jarzabkowski et al. 2009). In addition, scholars have pointed out the need for research into the strategic roles of strategy teachers and strategy gurus (Hendry 2000; Whittington et al. 2003). Others have focused on the identity of strategists. Knights and Morgan (1991) described how the emergence of strategic management in the middle of the twentieth century turned the passive administrators at the top of companies into proactive strategists. Strategy accordingly is described as a set of practices ‘which transform managers and employees alike into subjects who secure their sense of purpose and reality by formulating, evaluating and conducting strategy’ (p. 252). In another study, Lounsbury and Crumley (2007) provide a conceptualization of agency that accounts for the way in which practitioners are constrained by wider societal belief systems, providing meaning to their activities and prescribing them specific roles that delimit the scope for performativity. Beech and Johnson (2005) in turn showed the recursive relation between a strategist’s identity and his strategizing activities during a larger change project. Furthermore, Rouleau (2003) has examined the impact of gender on strategizing practice. Several publications in Strategy as Practice have lately been exploring the way in which specific tools and techniques are utilized in strategizing activity. Some authors have studied the ways in which tools and techniques change according to context (Seidl 2007; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2006). Others have examined strategy tools as potential boundary objects that can span across different organizational contexts (Spee and Jarzabkowski 2009). Moreover, there have been calls to analyse the ways in which strategizing work has changed through the use of technologies like PowerPoint, mobile phones and the like (e.g. Molloy and Whittington 2005). Ever since the beginning of Strategy as Practice research, scholars have also been interested in issues of power. Knights and Morgan (1991) set out on an analysis of the ‘disciplinary force’ of strategy as a particular institutional practice. Studies drawing on critical discourse analyses have also focused on

Introduction

the ways in which strategy discourse can be used to legitimate or resist specific ideas and to promote or protect one’s own power position (Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008). This has been followed by studies by Ezzamel and Willmott (2008) and McCabe (forthcoming) who examined the power differentials and inequalities in the strategizing processes occurring in a global retailer and manufacturing company and a UK building society, respectively, focusing attention on various modes of resistance. However, as noted above, critical analyses of Strategy as Practice have called for more studies of power in strategy and strategizing (Clegg et al. 2004).

Ontological and epistemological questions The Strategy as Practice approach was born from a break with the traditional notion of strategy as a property of organizations. Instead, strategy was to be understood as an activity or practice: strategy is not something that firms have, but something that people do (Johnson et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007). If taken seriously, this reconceptualization implies a fundamental ontological shift in several respects. First, the world of strategy is no longer taken to be something stable that can be observed, but constitutes a reality in flux. Second, strategy is no longer regarded as ‘located’ on the organizational level; instead, it is spread out across many levels from the level of individual actions to the institutional level. Third, the world of strategy constitutes a genuinely social reality created and recreated in the interactions between various actors inside and outside the organization. Accordingly, there are several fundamental epistemological consequences for both researchers and practitioners. So far, however, Strategy as Practice scholars have focused relatively little attention on epistemological questions. In this sense, the chapters in Part I of this handbook pave the way for a better understanding of these fundamental issues. Wanda Orlikowski in her chapter distinguishes three different types of practice research in organization studies in general and Strategy as Practice research in particular. These three types of research

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result from fundamentally different understandings of ‘practice’ among the respective researchers. The first type treats practice merely as phenomenon: researchers study what happens ‘in actual practice’ as opposed to what is merely derived theoretically. The second type emphasizes practice as a theoretical perspective: apart from attending to actual practice, researchers draw on practice-centred theory in their studies. Incorporating the assumptions of the other two types, the third mode highlights the notion of practice as a particular philosophy (ontology): researchers conceive of practice as constitutive of all social reality; i.e. actors and agency are treated as a product of their practices. This mode of engagement with practice is the most extreme form, rarely found in existing publications. Orlikowski discusses the general challenges of the three different practice views and the implications for research practice. The next two chapters elaborate on Orlikowski’s third mode of practice engagement. Drawing on Heidegger, Robert Chia and Andreas Rasche characterize this mode as a ‘dwelling worldview’, in contrast to what they refer to as a ‘building worldview’. The latter is the dominant view inherent in traditional strategy research, accounting for a large percentage of existing Strategy as Practice work. This view is characterized by two basic assumptions: (1) individuals are treated as discretely bounded entities; and (2) there is a clear split between the mental and physical realm; cognition and mental representation of the world necessarily precede any meaningful action. Accordingly, strategic action is explained through recourse to the intention of actors. In contrast, the dwelling worldview does not assume that the identities and characteristics of persons pre-exist social interactions and social practices. Social practices are given primacy over individual agency and intention. Thus, strategic actions are explained not on the basis of individual intentions but as the product of particular, historically situated practices. Chia and Rasche discuss the epistemological consequences of these two worldviews. They argue that the research findings depend greatly on the chosen worldview. In the following chapter, Haridimos Tsoukas develops the argument of Chia and Rasche further. In line with earlier works by Chia (Chia and

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Introduction

Holt 2006; Chia and MacKay 2007), he argues that Strategy as Practice researchers need to follow Orlikowski’s third mode of practice engagement. Only this would allow them to go beyond the process approach in strategy. He supports the call for a clear break with methodological individualism in favour of a view that gives primacy to practice. Yet he warns about pushing research too much in the opposite direction, where strategy is treated as emergent by definition. Instead, we need to reconcile – from a practice-based approach – the possibility of both non-deliberate and deliberate types of action in strategy. Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophy, he develops a framework that distinguishes between three different types of actions according to the involved form and degree of intentionality: (1) ‘practical coping’ (based on tacit understandings), which constitutes non-deliberate action; (2) ‘deliberate coping’ (based on explicit awareness); and (3) ‘detached coping’ (based on thematic awareness), which is the most deliberate form of action. These three forms of action are then linked to three forms of strategy making. Simon Grand, Johannes Rüegg-Stürm and Widar von Arx argue in their chapter that serious practice research needs to be accompanied by constructivist epistemologies. They show that while there are many variants of constructivism, they all share four central concerns: (1) they challenge the predominance of unquestioned dichotomies in the social sciences, like micro vs. macro or situated activities vs. collective practices; (2) agency is treated as distributed and related in specific ways in different contexts; (3) reality is treated not as given but constructed; and (4) therefore, the status of knowledge needs to be explicitly studied. After introducing and comparing the three most central constructivist perspectives, Grand and his co-authors discuss the implications of the four central assumptions of Strategy as Practice research, useful for the study of strategizing practices, the understanding of strategy and the conduct of strategy research. Above all, they emphasize that the very notion of strategy and strategizing practice contains nothing that can be taken as given, but is instead the result of continuous (re)construction by the activities of the practitioners and researchers involved.

The chapter by Karen Golden-Biddle and Jason Azuma continues the same theme by examining how Strategy as Practice articles construct their contribution to the field of organizational studies. Based on earlier work (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997), they argue that the construction of academic contributions can be examined along two dimensions: (1) the article needs to make connections among extant work, and between extant work and the respective article; this can be accomplished in several different ways, for example by presenting progressive coherence in the literature; and (2) in order to make a contribution the article has to problematize the current state of research. Again, there are different methods for doing that, e.g. by presenting it as incomplete or contradictory. Combining the two dimensions, the authors create a framework of nine generic choices for constructing contributions. By placing the existing Strategy as Practice papers within the framework, GoldenBiddle and Azuma identify opportunities for the construction of contributions yet to be examined by Strategy as Practice researchers. In the final chapter of Part I, Ann Langley addresses a central question in Strategy as Practice research: How can we build a cumulative body of knowledge when Strategy as Practice interests tend to favour small intensive samples and fine-grained analysis, leading to corresponding limitations in terms of generalizability? Langley addresses this question from three different perspectives on the nature and purpose of science: (1) the ‘normalscience view’ is based on the ongoing search for more accurate, general and useful causal statements about the relationships between important phenomena; (2) rather than striving for a single truth, the ‘practice view’ calls for increasingly more insightful interpretations or representations of the social world; and (3) the ‘pragmatic view’ puts the emphasis on the instrumentality of knowledge. Accordingly, the researcher ought to uncover the knowledge of the practitioners, render it explicit and make it available to others. Langley shows how the different publications in the field of Strategy as Practice invariably fall into one of the three views of science. She concludes by discussing the advantages and disadvantages were Strategy as Practice to adhere to any one of these models of science.

Introduction

Alternative theoretical perspectives With Kurt Lewin’s adage ‘nothing is so practical as a good theory’ in mind, it is important to focus attention on the theoretical basis of Strategy as Practice. A ‘good’ theory allows us to advance knowledge without having to reinvent the wheel. By offering a means to make sense of the very processes, activities and practices that constitute strategy and strategizing, it can also serve practitioners. However, there is no one theory of practice that can provide a basis for all relevant research questions at various levels of analysis, which range from reflections on strategy as a body of knowledge and praxis to studies of the idiosyncrasies of specific strategic and organizational processes in different institutional and cultural contexts. Nor should a unified theory be the objective if we wish to advance the theoretical discussion of practices and their implications. Consequently, Strategy as Practice research can and must be informed by alternative conceptions of practice and strategy. Various approaches have been offered and applied, the most important of which will be presented and discussed in Part II of this handbook. It serves to explain how specific approaches are able to elucidate not only our understanding of concrete strategic decision-making, but also of strategy as a body of knowledge and praxis. In the first chapter of Part II, Richard Whittington explains how Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory can be applied to Strategy as Practice research. Giddens has been a key source of inspiration in seminal pieces of Strategy as Practice, including Whittington’s own influential work (Whittington 1992, 2006). In his chapter, Whittington demonstrates how management researchers have already applied structuration theory in Strategy as Practice research. He explains how structuration theory differs from two close alternatives: the practice theoretic approach of Pierre Bourdieu and the Critical Realist approach of Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer. Whittington focuses on the advantages of structuration theory and highlights its usefulness for analysis that deals with the ever-present issues of agency and structure. However, he also points out that there is more to structuration theory than has been realized in previous research. In particular, he

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argues that the institution of strategy has received far too little attention, and he concludes by calling for further studies in this area. In the second chapter, Paula Jarzabkowski focuses on activity theory as a basis for Strategy as Practice research. The roots of activity theory can be traced to Russian social psychology (Vygotsky 1978; Leontiev 1978), but this has lately been developed into a widely used approach to study the interaction between the individual and the collective in the pursuit of activity. Jarzabkowski demonstrates how activity theory allows one to understand strategic actions as part of activity systems that comprise the actor, the social community with which the actor interacts, and the symbolic and material tools that mediate between actors, their community and their pursuit of activity. In particular, she explains how the elements of the activity system are linked with the key concepts of Strategy as Practice research: practitioners, practices and praxis. She also compares activity theory with theories of practice, to highlight the benefits of activity theory. In conclusion, she calls for more in-depth activity theory inspired research in strategic management. Marie-Léandre Gomez provides a Bourdieusian perspective on strategy-as-practice. This is a contribution that is very much needed, given the impact of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on practice theory in general. Gomez explains how Bourdieu offers a systemic view of practice that highlights the importance of relations between agents and with the field, the capital possessed by these actors, and their habitus. She argues that research on strategy can benefit greatly from Bourdieu’s praxeology. In particular, a Bourdieusian perspective allows one to overcome false dichotomies in strategy and strategizing: the micro/macro alternative, the opposition between structure and agency, and the dilemma between rationality and emerging strategy. In addition, the perspective can help us to better understand the various struggles that characterize strategy and the role of academics in these struggles. Saku Mantere turns his attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein and the potential of the philosopher’s ideas for elucidating our understanding of Strategy as Practice. This is an important contribution in

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Introduction

view of the fact that, apart from being one of the most influential philosophers, Wittgenstein’s ideas have paved the way for the ‘practice turn’ in social science. Both Giddens and Bourdieu, for example, have been greatly influenced by Wittgenstein. Mantere focuses on the idea of the ‘language game’ as a powerful concept to make sense of Strategy as Practice. He argues that language games shed more light on the discursive struggles endemic to the practice of strategy. He also maintains that the notion of ‘forms of life’, used to characterize the non-linguistic background of social practice, can direct our attention onto a number of important yet often neglected aspects of strategy. Examples from real-life strategy conversations provide concrete illustrations of these ideas. Florence Allard-Poesi adopts a Foucauldian view on Strategy as Practice. This reflection explains the seminal role of Foucault’s work in more critical studies of Strategy as Practice, as well as pointing to new ways in which we can look at strategy as a body of knowledge. From this perspective, strategic management may be seen as a heterogeneous set of discursive and material practices. These discursive and material practices are governed by specific rules that structure what can be read, said and done in and around strategy. They are techniques utilized for controlling from a distance in the modern enterprise, with both enabling and constraining implications for organizations and their members. She argues that strategic management is similar to a monitoring technique in which the strategist is led to reveal one’s intentions, say aloud what is hidden and ‘objectify’ one’s subjectivity. This has all kinds of effects on the individuals in question and the way in which people can and will make sense of strategy. Valérie-Inès de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud outline a narrative approach to Strategy as Practice. They draw on the work of Paul Riceour and Michel de Certeau in order to elucidate the various narrative practices that constitute an inherent part of strategy and strategizing. This involves the production of texts in strategy formulation, but also the consumption of texts in the ‘implementation’ of strategies. They offer a model that focuses on the writing and reading of texts and narratives as ongoing activities in organizations. This view

allows one to understand the crucial role of strategy texts and ongoing interpretations in strategizing – and thus challenges the conventional view that focuses solely on formal strategies without considering the ways in which they are ‘talked into being’.

Methodological issues and exemplary studies At the inception of the Strategy as Practice movement, scholars (Balogun et al. 2003) pointed to its methodological challenges, which require the researcher simultaneously to be close to actual practice while employing a broad range of theoretical and methodological tools. There have been calls for an exploration of methods that allow us to observe and understand the longitudinal and processual dynamics of the practices, routines and actions of the situated actors, to uncover their interdependences and interactions, and also to focus on discourses and their performativity, the disclosure of the ‘non-says’, of what is implicit or couched in rhetoric. While longitudinal case studies remain the most frequently used research design in Strategy as Practice, there is a notable trend towards applying and developing other methodologies. Some of the most promising approaches are presented and discussed in Part III of this handbook. As will become clear, the call for ‘methodologically innovative’ approaches does not necessarily mean that one has to develop entirely new methodologies; it suggests, rather, that we look at them through a ‘practice lens’ and use innovative ways to approach managers and reconstruct their strategizing activities and roles. Anne Sigismund Huff, Anne-Katrin Neyer and Kathrin Möslein suggest that the strategizing agenda should be expanded to respond better to macro-events such as the economic crisis in late 2008. They put forward an enhanced agenda, followed by an annotated list of relatively novel ways of interacting with informants, collecting data, involving collaborators, analysing information and presenting results. Theirs is a thoughtful and stimulating chapter that will certainly become a mustread so far as the methodological questions related

Introduction

to the Strategy as Practice field are concerned. It provides a set of methods that can be applied to the study of strategizing activity in all environments, and urges researchers to use methods that are conducive to explanations that can be easily generalized and will help develop the Strategy as Practice perspective further. Eero Vaara looks at the discursive aspects of strategy and strategizing from a critical angle. He emphasizes that critical discourse analysis (CDA) differs from that of relativist forms of discourse analysis, which reduce everything to discourse. After an overview of the characteristic features of CDA, he presents various ways in which this methodology can be applied to advancing our understanding of different forms of strategic discourse: (1) the central role of formal strategy texts; (2) the discursive construction of conceptions of strategy and subjectivity in organizational strategizing; (3) the processes of legitimation in and through strategy discourse; and (4) the ideological underpinnings of strategy discourse as a body of knowledge and praxis. He also provides an example of CDA as applied to the analysis of a media text. By focusing on ‘strategic text’, his chapter addresses the fundamental questions of how texts are selected and to what extent findings are generalizable in the Strategy as Practice perspective. Dalvir Samra-Fredericks explores select aspects of the ethnomethodological and conversation analytical (EM/CA) traditions in order to explain their relevance to the study of various strategizing practices. Drawing on two extracts from transcribed interaction reproduced from previous studies, she discusses some of the practical challenges one faces when accessing, selecting and interpreting accounts, and raises many theoretical issues related to the understanding of the elusive nature of practice. Her chapter delves into the reasoning processes that underlie EM/CA and offers Strategy as Practice researchers an insightful discussion on the skills and forms of knowledge that effective leaders use in talk-in-interaction. The author simply and clearly demonstrates through her own EM/CA perspective how the tiniest moment of interaction contains the essence of strategic and social order. Phyl Johnson, Julia Balogun and Nic Beech propose that strategy practitioners and their strategy-

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making practices should be examined through an ‘identity lens’, and urge Strategy as Practice researchers to move to a ‘close-with’ relationship with research subjects. Drawing on an empirical example, they propose a generic methodological approach to access identity through narratives captured from longitudinal engagement, multiple performances and back-stage access to the strategic practitioner. This chapter encourages researchers to produce collaborative research and engage themselves in long-term relationships with practitioners. Even though the authors provide some ground rules for establishing close relationships with strategists, they nevertheless maintain a critical and reflexive stance towards the position of researchers engaged in a collaborative agenda. Linda Rouleau suggests that narratives of practice, a variant of biographical methods, constitute a set of relevant qualitative methods of inquiry that offer many opportunities for developing typologies of practices and propositions regarding the skills needed in strategizing. Focusing on work experience and professional trajectories, narratives of practice provide privileged access to the subjective accounts of what managers and others ‘do’. The chapter draws on results and illustrative data extracted from a previous study, which examined how middle managers deal with the restructuring of their organization. It explains with clarity how narratives of practice can be used to gain access to explicit and tacit knowledge, and how the depth of the relationship between narrator and researcher is central to the thorough understanding of strategizing practices. Apart from the chapters of Part III, which focus exclusively on methodological issues, this handbook also contains four exemplary empirical works in Part IV, which provide additional illustrations of the use of different methodologies in Strategy as Practice research. In the first chapter of Part IV, Gerry Johnson, Stuart Smith and Brian Codling tackle one of the key issues in Strategy as Practice research: strategic agency in institutional change. They focus on the links between what managers do in practice and institutional changes at the level of organizational routines. For this purpose the authors adopt a longitudinal approach to a revealing case: British

12

Introduction

Rail, as it went through a transitional period of privatization. They examine how, and to what extent, managers adhere to or amend institutionalized routines and thereby affect the outcome of such change (Feldman and Pentland 2003). By so doing, they clarify the role of strategists in institutional change; in particular, the role of strategic actions in a process of deinstitutionalization. This chapter thus provides an illuminating example of the power of a classic longitudinal case study to add to our understanding of important theoretical questions. In the second study, Robert MacIntosh, Donald MacLean and David Seidl examine the role of strategy workshops, i.e. a particular formal strategic practice, as a means of effecting strategic change. The authors examine the conditions under which such workshops turn out to be effective compared to those in which they are not. For this purpose they combine a comparative case study methodology with a more engaged action research approach. While several scholars have pointed to action research as a potentially powerful approach for getting close to strategizing practices, few previous Strategy as Practice studies have actually employed it. In this sense, this chapter paves the way for new studies making innovative use of action research in the Strategy as Practice area. Pikka-Maaria Laine and Eero Vaara provide an example of a discourse-analytical study of strategizing. They focus on the crucial issue of subjectivity in organizational strategizing, arguing for a discursive struggle approach, according to which strategizing can be conceptualized as a dialectical battle between competing groups. Central to this perspective is the view that discourse and subjectivity are closely linked. The critical discursive analysis draws from multiple sources of data, focusing on examples of sensemaking and giving sense to strategic development in a multinational engineering group. The analysis shows how strategy discourses produce subject positions for the actors involved. At the same time, however, actors employ and resist other discourses – precisely to protect or enhance their social agency or identity. Thus, their chapter provides a rare example of using discourse analysis to study strategizing in concrete organizational settings.

Finally, in the last chapter of this handbook, Mona Ericson and Leif Melin adopt a philosophical, hermeneutically based understanding of practice. By so doing, they provide a novel perspective on one of the most central but poorly understood issues in Strategy as Practice: the role of history in strategizing. They argue for hermeneutical situatedness, where strategizing is a matter of history and all the present and future actions are in an endless relation with the past, as they are influenced by what was done, said and thought. According to this view, current strategic activity cannot be understood without a dialogical openness to the past. To illustrate this approach, they offer examples from a longitudinal case study of how history influences strategizing. By so doing, their analysis provides an illuminating example of the usefulness of hermeneutical methods in Strategy as Practice research.

Challenges for future research: a research agenda As previously mentioned, this handbook strives to be future-oriented. Each of the chapters provides innovative ideas to further advance our understanding of Strategy as Practice. With this in mind, the editors wish to take this opportunity spell out a renewed agenda for Strategy as Practice research. First and foremost, it is vital to make sure that these new insights connect with other streams of strategic management. Otherwise, Strategy as Practice stands the risk of becoming an isolated research approach or a social movement that does not interact with other communities. Hence, one of the key challenges for the future is to strengthen, both on theoretical and empirical fronts, its linkages to other important sub-fields in strategy, like the strategy process school, institutional approaches to strategy, the resource-based view and its new applications, cognition and sensemaking in and around strategy, evolutionary perspectives, learning, and communication in strategic management. Future research on Strategy as Practice holds great promise if it can continue to draw from and apply the theories and methodologies of the social sciences in novel ways. It is paramount that this research approach does not reinvent the wheel or

Introduction

develop in a vacuum, but is linked with other areas of social science. The goal should be not only to be informed, but also to be able to contribute to other fields. As the chapters of this handbook demonstrate, research on Strategy as Practice has a great deal to offer to contemporary social research on practice, activity, institutions and discourse. For example, focused analyses of strategy and strategizing can add to the ways in which Giddensian, Foucauldian or Bourdieusian traditions can be applied in addressing crucial issues in contemporary organizations or society at large. However, it is crucial that Strategy as Practice research continue on the trajectory of theoretical and empirical analysis, aiming at an increasingly better understanding of the activities, processes and practices that characterize organizational strategy and strategizing. The contributions of this handbook illustrate how much we have learned since this research approach came into being. But many issues still warrant targeted research efforts. They include the following: Linkage of the macro and micro in strategy. One of the great advantages of the practice approach is that it provides an opportunity to analyse how concrete micro-level activities are linked with broader institutionalized practices. This link is visible, for example, in discursive analyses of strategy, but many other aspects of the social and organizational practices that constitute strategy and strategizing remain unexplored. Whether we call it institutionalization, legitimation, naturalization or normalization, there is a great deal of work still to be done to explain how widely held assumptions about appropriate strategizing methods influence what is actually done in organizations, and how these activities, then, reproduce or at times transform prevailing understandings and practices. Agency in strategy and strategizing. A key reason for the emergence of practice theories was the need to develop concepts that explain how structure and agency are linked. Strategy as Practice studies have added to our understanding of the role, identity and subjectivity of the strategists in many ways and yet we still know little about those who are unable to participate in strategic decisionmaking. Furthermore, there are still few analyses that specify the ways in which organizational actors are at the same time constrained and enabled

13

by prevailing practices. We must go beyond the conventional view in strategic management that assumes that all strategists are omnipotent actors, but we must also not succumb to the gloomy perspective that everything is predetermined. This is a major theoretical question, but there is no doubt that empirical analyses of agency have a great deal to offer to practitioners. Coping and resistance. Conventional research tends to virtually ignore resistance; it is often framed as an obstacle to be dealt with and/or as illegitimate behaviour. If we want to better understand the social processes in strategizing, we need to take the issue of resistance seriously. As demonstrated in the contributions of this handbook, such analysis involves a reconceptualization of the ways in which organizational actors interpret, make sense of, consume or react to strategies that are imposed upon them. The reactions range from various modes of coping to outright resistance. Future research on Strategy as Practice would do well to draw from existing critical analyses of power and resistance in this endeavour. Practitioners and their knowledge. Practice research should be accessible to practitioners. Increasingly sophisticated theoretical analysis runs the risk of becoming alienated from the problems and challenges of the practitioners. Researchers should be mindful of this and strive to better understand the world of the practitioner with new epistemological, theoretical and methodological perspectives. For example, future research could challenge the prevailing view that holds that academic knowledge is superior to practical knowledge. Theoretical work could develop concepts and ideas that draw from what is relevant – either useful or problematic – in the practitioners’ world. In addition, new research could aim at a reappropriation of methods such as action research. Spread of strategy as discourse and praxis to new areas. Strategy as Practice research is by definition contextual; the focus of the analysis lies in the activities and practices that constitute strategy and strategizing in a given setting. Apart from studies of strategizing in business organizations, it is important and interesting to analyse the spread of strategy as a body of knowledge and praxis to other types of context, in particular public organizations such as government, municipalities, universities, hospitals or kindergartens. As the few existing studies show, such settings are often characterized by all kinds of struggles and clashes.

14

Introduction However, at the same time they provide examples of recontextualization and hybridization of practices, as well as innovations for dealing with problems and challenges. Cross-national comparisons. Decision-making and strategizing practices have evolved in distinctive ways in different national contexts. Future research on Strategy as Practice could zoom in on these differences and examine trends of practice convergence or crossvergence. Longitudinal analyses and the role of history. Not all research has to be longitudinal, but a more fine-grained understanding of the processes of strategic decision-making and change would benefit from longer-term analyses that elucidate changes in strategy and strategizing. Furthermore, historical studies can help us to better understand how practices have evolved and developed and the role of innovation in strategy and strategizing. Mediation and technologization of discourse and practice. In many ways the prevailing theories and methods of strategic management and organization studies tend to follow the social science tradition of forgoing tools, technologies, artefacts and other objects. Although there are interesting possibilities in such Strategy as Practice research as activity theory, most theory and methods trail behind practice when it comes to analysing the ways in which the various IT and other tools of communication affect contemporary organizations. Moreover, if comprehensively understood, mediation (the use of media to communicate and interact) and technologization (the use of conceptual tools, IT technologies and other means in decision-making and organizational actions) are fundamental features of contemporary organizations and society that warrant attention in their own right.

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Appendix Example papers

Particular contribution

Development of the research agenda Relation to other sub-fields of strategy Chia and MacKay 2007

Relation to process approach

Johnson et al. 2003, 2007

Relation to process approach and resource-based theory

Regnér 2008

Relation to dynamic capabilities/resource-based theory

Whittington 1996

Relation to policy, planning and process approach

Whittington 2007

Relation to process approach

Definition of the Strategy as Practice agenda and/or frameworks Jarzabkowski 2004

Characterization of Strategy as Practice with a particular emphasis on the concept of recursivity

Jarzabkowski 2005

Characterization of Strategy as Practice with an emphasis on the activity theory perspective

Jarzabkowski et al. 2007

Characterization of Strategy as Practice together with a research framework, literature review and research agenda

Jarzabkowski and Spee 2009

Review of the Strategy as Practice literature and future directions

Johnson et al. 2003

Characterization of Strategy as Practice as ‘activity-based view’

Johnson et al. 2007

Characterization of Strategy as Practice together with a research framework and research agenda

Whittington 1996

First rudimentary characterization of Strategy as Practice

Whittington 2002; Whittington et al. 2003

Characterization of Strategy as Practice and research agenda

Whittington 2006

Characterization of Strategy as Practice together with a research framework and research agenda

Whittington et al. 2003

Introduction and research agenda

Exploration of different theoretical perspectives Campbell-Hunt 2007

Complexity theory

Chia and Holt 2006

Heideggerian perspective

Denis et al. 2007

Actor-network theory, theories of social practice, convention theory

Jarzabkowski 2003; 2005

Activity theory

Jarzabkowski 2004

Theories of social practice (Bourdieu, Giddens, de Certeau)

Jarzabkowski 2008

Structuration theory

Johnson et al. 2007

Situated learning, Actor-network theory, Carnegie tradition (sensemaking, routines), institutionalist theories

Introduction Example papers

Particular contribution

Seidl 2007

Systemic-discursive approaches

Vaara et al. 2004

Critical discourse theory

Methodological reflections Balogun et al. 2003

Reflection on methodological challenges and exploration of novel methodologies

Johnson et al. 2007

Reflection on methodological challenges and exploration of novel methodologies

Rasche and Chia 2009

Propagation of ethnographic approaches

Critical reflections on Strategy as Practice Carter et al. 2008

Need for more theoretically advanced and critically oriented studies

Chia and MacKay 2007

Criticism for lack of differentiation from process research

Clegg et al. 2004

Need for more theoretically advanced and critically oriented studies

Rasche and Chia 2009

Criticism for lack of reflection of different strands of practice thinking

Central themes within Strategy as Practice research Strategizing in different contexts Jarzabkowski 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008; Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008

Strategizing in universities

Jarzabkowski and Balogun in print

Strategizing in multinationals

King 2008

Strategizing of venture capital firms

Maitlis and Lawrence 2003

Strategizing in an orchestra

Paroutis and Pettigrew 2007

Strategizing in multi-business firms

Regnér 2003

Strategizing in the centre vs. periphery

Von Arx 2008

Strategizing in hospitals

The role of formal practices Bourque and Johnson 2008

Strategy workshops

Hendry and Seidl 2003

Strategic episodes, workshops, meetings

Hodgkinson et al. 2006

Strategy workshops

Hoon 2007

Committees

Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002

Administrative practices

Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008

Strategy meetings

Paroutis and Pettigrew 2007

Formal teams

Whittington et al. 2006

Strategy workshops

Whittington and Cailluet 2008

Strategic planning practices

The role of sensemaking Balogun and Johnson 2004; 2005

Socially negotiated nature of sensemaking

Heracleous and Jacobs 2008

The role of embodied metaphors in sensemaking

Hodgkinson and Clark 2007

Cognition in action

Kaplan 2008

Framing contests

Rouleau 2005

Contextual factors of sensemaking/sensegiving and context

Stensaker and Falkenberg 2007

Interaction between individual-level and organizational-level sensemaking

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20

Introduction

Appendix (cont.) Example papers

Particular contribution

The role of materiality Giraudeau 2008

Strategic plans as visual and textual representation of contexts and strategies

Heracleous and Jacobs 2008

Embodied metaphors

Whittington et al. 2006

Physical objects as means of communication

Discursive aspects of strategy Barry and Elmes 1997

Strategic storytelling

Hendry 2000

Strategy as technological and appropriative discourse

Howard-Grenville 2007

Issue-selling practices

Knights and Morgan 1991

Historical emergence of the strategy discourse

Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008; Vaara et al. 2004

Critical discourse analysis of various aspects of strategizing

Phillips et al. 2008

Integrative model of the role of discourse in strategic decision-making

Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2005

Rhetorical micro-processes of strategizing and their impact on strategy

Seidl 2007

Differentiation between different strategy discourses

Sminia 2005

Layering of the strategy discussions

The role/identity of the participants to the strategizing process Balogun and Johnson 2004, 2005

Middle managers

Beech and Johnson 2005

Recursive relation between strategist’s identity and his/her strategizing activities

Jarzabkowski et al. 2009

Regulators

Knights and Morgan 1991

Impact of the emergence of strategic management on managers’ identity

Lounsbury and Crumley 2007

Constraining and enabling of agency through wider/societal theories and belief systems

Mantere 2005, 2008

Middle managers

Nordqvist and Melin 2008

Consultants

Rouleau 2003

Impact of gender on strategizing

Rouleau 2005

Middle managers

Schwarz 2004

Consultants

Sillince and Mueller 2007

Middle managers

Tools/Techniques Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2006

Change of tools and techniques according to context

Molloy and Whittington 2005

Impact of everyday technologies on strategizing

Seidl 2007

Change of tools and techniques according to context

Spee and Jarzabkowski 2009

Tools as boundary objects

Issues of power Ezzamel and Willmott 2008

Power diffentials and modes of resistance in strategizing processes

Knights and Morgan 1991

‘Disciplinary force’ of strategy as institutional practice

Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008

Power diffentials and modes of resistance in strategizing processes

McCabe forthcoming

Power diffentials and modes of resistance in strategizing processes

PA RT I

Ontological and Epistemological Questions

CHAPTER

1

Practice in research: phenomenon, perspective and philosophy WA N DA J. O R L IKOWSK I

The focus on practice in management studies – and the strategy field more specifically – is a recent and important development in what organizational scholars pay attention to and how. Reflecting the more general social theoretic ‘practice turn’ (Ortner 1984; Schatzki et al. 2001; Reckwitz 2002), this development is diverse and dynamic, expressing both a range of approaches and a set of emerging possibilities (Gherardi 2006; Malloy 2007; Postill forthcoming; Whittington 2006). Schatzki (2001a, p. 4) argues that given the broad array of interpretations and interests, the most effective notion of practice may be in its framing and orienting of research. It is in this spirit of exploring various ways of structuring practice research that I offer the discussion below, and not to propose or defend any particular conception or appropriation of practice ideas. In what follows, I want to distinguish three modes of engaging with practice in research, and highlight some of their attending entailments. I will then discuss some of the challenges and implications associated with taking practice seriously in studies of organizations. Throughout this commentary, I will draw on illustrations from the arena of organizational research that I am most familiar with – technology studies. These examples should offer some useful analogies and applications for Strategy as Practice research, where parallel considerations and formations are evident.

Modes of engaging practice in research I find it useful to differentiate among the different ways that the notion of practice has been attended to in the management literature (including the Strategy as Practice literature). These variations

arise as a result of differences in the locus of researchers’ attention and the logic of their inquiry. Three modes of engaging practice in research are evident. The first mode emphasizes practice as a phenomenon – the notion that what is most important in organization research is understanding what happens ‘in practice’ as opposed to what is derived or expected from ‘theory’; the second mode advocates practice as a perspective – the articulation of a practice-centred theory about some aspect of organizations; and the third mode highlights the notion of practice as a philosophy – the commitment to an ontology that posits practice as constitutive of all social reality, including organizational reality. These three modes of engaging practice in research are not mutually exclusive, but they can be understood as entailing differing assumptions about the power of practice to produce the world. As a result, they have different implications for how practice studies are understood and performed. Researchers engaging in studies of practice as a phenomenon may choose to do so without employing either a practice theory or a practice ontology. Researchers drawing on a practice perspective will certainly focus on some form of practice phenomenon and do so through a practice theoretic lens, but they need not also take on board a practice ontology. Researchers drawing on a practice philosophy believe in the primacy of practices in constituting social life, and will thus necessarily engage with practice through all three modes – philosophically, theoretically (practice as a perspective) and empirically (practice as a phenomenon).

Practice as a phenomenon The first mode of engaging with practice involves a specific commitment to understanding what 23

24 Wanda J. Orlikowski

practitioners do ‘in practice’, with practice here signifying the common-sensical notion of practical activity and direct experience. In this view, practice is recognized as a central locus of organizing, and thus critical in producing consequential organizational outcomes. This is a claim that, notwithstanding elegant theories and sophisticated models, it is practice that matters in organizational life, and that researchers ignore this to the detriment of their understanding of organizational life, specifically running the risk that their work will be irrelevant at best, or misleading at worst. In this mode, there is an explicit distinction between ‘practice’ and ‘theory’ or put another way, a distinction between what ‘actually happens’ and what researchers claim is happening through their representations, frameworks, narratives, models, propositions and theories. This distinction recognizes that there is typically a large gap between scientific knowledge and lived reality, and thus what is sought are means to bridge the gap by engaging more deeply in the empirical details of organizational life on the ground. The techniques used to do this vary, but all endeavour to get closer to practitioners and to their situated, practical activities. Examples of such gap-closing research range from immersive participant observation studies to various kinds of action research projects. With respect to participant observation, researchers tend to perform in-depth field investigations and ethnographies of practitioners at work (Bucciarelli 1994; Burawoy 1979; Hutchins 1995; Orr 1996; Lave and Wenger 1991), focusing on specific social groups, professions, occupations or communities such as engineers, managers, midwives and technicians in order to understand how it is that they do what they do. Studies of such practitioners ‘in the wild’ recount the myriad and detailed ways in which work is an ongoing and contingent accomplishment, typically relying less on explicit knowledge, specific prescriptions and canonical procedures, and more on tacit knowing, situated experiences and reflective improvisations. In other words, focusing on what practitioners do in practice reveals an adaptive and pragmatic intelligibility that is not easily captured in abstract models and formal theoretical propositions (Brown and Duguid 1991; Schön 1983).

With respect to action learning, researchers choose to engage practice more directly by partnering with practitioners on various projects (Rynes et al. 2001; Van de Ven and Johnson 2006). Methodologies include action science (Lewin 1946; Argyris et al. 1985; Whyte 1991), clinical fieldwork (Schein 1987), process consultation (Schein 1999), insider/outsider team research (Bartunek and Louis 1996) and collaborative interactive action research (Rapoport et al. 2002). All these various techniques explicitly design research studies as joint interventions aimed to address some substantial problem or challenge within an organization. In the process of collectively intervening in practice, researchers and practitioners generate data that are then analysed to help create and implement specific and more substantive practical changes in the workplace. One of the premises guiding this work is the notion that the best way to understand a system is to try to change it (Schein 1985). This mode of engaging practice as a phenomenon has been particularly useful in technology studies. Here, there is a similar range of methodological approaches aimed at getting closer to what happens on the ground: from detailed field studies (Gasser 1986; Kling 1991; Thomas 1994; Zuboff 1988) to participative systems design (Checkland 1999; Dourish and Button 1998; Mumford and Henshall 1979; Sachs 1995) and action research (Baskerville and Myers 2004). Recognizing the importance of what happens in practice has led researchers to focus on specific instances of technology use, as opposed to examining technologies abstractly ‘in theory,’ or in isolation from specific situated conditions. An important insight of this work is that technology only matters to the extent that it is incorporated into users’ practices. Studying the designed functionality or inscribed features of a technology is insufficient to understand the effects of that technology, because practice departs (sometimes substantially) from theory, design, plan or mandate (Button 1993; Ciborra 2002). An important genre of this kind of work is represented by ethnomethodological accounts of technological use in the workplace (Luff et al. 2000). For example, Suchman (1987) describes a

Practice in research

study she conducted into people’s use of a photocopier that had been designed with an intelligent user interface, but that had been found to be particularly difficult to operate in practice. Suchman investigated users’ actual interactions with the photocopier in practice (via detailed transcripts and videotaped recordings of users attempting to photocopy documents), and identified a range of breakdowns, misconceptions and communicative troubles that emerged in the gap between the assumptions embedded within the design of the machine’s expert system interface and the actual expectations, intentions and actions of the users interacting with the machine. By showing in detail what happens in practice, Suchman argues persuasively that situated forms of social action can never be fully specified a priori, and thus that human– computer interaction should be understood as an ongoing contingent co-production that emerges in practice. A key contribution of studies focusing on practice as a phenomenon is both the claim and the emerging grounded evidence that practices matter, and thus must be empirically engaged with in order to understand/improve organizational reality.

Practice as a perspective A second mode of engaging practice in research identifies it as a powerful lens for studying particular social phenomena. The ascendancy of this analytical perspective represents an important departure from traditional perspectives on organizations that have tended to privilege either macro-level structural relations or micro-level psychological attributes. As Lave (1988, p. 15) puts it, a practice perspective shifts attention to the routine, lived character of the everyday world, and it is this everyday activity that now serves as the object of analysis. But this everyday activity is not simply a focus on the mundane and micro-aspects of organizations. On the contrary, a practice perspective posits that it is through the situated and recurrent nature of everyday activity that structural consequences are produced and become reinforced or changed over time. This view of practice entails a specific conceptual grounding in what have come to be known as

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‘practice theories’. Postill (forthcoming) offers a useful distinction between two generations of practice theorists. The first generation, represented by such scholars as Bourdieu (1977), de Certeau (1984), Foucault (1977), Garfinkel (1967), Giddens (1984) and Taylor (1985) provided the theoretical foundations on which the second generation, represented by scholars such as Ortner (1984), Pickering (2001), Reckwitz (2002), Rouse (1996) and Schatzki (2002) are producing analyses, building extensions and generating elaborations. A particularly useful compilation of second generation developments is available in the co-edited collection, The Practice Turn (Schatzki et al. 2001), which includes chapters by such contributors as Barnes, Knorr Cetina, Lynch, Swidler and Turner. The first generation of practice theorists emphasized agents’ actions, interactions and improvisations and focused on how these produce/reproduce/ transform social structures, while also acknowledging the imprinting of structure and power on the human body and recurring forms of human activity (e.g. habitus, discipline). The second generation of practice scholars sought to advance the central tenets proposed by the first generation theorists while also developing new concepts and understandings. An important scholar in this regard is Schatzki, a philosopher, whose recent writings (2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2005) have been especially influential in stimulating the growing interest in a practice perspective among social scientists. The Practice Turn (Schatzki et al. 2001) has done much to inform researchers of the generative possibilities entailed in adopting a practice lens on social phenomena. In particular, his definition of practices as ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understandings’ (Schatzki 2001a, p. 2) has been widely taken up by scholars interested in employing a practice perspective in their own research studies. While many of the practice theorists also advocate a practice philosophy (more on which in the next section), their practice theories have also been appropriated to inform the study of quite specific social phenomena. Such application of practice theory has in some cases stimulated valuable and innovative reconceptualizations of established notions in social science. For example, Lave (1988)

26 Wanda J. Orlikowski

has done significant work in using a practice perspective to shift understanding of human cognition. Rather than assuming that cognition occurs ‘in the head’ (the conventional view adopted by psychologists and cognitive scientists), she draws on practice theory to offer a powerful argument for an understanding of cognition as enacted ‘in practice’. Lave’s research involved studying mathematical problem-solving activities in adults in different settings, observing participants in routine activities such as grocery shopping in the supermarket (calculating best buys), as well as assessing them on their general arithmetic knowledge through standardized mathematical achievement tests. She finds considerable variation in participants’ arithmetic procedures and performances across these two contexts. Even though the mathematics test was designed to evaluate the same arithmetic knowledge that the participants had used in the supermarket, participants scored an average of 59% on the test of arithmetic knowledge as opposed to achieving an average of 98% observed arithmetic knowledge in the supermarket. Lave argues that competence in arithmetic is not abstract knowledge that individuals either do or do not have (and which they can easily apply in any context), but a ‘knowledge-in-practice’, embodied and enacted by a person acting in a particular setting and engaging aspects of the self, the body, and the physical and social worlds (Lave 1988, pp. 180–181). In Lave’s practice-based reformulation, cognition is not separate from doing. Rather, cognition is an activity grounded in practice. In the case of technology studies, adoption of a practice perspective has led researchers to focus on the structured practices through which people engage with particular technologies in their daily work. One such stream of research draws on Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, that posits structures as recursively produced, reproduced and changed in social practices. In some of my prior work, I have applied this understanding to the use of technology (Orlikowski 1992, 1996, 2000), and argued that through their regularized engagement with a particular technology (and some of its inscribed features), users recurrently enact technology structures – what I term

technologies-in-practice – which are the sets of rules and resources that are (re)constituted in people’s ongoing interactions with the technologies at hand. I argued that such technologies-in-practice are consequential for shaping the kinds of outcomes that emerge from the use of technologies. In particular, drawing on a series of studies into the use of a groupware technology, I distinguished a number of different technologies-in-practice that were enacted with the Lotus Notes groupware technology in both similar and disparate contexts (Orlikowski 2000). For example, in a large multinational consulting company, I found that the consultants were strongly inhibited from using the technology for knowledge sharing (its intended use) by their firm’s hierarchical career path, individual criteria for evaluation and promotion, a client-focused billing system and their lack of understanding of the technology. As a result, their work practices used none or very few of the collaborative features of Lotus Notes, and was aimed at personal rather than collaborative benefit. Through such practices they enacted technologies-inpractice of limited use and individual productivity that had minimal impact on knowledge sharing and project performance within the organization. In contrast, the technologists in this firm, influenced by an institutional context that supported and rewarded cooperation in technical support work and a deep understanding of technology, used the collaborative features of Lotus Notes in their work practices, and in doing so enacted a technology-in-practice of collective problem solving that led to improved knowledge sharing and technical performance. Use of a practice perspective thus allowed me to identify the various conditions (institutional, interpretive and technological) that shaped the enactment of different technologies-inpractice, and how those different enactments, in turn, reinforced or modified the institutional, interpretive and technological conditions. A key contribution of a practice perspective is the claim that practices shape reality, and thus that analytical purchase is gained by treating practices as a focal lens through which to inquire into social reality. A practice perspective, because it entails a theoretically grounded understanding of the recursive interaction among people, activities, artefacts

Practice in research

and contexts, is particularly well positioned to address organizational phenomena that are posited to be relational, dynamic and emergent.

Practice as a philosophy A third mode of engaging practice in research represents a commitment to the ontological primacy of practice in social life. All social reality is understood to be constituted in and through practices, and as such is seen to be an ongoing dynamic and practical accomplishment. Compared to the modes of engaging practice in research discussed above, this mode entails the strongest ontological assertion about the nature and constitution of social reality. The first mode’s focus on practice as a phenomenon is an empirical claim that practices matter and thus should be investigated when studying organizational reality. The second mode’s focus on practice as a perspective is a theoretical claim that practices shape reality in particular ways, and these need to be explicated through practice theoretic accounts of organizational phenomenon. The third mode’s focus on practice as a philosophy is a meta-theoretical claim that practices are reality, and thus studies of organizations must be grounded ontologically, theoretically and empirically in lived practice. Claiming that all social life – not just specific phenomena – is constituted in ongoing practices represents a distinct social ontology, which Schatzki (2002, 2005) sets apart from the dominant alternative ontologies: individualism and societism. Ontological individualism claims ‘that social phenomena are either constructions out of or constructions of individual people and – on some versions – their relations’ (Schatzki 2005, p. 466). The assumption is that ‘all social matters ultimately consist in and are explained by facts about people – either individual people or groups thereof’ (p. 467). In contrast, societism rejects this view, denying that all there is to social phenomena are individuals and their relations. Different scholars emphasize different additional elements that are not decomposable to individuals, for example, modes of production, structures, discourses, institutions, etc. Ontological societism thus claims that social phenomena are composed

27

of something other than features of individuals or groups (p. 467). Arguing that both these dominant ontologies are problematic, Schatzki proposes an alternative approach that steers a path between individualism and societism and identifies practice as ‘the primary generic social thing’ (2001a, p. 1). In this alternative ontology, practices are constitutive of social reality. In the case of technology studies, recognition that social life transpires as ‘nexuses of practices and material arrangements’ (Schatzki 2005, p. 471) has led scholars to draw attention to how relations and boundaries between humans and technologies are not fixed, but enacted in practice. This approach entails a shift from positing humans and technologies as discrete, preformed entities to viewing them as intertwined through dynamic, unfolding relations (Emirbayer 1997). Prior perspectives – including practice theoretic perspectives on technologies such as my own (Orlikowski 1992, 2000) – have tended to view technology and humans as interacting through relations of mutual or reciprocal influence. While useful, such views still tend to assume that humans and technology are distinct entities with some a priori independence from each other. Speaking of humans and technology as mutually shaping each other necessarily maintains their ontological separation. It is this presupposition of ontological separation between humans and technologies that is set aside here in favour of a position of ontological entanglement. Ontological entanglement posits that there are no independently existing entities with inherent characteristics (Barad 2003, p. 816). Rather, these separate entities are reconceptualized as heterogeneous and shifting associations (Pickering 2001; Latour 2005) that are enacted in practice as an ‘ongoing, contingent coproduction of a shared sociomaterial world’ (Suchman 2007, p. 23). The entanglements constituting sociomaterial configurations are quite fluid – mutating over times and places and variably fusing together people, meanings, materialities and practices in the performance of work (Suchman, 2007). The intrinsic contingency of the sociomaterial configurations enacted in practice challenges deeply taken-for-granted assumptions about the relative independence, singularity and stability of reality, and opens up the

28 Wanda J. Orlikowski

radical possibility that multiple sociomaterial realities are being enacted in practice. One example of what this proposition might involve in research practice is offered by Mol’s (2002) investigation of the diagnosis and treatment of a particular cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis (which involves a thickening and hardening of large and medium-sized arteries). In examining the practices entailed in constituting this disease, she conducts, as she puts it, ‘an ethnography of a disease.’ What she finds through detailed fieldwork in a hospital is that what atherosclerosis is varies significantly depending on where, when, how and with whom the disease is being discussed, evaluated and treated. As she powerfully argues, what the disease is then depends on how the disease is sociomaterially configured in practice within different sites across the hospital. For example, in the outpatient clinic, the disease is enacted through a conversation about pain and inability to walk distances or up stairs that takes place between the vascular surgeon and the patient. It also involves manipulation of the patient’s legs by the surgeon, and a consideration of the leg’s skin colour and texture, as well as measurements of blood pressure in the legs. In the pathology lab, in contrast, the disease is enacted through dissecting arteries taken from an amputated limb and then examining cross sections of the arterial walls under the microscope. As Mol (2002, p. 35, emphasis in original) writes: The practices of enacting clinical atherosclerosis and pathological sclerosis exclude one another. The first requires a patient who complains about pain in his legs. And the second requires a cross section of an artery visible under the microscope […] It is not a question of looking from different perspectives. […] The incompatibility is a practical matter. It is a matter of patients who speak, as against body parts that are sectioned. Of talking about pain, as against estimating the size of cells. Of asking questions, as against preparing slides. In the outpatient clinic and in the department of pathology, atherosclerosis is done differently.

Mol argues that the disease is not a self-standing and discrete entity. It does not stand by itself. It is not independent or fixed or singular. Rather, it is sociomaterially configured by the practices that

involve particular bodies, skills, places, instruments, interactions, tests, measures, and so on. That is, the disease – and by extension, social life more generally – is thoroughly constituted within contingent practices.

Implications of researching practice Each of the three modes of engaging practice in research make different contributions to knowledge, and represent different challenges and implications for the conduct and outcomes of organizational research. A focus on practice as a phenomenon establishes the centrality of practice in the ongoing conduct of organizational life. It argues compellingly that to develop an understanding of how it is that organization – or more specifically, organizing – happens, we must understand what organizational members do every day when they show up for work (wherever and whenever that may be). This focus on the details of everyday doings – both the mundane and the novel – recognizes that organizational life tends not to be the rational, orderly, homogenous and invariant phenomenon often portrayed in formal theories and abstracted models. On the contrary – as studies of practice highlight – organizational realities are rich with contingency, complexity, interdependence and emergence. And while such ‘messiness’ is difficult to parse and represent, assuming it away does a disservice to the practitioners and to knowledge. A focus on the phenomenon of practice in organizational research thus insists on taking seriously the everyday realities of organizing as they show up in practice, however inconvenient or complicating these render the processes and products of research. A commitment to the phenomenon of practice requires deep engagement in the field, observing or working with practitioners in action. Such intensive and extensive fieldwork is time-consuming and generates large amounts of qualitative data that are demanding to analyse. It also requires committed and open access from participating organizations and their members, who will need to engage in, or at least be tolerant of, the ongoing research effort. Whether researchers are conducting a participant

Practice in research

observation study or an action research project, they will need to carefully navigate and negotiate the terms of their engagement in and their intellectual and ethical obligations to the participating organization. Expectations of researchers by organization members will vary from sharing insights, offering practical suggestions and making normative recommendations, to facilitating specific changes in practitioners’ capabilities and shifts in their practice. Knowledge outcomes from immersive practice studies tend to take on a different form than traditional academic research. They are much more likely to be directly relevant to the practitioners and contexts studied. Whether through detailed field study or through active intervention, the deep engagement in particular sites allows for the findings generated to be very applicable to the situations at hand. Extending these specific findings to other contexts is more challenging. In particular, such insights are bounded, historically and contextually, and any theory that is built from participant observation studies is necessarily grounded in specific conditions. Action research projects do not seek to test or build theory but to understand living systems in action and how to change them. They design and implement distinct interventions whose effects are necessarily local and situated. Nevertheless, the experiential learning to be had from attempting to shift organizations (and then studying what happens) typically generates valuable process lessons that can be usefully applied in other contexts. A focus on practice as a perspective involves employing, to a greater or lesser extent, the conceptual scaffolding afforded by one or other existing practice theory. It entails treating practices as a central lens through which to understand organizations, examining the recurrent doings and saying of actors and how those are both shaped by and shape structural conditions and consequences. Appropriation of a practice theoretic lens requires researchers to attend to certain aspects of social phenomena – the specifics varying by the particular practice theory taken up – for example, the emergent and contingent nature of everyday activity, its human embodiment, material mediation, embeddedness in socio-political contexts and enactment

29

of social structures. This raises the question of how to effectively account for such emergent, contingent, embodied, mediated, embedded and enacted aspects of everyday life. Furthermore, given that a practice perspective theorizes both situated activities and institutional consequences, as well as their recursive interaction, a key empirical issue is where and how to pay attention to all these aspects. As some bracketing is practically necessary, how is this to be done? Where should researchers draw boundaries around actors, objects, activities and political/institutional/cultural structures? And what are the implications for knowledge of what is left in and what is left out? Making these methodological choices has important theoretical and practical consequences, highlighting what we choose to keep in view and obscuring what we choose to cut out – ‘the brighter the light, the darker the shadow’. While the theoretical insights developed through a practice perspective may, at first blush, appear less directly influential in practice, theories too have powerful pragmatic implications. Indeed, Giddens (1993, p. 15) makes a strong argument for what he calls the ‘double hermeneutic’ in the social sciences. That is, the discourse of social studies circulates in and out of its subject-matter, reflexively restructuring it. One consequence of the double hermeneutic is that original ideas and findings in social science tend to ‘disappear’ to the degree to which they are incorporated within the familiar components of practical activities. This is one of the main reasons why social science […] typically sustains less prestige in the public eye […] In reality, the impact of social science – understood in the widest possible way, as systematic and informed reflection upon the conditions of social activity – is of core significance to modern institutions, which are unthinkable without it.

The people we study appropriate the concepts we develop and, in so doing, change the reality that we have studied. As Geertz (1973) put it, our models of reality become models for reality. A focus on practice as a philosophy entails the claim that all social life is constituted in practices, and thus pushes this notion of double hermeneutic even further. If social life is constituted in practices,

30 Wanda J. Orlikowski

then so too do practices of social science participate directly in the constitution of social reality. A practice philosophy thus has strong epistemological implications for the nature and politics of social science research, suggesting in particular that the long-standing commitment to a representational epistemology needs to be displaced. Barad (2007, p. 46) writes, ‘Representationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent […] That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities – representations and entities to be represented’. In this form of social science research there is ‘a bracketing out of the significance of practices; that is, representationalism marks a failure to take account of the practices through which representations are produced” (p. 53). In contrast, a performative epistemology ‘takes account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing, but rather from a direct material engagement with the world’ (p. 49). As Tsoukas (1998) notes, ‘the models through which we view the world are not mere mirrors upon which the world is passively reflected but, in an important sense, our models also help constitute the world we experience’ (p. 792, emphasis in original). A similar argument is made by Law and Urry (2004, p. 391) who observe that social inquiry and its methods are profoundly productive; ‘they do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it’. This, they argue, is a recognition that the methods of social science ‘have effects; they make differences; […] and they can help to bring into being what they also discover’ (p. 393). As a result, ‘social science is performative. It produces realities’ (p. 395, emphasis in original). The shift away from a representational epistemology towards a performative one raises important political and ethical questions (Rouse 2001). In particular, it begs the question of what kinds of realities are being produced through our social science. Law and Urry (2004, p. 397) argue that the kind of reality that social science has tended to produce is a singular one, ‘composed of discrete entities standing in hierarchical or inclusive relations with one another’. And, as they argue, such

a reality is not productive in a twenty-first century where social relations are increasingly entangled, ephemeral, non-linear, unpredictable, global and mobile. Shifting towards a practice ontology and thus a performative epistemology may help to provide more productive metaphors and approaches for studying contemporary organizational life. But it will challenge established institutional norms, practices and criteria of organizational research that are premised on a representational epistemology.

Conclusion The turn to practice in management studies – and particularly in the strategy-as-practice school of thought – has been a welcome addition to the repertoire of ideas and approaches that scholars use to study organizational phenomena. In focusing on practice as a phenomenon, the value of engaging with the everyday doings of organizing has been foregrounded. In focusing on practice as a perspective, the value of practice theories in examining and explicating specific organizational phenomena has been articulated. In focusing on practice as a philosophy, the value of understanding practice as constitutive of reality has been highlighted. Furthermore, the entailments of a practice philosophy within management studies help us to see that engaging with practice in research – whether through descriptions, interventions, appropriations or enactments – is itself a performance that helps to constitute particular kinds of practices and organizations. Law and Singleton (2000, p. 767) note that ‘every description of the world also participates in social and material agenda-setting’. Thus, key questions the community of Strategy as Practice scholars might want to ask going forward are: What and whose agenda is being set in our research, and by whom? And what are the performative consequences of our various modes of engaging with practice, and more pointedly, if our research helps to produce certain organizational outcomes then what kinds of organizational outcomes do we want to help produce?

Practice in research References Argyris, C., Putnam, R. and Smith, D. 1985. Action Science: Concepts, Methods and Skills for Research and Intervention. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Barad, K. 2003. ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs, 28, 3: 801–831. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barnes, B. 2001. ‘Practice as Collective Action’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 17–28. Bartunek, J. M. and Louis, M. R. 1996. Insider/Outsider Team Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Baskerville, R. and Myers, M. D. 2004. ‘Special Issue on Action Research in Information Systems: Making IS Research Relevant to Practice,’ MIS Quarterly, 28, 3: 329–333. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. 1991. ‘Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation,’ Organization Science, 2, 1: 40–57. Bucciarelli, L. L. 1994. Designing Engineers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Buroway, M. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Button, G. (ed.) 1993. Technology in Working Order: Studies in Work, Interaction and Technology. London: Routledge. Checkland, P. 1999. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (2nd edn). London: Wiley. Ciborra, C. 2002. The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dourish, P. and Button, G. 1998. ‘On “Technomethodology” : Foundational Relationships Between Ethnomethodology and System Design’. Human-Computer Interaction, 13: 395–432.

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Emirbayer, M. 1997. ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 103, 2: 281–317. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Gasser, L. 1986. ‘The Integration of Computing and Routine Work’, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 4, 3: 205–225. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gherardi, S. 2006. Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1993. New Rules of Sociological Method (2nd edn). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kling, R. 1991. ‘Computerization and Social Transformations’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 16, 3: 342–367. Knorr Cetina, K. 2001. ‘Objectual Practice’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 175–188. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lave, J. 1988. Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. and Singelton, V. 2000. ‘Performing Technology’s Stories: On Social Constructivism, Performance and Performativity’, Technology and Culture, 41, 4: 765–775. Law, J. and Urry, J. 2004. ‘Enacting the Social’, Economy and Society, 33, 3: 390–410. Lewin, K. 1946. ‘Action research and minority problems’. Journal of Social Issues, 2, 4: 34–46. Luff, P., Hindmarsh, J. and Heath, C. (eds.) 2000. Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice

32 Wanda J. Orlikowski and Informing System Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, M. 2001. ‘Ethnomethodology and the Logic of Practice’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 131–148. Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Molloy, E. 2007. ‘Practice Theory’. In Thorpe, R. and Holt R. (eds.) The Sage Dictionary of Qualitative Management Research. London: Sage Publications, 163–165. Mumford, E. and Hensall, D. 1979. Participative Approaches to Computer Systems Design. London: Associated Design Press. Orlikowski, W. J. 1992. ‘The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations’, Organization Science, 3, 3: 398–427. 1996. ‘Improvising Organizational Transformation over Time: A Situated Change Perspective’, Information Systems Research, 7, 1: 63–92. 2000. ‘Using Technology and Constituting Structures’. Organization Science, 11, 4: 404–428. Orr, J. 1996. Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ortner, S. B. 1984. ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26, 1: 126–166. Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency and Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2001. ‘Practice and Posthumanism: Social Theory and a History of Agency’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 163–174. Postill, J. (forthcoming) ‘Introduction: Theorising Media and Practice’. In Bräuchler, B. and Postill, J. (eds.) Theorising Media and Practice. New York: Berghahn. Rapoport, R., Bailyn, L., Fletcher, J. K., and Pruitt, B. H. 2002. Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Reckwitz, A. 2002. ‘Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Cultural Theorizing’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5, 2: 243–263.

Rouse, J. 1996. Engaging Science: How to Understand its Practices Philosophically. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2001. ‘Two Concepts of Practices’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 189–198. Rynes, S. L., Bartunek, J. M. and Daft, R. L. 2001. ‘Across the Great Divide: Knowledge Creation and Transfer between Practitioners and Academics’, The Academy of Management Journal, 44, 2: 340–355. Sachs, P. 1995. ‘Transforming Work: Collaboration, Learning and Design’, Communications of the ACM, 38, 9: 36–44. Schatzki, T. R. 2001a. ‘Practice Theory’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 1–14. 2001b. ‘Practice Mind-ed Orders’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 42–55. 2002. The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. ‘The Sites of Organizations’, Organization Studies, 26, 3: 465–484. Schatzki, T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Schein, E. H. 1985. Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. 1987. The Clinical Perspective in Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 1999. Process Consultation Revisited. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Schön, D. A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books. Suchman, L. A. 1987. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. 2007. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swidler, A. 2001. ‘What Anchors Cultural Practices’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and

Practice in research von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 74–92. Taylor, C. 1985. Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, R. J. 1994. What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tsoukas, H. 1998. ‘The Word and the World: A Critique of Representationalism in Management Research’, International Journal of Public Administration, 21, 5: 781–817.

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Turner, S. 2001. ‘Throwing out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices’. In Schatzki T. R., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 120–130. Van de Ven, A. H. and Johnson, P. E. 2006. ‘Knowledge for Theory and Practice’, Academy of Management Review, 31, 4: 802–821. Whittington, R. 2006. ‘Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research’, Organization Studies, 27, 5: 613–634. Whyte, W. F. (ed.) 1991. Participatory Action Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Zuboff, S. 1988. In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic Books.

CHAPTER

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Epistemological alternatives for researching Strategy as Practice: building and dwelling worldviews RO BE RT C H IA and A N D REAS RASCHE

Introduction The ordinary practitioners […] live ‘down below’, below the threshold at which visibility begins […] their knowledge […] is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms […] It is as though the practices were characterized by their blindness (de Certeau 1984, p. 93)

Most traditional approaches to strategy research have tended to consist of a complex amalgam of activities consisting of the analyses of dependent and independent variables, theoretical conjecturing and the testing of theories and models developed to capture the essence of strategic realities (Rasche 2007). In this regard, the Strategy as Practice approach to research is a welcome departure in its single-minded insistence on focusing primarily on what strategy practitioners actually do. Although the Strategy as Practice field has attracted a mass of empirical work (Balogun and Johnson 2005; Jarzabkowski 2005; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002; Regnér 2003; Samra-Fredericks 2003) and theoretical clarification (Denis et al. 2007; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Johnson et al. 2003; Whittington 1996, 2003, 2006), the alternative epistemological groundings available and how they may affect further efforts at conceptualizing Strategy as Practice remain relatively unarticulated. This is despite the fact that there have been some notable attempts to clarify research and methodological priorities for the Strategy as Practice movement (Balogun et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski 2003, 2004, 2005; Johnson et al. 2003; Whittington 2006). As researchers it is vital that substantial consideration is given to the manner in which accounts and explanations proffered on strategy practice 34

are reflexively moderated by an acute awareness of the inherent problems relating to the ‘situatedness’ of strategic action and hence the epistemological issues associated with such attempted representations. The manner in which academically articulated accounts of strategy practice tend to create a schism between such accounts and the very practices they purport to explain is one of the most intractable problems of the research process. Such a schism can only be addressed and rectified through a careful examination of the dominant research dispositions and the nature and limitations of the resultant explanatory outcomes involved. In this chapter, we explore how the explanatory rupture between research accounts of strategy practice and the practice itself is intimately linked to the adoption of a widely held set of epistemological premises that we term here the building worldview. This dominant view relies on two core assumptions. First, that each individual is a discrete bounded entity relating externally to its social environment and to other individuals in such a way as to leave its basic internally specified identity and agentic qualities relatively unchanged. A ‘social atomism’ (de Certeau 1984, p. xi) or methodological individualism (Weber 1968, p. 15) is presupposed. Individuals are conceived of as being separated by a structure of invisible ‘walls’ and this tends to ‘obscure and distort our understanding of our own life in society’ (Elias 1978, p. 15). Second, the building worldview presupposes a Cartesian split between the mental and the physical realms so that proper knowledge is construed as the ability to represent the world around us in the mind in the form of mental images. Cognition and mental representation necessarily precede any meaningful

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action. What distinguishes ‘action’ as opposed to ‘mere’ behaviour, as such, is that actors are deemed to be motivated by prior thought-out intentions and act purposefully to attain pre-specified goals. By purposeful, we mean a deliberately designed and planned form of intervention. Strategic action is thus explained through recourse to the meaning and intention of actors and a means–ends logic of action is presumed. We contrast this building worldview with a dwelling one in which the identities and characteristics of persons are not deemed to pre-exist social interactions and social practices. Rather, the individual person is viewed as a product of the ‘condensations of histories of growth and maturation within fields of social relations […] every person emerges as a locus of development within such a field’ (Ingold 2000, p. 3). Hence, neither the individual nor society is to be construed as self-contained entities interacting externally with each other (Elias 1991, p. 456). Instead, both the individual and society are viewed as mutually constitutive and co-defining impulses relying on ‘complex responsive processes’ (Stacey 2007, p. 247) to become who and what they are. Social practices themselves are given primacy over individual agency and intention (Chia and Holt 2006; Ezzamel and Willmott 2008) so much so that the individual is understood as a locus ‘in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interact’ (de Certeau 1984, p. xi). Neither individuals nor some overarching deterministic superstructures are the real ‘co-authors’ of action. In this regard, a relational ontology of individuation is presupposed (Chia and MacKay 2007; Chia and Holt 2006, p. 635; Ezzamel and Willmott 2008, p. 197). What this implies is that individual agents are so constituted by everyday social practices that they act and interact, for the most part, spontaneously and purposively (in contrast to purposefully) in a self-referential manner to overcome immediate problems and obstacles without any need for theoretical distancing, conscious deliberation or an overall pre-designed plan of action. There is, on this view, no presupposed prior distinction between individual and society, no dualism between mind and matter and no prior distance

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between thought and action: these are deemed to be secondary distinctions generated through social practices themselves. The delineation of such a dwelling worldview enables us to establish an alternative set of epistemological premises whereby knowledge is not some representational commodity that is digested, processed and then acted upon, but rather is ‘grown’ and re-grown through social practice within specific sociocultural and historical contexts; unconsciously internalized and incorporated into the modus operandi of the individual in the form of skills, sensitivities and overriding predispositions (Bourdieu 1990). Both the building and the dwelling modes of explanation may be employed to explain the actual practice of strategizing. Yet each produces significantly different explanatory outcomes. Thus, whilst it is possible to straightforwardly identify and catalogue the explicit and purposeful ‘doings’ of assigned strategists – the tools, artefacts, talk, away-day meetings and strategy presentations, etc. – it is also true to say that much of what goes on in the actual process of evolving a coherent strategy consists of small unspectacular everyday coping actions throughout an organization. These are carried out in a self-absorbed manner by individuals that do not presume deliberate forethought or conscious planning on their part. We believe that Strategy as Practice scholars have not given adequate attention to this latter aspect of strategy making and the tacit form of practical knowledge associated with it even though there are now signs that some strategy researchers are beginning to address these issues (Baumard 1999; Regnér 2003; Nonaka and Toyama 2007). Hence, our aim here is to draw on these insights to enrich accounts of strategy practice by expanding the epistemological possibilities available to the Strategy as Practice research movement. Our analysis proceeds as follows. In the next section, we lay the ground for our argumentation by discussing (a) how epistemological considerations interact with the strategy research process and (b) how traditional epistemological assumptions have informed strategy scholars’ thinking. In the third section, we draw on these insights to distinguish between a building and a dwelling worldview and the specific epistemologies

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associated with each of these. We show that two types of knowledge, episteme and techné, are intimately linked to the dominant building worldview whilst another two, phronesis and mētis, constitute the form of practical knowing characterized by a dwelling mode. In the final section, we first argue that a lot of Strategy as Practice research is still rooted in the building epistemology and then explore the implications of adopting a dwelling worldview for the future direction of the Strategy as Practice movement. We show that adopting a dwelling set of epistemological premises opens up new avenues for explaining the acquired disposition towards strategy practice as a form of mundane or opportunistic everyday strategizing that is inherently unspectacular but that is yet unquestionably efficacious and transformational in its overall conduct.

Epistemology and the research process Problems and tensions of researching strategy practice The term epistemology is based on the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (account/explanation) and is often misperceived to be solely about propositional forms of knowledge-claims underpinned by a rationally inspired mode of thought. In ‘proper’ epistemological inquiry, therefore, the facts, the theory, the alternatives and the ideals are brought together and weighed against each other in the creation of knowledge. The prevailing emphasis on this specific form of knowledge meant that only that which can be subjected to linguistic explication, propositional articulation and universal generalization or precise measurement is deemed to be proper knowledge. The problem with relying solely on this type of knowledge in academic research is that it misses out on a wealth of tacit, inarticulate and often inarticulatable understandings of strategy practitioners as they go about their practical affairs. Indeed, for most of the time, practitioners themselves may be unaware of this tacit knowledge that they possess. This means that when they are questioned in the research process, respondents may unsuspectingly

feel pressurized to justify, account for or clarify their actions in an explicitly logical and coherent manner that is readily understandable to the researcher, thereby distorting what they actually know and do. They are required to respond to the questions, concerns and preoccupations of researchers in a social context which is distant from the immediate demands of practical engagements, and do so using a logic and vocabulary foreign to that of everyday application, so much so that they may unwittingly conceal from themselves and their interrogators the true nature of their practical mastery (Bourdieu 2002, p. 19). This means that the practice-naïve academic researcher and the research-naïve practitioner may actually unintentionally collude in producing an overly deliberate and rationalistic account of what has actually happened through their retrospective sensemaking (Weick 2001). The situation is far less problematic when successful strategists express their own views in autobiographical accounts, for instance, because there they are less constrained by academic protocols. In the case of formalized research, however, the conversion from the prospective orientation of inventive, opportunistic and timely action on the part of practitioners to the retrospective theoretical schema of logical explanation connives to transform the reality of practice in process to an efficiency ‘model’ of action and the framing of experience in strictly instrumental causal terms, thereby ‘flattening out’ the more enfolded and circuitous reality of everyday strategic coping practices. This is partly because, for research to be acceptable and publishable in prestigious journals, scholars are required to adopt ‘discursive practices’ that conform to the tight demands of an academic community that recognizes only propositional forms of knowledge and explicit causal explanations as the legitimate form of knowledge. Producing knowledge acceptable to the exacting demands of academic scholarship, therefore, risks killing off that very thing which makes research itself a worthwhile activity (Mintzberg 2004, p. 399). It tends to leave out the tacit ‘feel’ for a strategy situation which is intuitively understood by the strategy practitioner but which is hardly ever acknowledged in research accounts.

Epistemological alternatives for research

The epistemological legacy of Western thought To understand the grounds on which the described schism between theory and practice has been generated, we explore deeper into the epistemological legacy of Western thought in this section. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Plato’s successor, Aristotle, distinguished between three types of knowledge which he called episteme, techné and phronesis. Episteme is universal truth that is context-independent, rationally based and objective. Baumard (1999, p. 53) maintains that episteme is propositional knowledge and expertise ‘about’ things. It is abstract, universal and hierarchical knowledge that can be ‘written, recorded, and validated’. It is explicitly articulated in causal terms and can be systematically verified empirically. Similarly, techné is about craftsmanship and involves precise codifiable techniques or practical instructions that are amenable to linguistic explication. Both episteme and techné are often used interchangeably amongst the ancient Greeks, as Nussbaum (1986, p. 94) noted. Both reflect the aspirations towards explicitness, universality, precision, clarity and teachability; all values associated with what was deemed desirable in ancient Greece and still held in the highest esteem, particularly in academic circles (Raphals 1992, p. 227). Knowledge is thus only considered such if it is capable of being expressed linguistically in terms of principles, causes or actor meanings and intentions. In addition to episteme and techné, however, Aristotle also posited (though less emphatically) the existence of phronesis (practical wisdom) as a less accessible form of personal knowing which differs qualitatively from episteme and techné in that it ‘expresses the kind of person that one is’ (Dunne 1993, p. 244). Whilst episteme and techné imply the explicitness and transmissibility of knowledge, phronesis alludes to a form of tacit knowing that emerges through a person’s striving and that is inseparable from an individual’s entire cultural attitude and predisposition. Whilst both episteme and techné can be consciously learned and hence can be forgotten, ‘phronesis cannot’ (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 6.5.1140b28–30, cited in Dunne 1993, p. 265) since it is always

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already integral to an individual’s make-up. Unlike episteme or techné, where it is possible to make a distinction between intention and behaviour and hence between what one is and what one does, in phronesis, what one does is inextricable from what one is. Unlike episteme and technē which produce outcomes that are clearly separable from the producer, phronesis gives rise to praxis which cannot be instrumentalized: it is action that seeks no outcomes other than its own self-realization (p. 262). In phronetic action (i.e. praxis) the agent […] is constituted through the actions […] he becomes and discovers ‘who’ he is through these actions. And the medium for this becoming through action is not one over which he is ever sovereign master; it is rather, a network of other people who are also agents and with whom he is bound in relationships of interdependence. (Dunne 1993, pp. 262–263)

This intimate relationship between being and doing, between intention and action, and between identity and strategy, makes phronesis extremely difficult to apprehend and hence it remains very much an unexplored feature in strategy research (Baumard 1999; Nonaka and Toyama 2007). Moreover, recent studies of pre-Socratic Greek culture and society, including especially the insights expressed in Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony (Detienne and Vernant 1978), suggest the existence of yet another form of practical knowing on which even Plato and Aristotle remained surprisingly silent. Detienne and Vernant called this form of ‘cunning intelligence’ mētis. Mētis is ‘a type of intelligence and of thought, a way of knowing; it […] combines flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over years’ (p. 4). The field of application for mētis is a world that is shifting, multiple, disconcerting and ambivalent. Whilst phronesis was still considered in Aristotelian thought, and is increasingly recognized and acknowledged as, a form of ‘tacit knowledge’ or ‘practical wisdom’ (Baumard 1999; Nonaka and Toyama 2007), the quality of mētis was ignored by the Greek philosophers and this has also been the case in strategy research. Mētis corresponds to what we mean

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when we say that someone is ‘street-smart’ or who seems able to ‘get away with things’ or ‘get out of difficult situations’ with cunning and ease. Both phronesis and mētis are relatively unexplored and hence unacknowledged in the Strategy as Practice research agenda. Yet they are vital tacit qualities of an effective strategy practitioner. In what follows, we show that phronesis and mētis are alternative epistemologies intimately linked to a dwelling mode of thinking.

Building and dwelling – two worldviews for Strategy as Practice research Comparing the building and dwelling worldviews In The Practice of Everyday life, de Certeau (1984, pp. 91–93) finds himself at the top of the ill-fated World Trade Center in New York musing on the distinction between the view looking down on the city and enjoying the voyeuristic pleasures of seeing it all neatly laid out below as one would view a map of a city, and the view of the city as most ordinary people would see it; pedestrians engrossed in their specific circumstances and unthinkingly finding their way around at the street level itself. Unlike the detached transcendent observer looking from atop the building, the pedestrians on the streets down below do not have a map-like view or comprehensive picture of the city but experience a series of migrational outlooks which is continuously changing as they actually walk the streets at ‘ground zero’ – unthinkingly but deftly avoiding traffic, sidestepping and negotiating their way around obstacles, ignoring the honking, but noticing the displays on the sidewalk, passing by, reaching towards and generally ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom 1959) on their way to work. This is the creative experience of weaving spaces, events and situations together in a subjective self-referential manner. The richness of experiences involved in such pedestrian journeys cannot be captured by static maps, tracing routes or locating positions. Nor can they be even descriptively exhausted through seeking out and clarifying the meanings and intentions of actors, since such everyday activities are

often conducted unthinkingly in situ. The pedestrians ‘down below’ have no privileged ‘birds-eye’ view and must act by ‘reaching out’ from wherever they find themselves, feeling their way towards a satisfactory resolution of their immediate circumstances. In this astute observation, de Certeau is making a vital distinction between two different outlooks and their associated modes of engagement and knowing that we label here the ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’ worldviews. In the building mode, researchers suppose that there is an initial pre-cognitive separation between the actor and the world, so much so that the strategy actor has first a need to ‘construct mental representations and models of the world prior to any practical engagement with it’ (Ingold 2000, p. 178). As such, the strategy actor is assumed to be distinct and detached from the situation he/she finds him/herself in, much like de Certeau’s viewer looking from atop the World Trade Center building. Strategizing is thus construed as the act of planning purposeful ‘interventions’ into the flow of reality to affect a desired outcome. Such action is necessarily ‘heroic’ in that it presupposes the attempt on the part of the actor to impose his/her will and ideal onto an otherwise recalcitrant reality. It directs attention to the meaning, intention and purposefulness of the individual actor and portrays the strategy actor as a self-contained entity engaging externally with reality. In the dwelling mode of theorizing, on the other hand, people are assumed to be intimately immersed and inextricably intertwined with their surroundings in all its complex interrelatedness. They have no privileged ‘birds-eye’ view of their situation and hence must act from wherever they find themselves to achieve a satisfactory resolution of their immediate predicament. In their everyday activities, people engage in ‘wayfinding’ (Hutchins 1995), creating action pathways that radiate outwards from their concrete existential situations. Like the pedestrians in de Certeau’s (1984) observation, people experience the city streets by reaching out and feeling ‘their way through a world that is itself […] continually coming into being’ (Ingold 2000, p. 155). Self and world (e)merge in the concrete activities of dwelling where skills are acquired and developed ‘without necessarily

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Table 2.1 Contrasting a building and dwelling epistemology (adopted and modified from Chia and Holt 2006, p. 644) Building worldview

Dwelling worldview

Actors are self-conscious, intentional and selfmotivated.

Actors as non-deliberate, relationally constituted nexus of social activities.

Actions are guided by predefined goals directing efforts towards outcomes – purposeful action.

Actions are directed towards overcoming immediate impediment – purposive practical coping.

Consistency of action assumed to be ordered by deliberate intent.

Consistency of action assumed to be ordered by a modus operandi – an internalized disposition.

passing through consciousness’ (Dreyfus 1991, p. 27). In such a dwelling mode, decisions and actions emanate from being in situ and occur sponte sua. Here, the efficacy of action does not depend upon some pre-thought plan of action but results from internalized predispositions that facilitate continuous timely and ongoing adjustment and adaptation to local circumstances. What is crucial to the dwelling mode of explanation is that it acknowledges the primacy of tacit knowledge over explicit knowledge. It recognizes that such forms of tacit knowing are acquired through living within and becoming intimately acquainted with local conditions ‘on the ground’, and not from some detached observer’s point of view. In other words, the dwelling mode of engagement presupposes possession of phronesis and/ or mētis. Actions are taken in relation to changes observed in a specific local context and not as a universal rule or principle. Moreover, such small local adaptations and the timeliness involved in doings are incremental and ‘unheroic’ so that they often go unnoticed. The practical intelligence involved is subtle, tacit and oblique, unlike the kind of direct means–ends logic of explanation used to account for purposeful human action. Table 2.1 summarizes the relationship between a building and dwelling worldview.

Towards a dwelling worldview – phronesis and metis To better understand what we mean by a dwelling epistemology and its implications, we now link the concepts of phronesis and mētis to our discussion. As we have maintained, unlike episteme or techné, phronesis and mētis, though different forms of tacit

knowing, are acquired through the immersion and internalizing of embedded social practices. These are learned unconsciously and unintentionally through exemplification, and unthinkingly emulated. Such practical knowing is generated in the immediate intimacy of lived experience, tacitly acquired through trial and error and the process of the gradual modification of behaviour, and hence does not easily lend itself to research scrutiny. Phronesis, in particular, is the tacit form of prudent practical intelligence and wisdom, acquired through experience, that accounts for the ability to perform expediently and appropriately in defined social circumstances. Nonaka and Toyama (2007, p. 6), in a recent paper on strategic management, suggest that strategy-in-practice may be better understood as ‘distributed phronesis’. In largely agreeing with the emphasis on Strategy as Practice, Nonaka and Toyama make the point that strategy as practical wisdom arises from the desire to pursue a ‘common goodness’ and hence necessarily involves subjective value judgments. This is where phronesis differs qualitatively from episteme and techné. Thus, ‘if techné is the knowledge of how to make the car well, phronesis is the knowledge of what a good car is […] and how to endeavour to build such a car’ (p. 8). Neither episteme nor techné can answer the question of what a ‘good’ car is, since this is a subjective valuation. Only through phronesis can one answer that question. By couching the problematic in this manner, however, Nonaka and Toyama are in danger of ‘instrumentalizing’ phronetic action (praxis), which as we have shown is inseparable from a person’s being and internalized predisposition. Someone with phronesis cannot help acting in

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the way he/she does. He or she is internally predisposed to building a ‘good’ car in this instance; it is part of being, as we have argued above. Our view is that Nonaka and Toyama overlook the most important aspect of phronesis; that it is a culturally shaped and socially internalized modus operandi or habitus (Bourdieu 1990), integral and inextricable from one’s own self-identity. Phronesis denotes a shared propensity to act in a manner congruent with our own sense of who we are. For this reason, we can agree with Nonaka and Toyama that phronesis may indeed be an immanent, and socially distributed, strategic orientation which is enacted and re-enacted through the everyday coping actions of a collectivity. Mētis, on the other hand, is the kind of practical intelligence required to escape puzzling and ambiguous situations and is particularly applicable to those research settings that do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic (Baumard 1999, p. 65). Raphals (1992, p. 5) points out that whilst phronesis is ‘practical but not inherently oblique, devious or indirect’, mētic intelligence operates with a ‘peculiar twist’; it reflects the internalized ability to attain a surprising reversal of situations. So whilst phronesis is tacit shared practical wisdom associated with goodness and virtue, mētis has no such moral compunctions. It is more associated with clandestine and seemingly ‘unsavoury’ ruses, cunning and opportunism; with the ability to ‘get away’ with things as and when needed. Mētis operates through duplicity and disguise, concealing its true lethal nature beneath a reassuring exterior. It is characterized by agility, suppleness, swiftness of action and the art of dissimulation (seeing without being seen or acting without being seen to act). It is a form of primordially acquired ‘strategy’, where the emphasis is on constantly seeking out practical ways to survive dangerous situations or to ‘outwit’ the competition. The eminent Yale anthropologist James Scott (1998) maintains that ‘Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of mētis’ (Scott 1998, p. 316, emphasis in original). Mētis reflects the ability to attain a surprising reversal of unfavourable situations to achieve favourable outcomes through diversionary

practices such as poachings, surprises, trickery and deceit. Mētis is quintessentially the strategy of the ‘weak’, the disempowered or the disadvantaged (de Certeau 1984, pp. 37–40). Both phronesis and mētis point to the myriad ways by which strategy actors, finding themselves in a given situation, are still able to spontaneously and without much forethought transform unfavourable circumstances into favourable outcomes through their practical wisdom, alertness, resourcefulness and guile. When referring to phronesis and mētis, researchers can distinguish the everyday purposiveness of absorbed practical coping action from the purposefulness of planned action (Chia and Holt 2006, p. 648). Both phronesis and mētic intelligence are internalized predispositions inscribed onto material bodies that generate the propensity to act in a manner congruent with the demands of shifting material situations. They constitute the authentic art of strategizing that is peculiarly sensitive to time – duration as well as simultaneity – and hence they are particularly well suited for dealing with transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous situations. It is quintessentially that which continues to remain ‘outside’ the remit of Strategy as Practice theorizing, yet is everywhere to be seen in practice.

Building and dwelling worldviews – consequences for Strategy as Practice research Both the building and the dwelling modes of comprehension may be employed to understand the actual practice of strategizing, each with its own merit. Yet, to date, it has been the former that has primarily occupied the attention of the Strategy as Practice research community.

Strategy as Practice research and the building epistemology Although Strategy as Practice scholars have taken much care to conceptualize strategy practices as flexible and being based on practitioners’ improvizations in praxis (Whittington 2006, p. 620), and although they have encouraged methodological

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pluralism in research (Balogun et al. 2003; Whittington 2003), we contend here that their underlying epistemological assumptions remain within the realms of traditional scholarship and that their attention is restricted to considering practitioners’ actions in terms circumscribed by episteme and techné. Both phronesis and mētis as equally legitimate tacit forms of knowledge possessed by practitioners do not feature much in their studies. The central assumption of the autonomous strategic actor relying on explicit knowledge to deliberately analyse, plan, and then purposefully act to attain predefined ends, remains a core feature of the research agenda. To be sure, the focus is directed to more micro everyday strategic sensemaking activities, but the focus remains on what formally assigned organizational strategists actually do and the rational choices they make. In a recent paper, Ezzamel and Willmott (2008) maintain that Strategy as Practice advocates like Jarzabkowski (2005) and Whittington (2006) continue to rely on an interpretive approach to peer into the black box of everyday strategizing and to examine ‘how, for example, decision-makers’ cognitive frameworks yield their sense of the context; and how these frameworks inform their actions’ (Ezzamel and Willmott 2008, p. 196), without acknowledging that such research accounts are ‘inescapably constitutive of what (they) claim to capture or reflect’ (p. 196). Ezzamel and Willmott insist, rightly in our view, that even though Strategy as Practice theorists continue to employ and emphasize the primacy of practice, citing seminal thinkers such as Bourdieu (1990) and Foucault (1972, 1984) as key advocates, they have not actually embraced the latter’s relational ontology. ‘SAP [Strategy as Practice] analysis incorporates little consideration of how, for example, engaging in practices is constitutive of practitioners as subjects’ (Ezzamel and Willmott 2008, p. 197). Instead, practices are mainly construed in terms of how assigned strategists ‘think, talk, reflect, act, interact, emote, embellish, politicise’ (Jarzabkowski 2005, p. 3). It is these explicit doings of strategists which feed into Strategy as Practice theorizing. Practices themselves remain secondary outputs of individuals. In maintaining

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this epistemological stance, Strategy as Practice researchers continue to subscribe to what we have called here a building worldview. Such a research orientation overlooks the formative character of social practices on the individual’s or organization’s identity. In other words, it fails to consider the fact that so-called strategic ‘choices’ are shaped by deeply embedded internalized tendencies distributed throughout the organization and acquired through socialization/ acculturation, and that this predisposition, or habitus, itself constitutes an immanent strategy of sorts. Instead, the impression conveyed of organizational strategy making is one in which important individuals gather themselves in corporate boardrooms, away-days and summer retreats, enjoying fresh air and/or distance from the cacophony of business operations, to make glitzy presentations and produce glossy reports with a view to charting out the future direction of the organization. This view of strategy making as a deliberate, intentional and goal-driven activity is itself dispositionally embedded into much of Strategy as Practice research because of the continuing commitment to proper explicit knowledge (i.e. episteme and techné). Hendry and Seidl (2003, p. 176), for instance, characterize strategic episodes as ‘a sequence of communications structured in terms of a beginning and ending’. Although we agree that such episodes exist (e.g. meetings and occasions in which senior managers separate themselves deliberately from their day-to-day routines), and that they might constitute a useful unit of strategy research and analysis, over-focusing on these formalized aspects of strategizing leads to an overlooking of the less conscious and more tacit elements involved in the build-up to those episodes in the first place. Similarly, strategy practices are often viewed in a manner that allows a researcher to document and classify precise outcomes and to establish causal relations. Mantere (2005), for instance, uses Jarzabkowski’s (2004) distinction between recursive and adaptive practices to assign clear outcomes (e.g. task definition) to the identified practices (e.g. organizing) and to then characterize key strategy practices in terms of their causes and effects. This kind of explanation

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rests squarely on the notion of knowledge as episteme and/or techné: both forms of knowledge are characterized by explicitness, classifiability and clarity and are linguistically expressible in propositional terms or in terms of actor meanings and intentions. We are not arguing that all research into strategy practice must eschew such manifest elements of the strategic activity. Rather, Strategy as Practice research should not be limited to these visible ‘doings’. Strategy as Practice consists of both visible and manifest purposeful activities and more mundane everyday practical coping actions. This idea that strategy researchers, like astute business investors, must eschew the visible and manifest and look towards the inarticulate and implicit is well understood by successful strategists themselves. Observing that it is often the hidden practical activities and not the surface glitter that is most important in accessing what is really going on in organizational reality, the chairman of Channel 4 and the private equity firm Risk Capital Partners, Luke Johnson, in a recent article in the Financial Times, writes: ‘Beware form over substance’ […] look at the underlying reality rather than the surface appearance of things […] Terry Smith, who runs the UK inter-dealer broker Tullett Prebon, once told me his footwear test of investment analysis: back the captain of industry who wears practical shoes with plastic soles rather than the ones who wear ultra-posh brogues from Church’s. The former visits factories to find out what’s going on, the latter is unlikely to be found outside London’s West End. (Financial Times, 5 March 2008, p. 14, our emphasis)

Johnson is reminding us, whether as investors or researchers, to resist the seductions of the apparent and to look beneath the surface of things; to the ‘rough ground’ (Dunne 1993) to discover the true reality of the practitioner world. Similarly, whilst the Strategy as Practice movement has rightly directed attention to the less ‘glittery’ aspects of strategy making towards the more ordinary activities, it is now timely to take the next logical step and focus attention on what escapes the building worldview on strategy making; the tacit dimension of Strategy as Practice.

Strategy as Practice research and the dwelling worldview This turn towards the tacit dimension in Strategy as Practice reflects a commitment to a dwelling mode of explanation and a deliberate focus on the role that phronesis and mētis play in the non-deliberate shaping of strategic outcomes. This is what is required to further expand the field of Strategy as Practice research; to try to track the spontaneous emergence of strategy through direct local action before deliberate planning and purposeful intention kick in. What is really needed to truly appreciate how ‘the myriad, micro activities that make up strategy and strategising in practice’ (Johnson et al. 2003, p. 3) cumulatively add up to a consistent pattern of actions, is a redirection of attention to the inarticulate and unexpressed but implied elements of the strategy process. This requires a more sympathetic grasping of the internal logic of local coping actions that take place largely unplanned and in situ in dealing with the exigencies of an evolving situation. In other words, attending to and dealing with the problems, obstacles and concerns confronted in the here and now may actually generate a surprising consistency of action that through hindsight may appear as a relatively stable pattern to which we might ascribe the label ‘strategy’. In this sense, strategy may be latent or immanent in such everyday coping actions. To grasp this immanent aspect of strategy practice we need to embrace the reality of tacit forms of understanding and the dispositional tendencies associated with these local forms of knowing. The difference between a building and dwelling worldview is well reflected in Regnér’s (2003) distinction between strategy making at the centre and the periphery. According to Regnér, strategy making at the centre is much about using deductive methods based on well-defined representations. This, from our perspective, would be much in line with a building worldview. By contrast, at the periphery decision-makers develop a phronetic awareness of the local context and strategy making is largely improvisational; strategy slowly emerges through the internalized predispositions that actors refer to. A dwelling epistemology, thus, would be a necessary supplement while studying strategy

Epistemological alternatives for research

making in the periphery. This shows that we do not think of building and dwelling epistemologies as mutually exclusive alternatives, but rather like to encourage scholars to use both while making sense of research settings. Another more practical example of how practical coping actions, shaped by an internalized modus operandi (Bourdieu 1990) and characterized by phronesis and mētis, provide the seeds for the nondeliberate development of a strategy is reflected by the case of Virgin Airways. Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Airways was born serendipitously as a consequence of him and his then girlfriend being stranded on one of the Virgin Islands during a holiday in the Caribbean in the late 1970s. When they got to the local airport on the island to return home, they found, together with other waiting passengers, that their flight to Puerto Rico had been cancelled. No one was doing anything. So I did – someone had to. Even though I hadn’t a clue what I was really doing, with a great deal of aplomb I chartered a plane for $2,000 and divided that by the number of passengers. It came to $39 a head. I borrowed a blackboard and wrote on it: VIRGIN AIRWAYS. $39 SINGLE FLIGHT TO PUERTO RICO. All the tickets were snapped up by grateful passengers. I managed to get two free tickets out of it and even made a small profit! The idea for Virgin Airways was born, right there in the middle of a holiday. (Branson 2007, pp. 39–40, our emphasis)

This spontaneous coping action, borne of necessity given the circumstances he found himself in, provided the embryonic start to the idea of running a trans-Atlantic airline. Today Virgin Airways is flying to over 300 destinations all over the world. The success of Virgin Airways, amongst many others, shows that the idea of strategy making as a formal affair conducted primarily by assigned top managers and highly paid strategists is only partially correct. Often, strategy emergence in actual practice happens quite serendipitously and relies more on an initial opportunistic intervention or on deeply embedded and unconscious dispositional tendencies than on expressed meanings, intentions and choices. To be sure, there may be some vague directional aspirations and internalized tendencies which may serve as the driving force

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behind such initially insignificant initiatives. But to understand these hidden motives, we need to resort more to phronesis and mētis as fertile modes of explanation. Only through an appreciation of how phronesis and mētis actively shape strategic behaviour can we begin to follow more closely the twists and turns of everyday absorbed practical coping; the opportunism, reversals, ruses, duplicities, disguises and inventiveness that is entailed in strategic doing. This, after all, is really what constitutes strategyin-practice, as opposed to strategy-in-theory which we all know and read about in prestigious journals. This ‘underbelly’ of strategy practice has been considered either too obscure or morally repugnant to warrant serious study. Curiously, however, the more popular ‘airport-type’ books on the practice of strategy are far more likely to acknowledge the existence of these elusive and/or ‘unsavoury’ strategic ruses. These books often relate to the thinking of ancient Greeks, von Clausewitz, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, who were centrally concerned with the oblique and circuitous elements of strategizing as described in the dwelling worldview. The importance of timing and surprise as well as deception and clever manoeuvres in gaining strategic advantage is well documented in the classic text of Carl von Clausewitz that has been taken up by practitioner-friendly books and that is studiously internalized and put into practice by successful strategists. The entrepreneur Reinhold Würth, founder of the German Wűrth Group, confesses to be an ardent devotee of Carl von Clausewitz. He writes: ‘Von Clausewitz writes that if you have to defend a fortress and you are surrounded by enemies you should send out a minor part of your troops to engage the enemy as far away as possible to enable the rest of your troops time to prepare’ (Financial Times, 5 March 2008, p. 14). In relating this lesson to his own business, Würth is endorsing the use of deception and dissimulation in business affairs as a legitimate strategy. He is acknowledging the reality of mētis in practically coping with the strategic challenges of a globalized economy. This is something the more ponderous academic literature on business strategy taught in business schools with its economics-based concern seems to leave out.

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From a dwelling worldview, practices intimated by phronesis and mētis, as the ones described in the abovementioned examples, constitute the legitimate ‘objects’ of Strategy as Practice research. Such practices are resistant to traditional conceptual analysis and can only be approached obliquely. Clearly, the shift in focus, initiated by the Strategy as Practice movement, to micro-strategizing and flexible adaptation is to be complimented. Yet an emphasis on flexibility by itself is not sufficient to move research from a building to a dwelling worldview with all its attendant consequences. What is needed in Strategy as Practice research is a redirection of attention from the declared overt activities traditionally associated with strategizing to the subtle manoeuvres adopted by individuals, organizations and businesses over the course of dealing with pressing immediate concerns that threaten their survival, growth and development. To truly appreciate the hidden workings that make up strategy and strategizing, the importance of phronetic and mētic intelligence and how that is multifariously deployed to gain momentary strategic advantage in any given situation must be fully recognized. This requires a sympathetic grasping of the internal logic of practice through following closely the everyday practical coping behaviour of strategists and not through the retrospective reasons and meanings offered by actors themselves in restricted academic research contexts. Strategy as Practice scholars need to get ‘inside’ the experiences of strategy practitioners and to use an alternative vocabulary for describing how practitioners cope on an everyday basis from where they find themselves and not from where they think they ought to be. Adopting this dwelling research stance will give us a different and more enriched account of Strategy as Practice.

Conclusions This chapter contrasts two major epistemological alternatives for Strategy as Practice research. On the one hand, the building worldview leads to a detached, spectator’s apprehension of social situations which privileges a ‘knowledge about’ typically characterized by episteme (abstract, universal

generalizations using propositional forms) and/or techné (precise, measurable, codifiable instruction) (Raphals 1992; Baumard 1999; Nonaka and Toyama 2007). Research in line with the building worldview is directed towards the visible, the manifest and often the ‘spectacular’ interventions carried out by relatively autonomous strategy actors. On the other hand, a dwelling worldview leads to an intimate, engaged and involved comprehension of the local mindsets and proficiencies required to skilfully perform the everyday practices of strategizing. It directs attention to the minutiae of tacit and almost imperceptible interventions that cumulatively produce the gradual transformation of strategic situations. An ‘unheroic’ stance is adopted so that research attention is redirected to the mundane everyday practical forms of intelligence and knowledge that are more associated with phronesis and mētis. Both phronesis and mētis are forms of knowing-in-practice recognizable as such only in their articulation; ingrained propensities, dispositions and capabilities associated with a dwelling worldview. A dwelling epistemology also points to a different understanding of strategy in general. Often, strategy is construed in terms of clarity of vision, of transparent purposefulness, of goal-directed action and systematic resource mobilization. This approach, however, is practically ‘naïve’ in that it does not take into account the fleeting transient and shifting nature of competitive realities where competitive advantage may last for only a short while. It is surprise and the capitalizing on momentary advantage that constitutes the real strategizing-inpractice. Researching ephemeral and immanent strategies involves the adoption of a dwelling epistemology; one that pays attention to the unconscious parts of strategizing and the internalized and culturally mediated modus operandi that underlies strategy practices. Although the Strategy as Practice research movement rightly aspires to document the micro moments of strategizing, we conclude that it can be enriched by incorporating the tacit dimension of strategizing to leverage the full potential of an alternative dwelling epistemology. Although the building worldview remains dominant in existing theoretical and empirical studies on the practice

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of strategy, we see a lot of potential for the dwelling worldview to supplement and extend this more traditional position. It can teach us above all that those who are researched do not necessarily have a ‘birds-eye’ view of their situation and that, consequently, the resulting knowledge they operate with is of a different genre from that of episteme and techné. To better understand and appreciate the world of practitioners, Strategy as Practice researchers must attune themselves to the more subtle nuances of strategizing: of the possibility of phronesis as a distributed practical wisdom and tacit understanding which underpins strategic actions; and of the importance of mētis in strategic manoeuvrings that appear to be more recognized and accepted by astute business practitioners themselves. References Baumard, P. (1999), Tacit Knowledge in Organizations. London: Sage. Balogun J., Huff A. and Johnson P. (2003), ‘Three Responses to Methodological Challenges of Studying Strategising’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 197–224. Balogun, J. and Johnson, G. (2005), ‘From Intended Strategy to Unintended Outcomes: The Impact of Change Recipient Sensemaking’, Organization Studies, 26/11: 1573–1602. Bourdieu, P. (1990), The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. (2002), Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Branson, R. (2007), Screw It, Lets do It. London: Virgin Books. Chia, R. and Holt, R. (2006), ‘Strategy as Practical Coping: A Heideggerian Perspective’, Organization Studies, 27/5: 635–655. Chia, R. and MacKay, B. (2007), ‘Post-processual Challenges for the Emerging Strategy-asPractice Perspective: Discovering Strategy in the Logic of Practice’, Human Relations, 60: 217–242. de Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Denis J.-L., Langley, A. and Rouleau, L. (2007), ‘Strategizing in Pluralistic Contexts: Rethinking Theoretical Frames’, Human Relations, 60: 179–215.

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Detienne, M. and Vernant, J. P. (1978), Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Sussex: The Harvester Press. Dreyfus, H. (1991), Being-in-the-World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dunne, J. (1993), Back to the Rough Ground: Phronesis and Techné in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle. London: University of Notre Dame Press. Elias, N. (1978), What is Sociology? Oxford: Blackwell. (1991), The Society of Individuals. Oxford: Blackwell. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (2008), ‘Strategy as Discourse in a Global Retailer: A Supplement to Rationalist and Interpretive Accounts’, Organization Studies, 29/2: 191–217. Foucault, M. (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper Colophon. (1984), ‘Truth and Power’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.), The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Hendry, J. and Seidl, D. (2003), ‘The Structure and Significance of Strategic Episodes – Social Systems Theory and the Routine Practices of Strategic Change’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 175–196. Hutchins, E. (1995), Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment. London, New York: Routledge. Jarzabkowski, P. (2003), ‘Strategic Practices: An Activity Theory Perspective on Continuity and Change’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 23–55. (2004), ‘Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation and Practices-in-Use’, Organization Studies, 25/4: 529–560. (2005), Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based Approach (London: Sage). Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. and Seidl, D. (2007), ‘Strategizing: The Challenges of a Practice Perspective’, Human Relations 60/1: 5–27. Jarzabkowski, P. and Wilson, D. (2002), ‘Top Teams and Strategy in a UK University’, Journal of Management Studies, 39/3: 355–381. Johnson, G., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2003), ‘Micro-Strategy and Strategising’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 3–22.

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Lindblom, C. (1959), ‘The Science of Muddling Through’, Public Administration Review, 19: 79–88. Mantere, S. (2005), ‘Strategic Practices as Enablers and Disablers of Championing Activity’, Strategic Organization, 3/2: 157–184. Mintzberg, H. (2004), Manager not MBAs. San Francisco: Berret Koehler. Nonaka, I. and Toyama, R. (2007), ‘Strategic Management as Distributed Practical Wisdom (Phronesis)’, Industrial and Corporate Change, 16/3: 1–24. Nussbaum, M. C. (1986), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. London: Cambridge University Press. Raphals, L. (1992), Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press. Rasche, A. (2007), The Paradoxical Foundation of Strategic Management. Heidelberg; New York: Physica. Regnér, P. (2003), ‘Strategy Creation in the Periphery: Inductive versus Deductive Strategy

Making’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 57–82. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003), ‘Strategizing as Lived Experience and Strategists’ Everyday Efforts to Shape Strategic Directions’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 1413–1442. Scott, J. (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale ISPS Series. Stacey, R. (2007), Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics. London: Prentice Hall. Weber, M. (1968), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. New York: Bedminster Press. Weick, K. E. (2001), Making Sense of the Organization. Oxford: Blackwell. Whittington, R. (1996), ‘Strategy as Practice’, Long Range Planning, 29/5: 731–735. (2003), ‘The Work of Strategizing and Organizing: For a Practice Perspective’, Strategic Organization, 1/1: 117–125. (2006), ‘Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research’, Organization Studies, 27/5: 613–634.

CHAPTER

3

Practice, strategy making and intentionality: a Heideggerian onto-epistemology for Strategy as Practice H A R I D IMO S T S O U K A S

A little strategy goes a long way. Too much can paralyze or splinter an organization. That conclusion derives from the possibility that strategylike outcomes originate from sources other than strategy. (Karl Weick 2001, p. 345)

Research on strategy from a practice perspective has been steadily gaining momentum, as attested by, among other things, several journal special issues, an increasing number of publications (including this volume) and long-standing conference streams. Although it has been a mainly European pursuit, it is also spreading to other academic milieus in other continents. Strategy as Practice calls for nothing less than a re-orientation of the field of strategy research. By re-conceiving strategy as not something organizations have but as something organizations do, Strategy as Practice is shifting the focus of analytical attention towards the making of strategy (Whittington 2006), thus departing from traditional variance-model approaches (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002). Insofar as this is the case, Strategy as Practice shares important assumptions with an earlier perspective in strategy research, namely the process approach. Both Strategy as Practice and process research do not treat strategy as a dependent variable, the variance of which is to be explained through the construction of a model consisting of a set of contributory variables, each one of which has its own variance (Langley 2007; Pettigrew 1992; van de Ven and Poole 2005). The main research question these two perspectives seek to address is: How do organizations make strategies (or fail to do so)? Focusing on and accounting for process is of

great importance if we are to understand how strategy is created (Langley 2007). Given their strong affinities and overlaps, what more does Strategy as Practice add to the process approach? For some researchers, Strategy as Practice advances process theorizing by overcoming the limitations of the process perspective. What are they? Johnson et al. (2003, pp. 10–13) have suggested that process research suffers from six shortcomings. First, process researchers have largely relied on second-hand retrospective accounts rather than on ethnographic research methods that stay close to the actual work that makes up organizational life. Second, process research has focused too strongly on managerial agency at the expense of other actors. Third, process research has tended to be mainly descriptive, offering little practical advice to managers. Fourth, process research has forced a dichotomy between process and content. Fifth, process research often lacks explicit links to strategy outcomes. And sixth, by focusing heavily on the particular, process research has eschewed offering generalizable frameworks, thus impeding knowledge accumulation. It is worth noting, however, that even if some, or all, of these criticisms are accepted, there is nothing inherent in the process approach that would stop it from taking them on board. Such a critique does not impinge on the ‘hard core’ (Lakatos 1978) of process research. To use Lakatos’ terms, all the preceding critical points can be accommodated within the ‘protective belt’ (Lakatos 1978) of process research. What is, for example, in the process approach that would stop researchers from 47

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employing ethnographic methods, extending the reach of their empirical research to actors other than managers, being more prescriptive as well as generic in their theories, or bringing together process and content issues (Langley 2007)? Hardly anything. For other researchers, the distinctive feature of Strategy as Practice is ‘the sociological eye’ (Whittington 2007) it brings to the study of strategy. The chief characteristic of the sociological eye is the treatment of social processes not as unique but as consisting of the playing out of generic roles, embedded in broader contexts, as well as sensitivity for the neglected, the unintended and the unexpected. No one can fairly criticize the process approach for insensitivity to the unintended, the unexpected and the neglected. Indeed, Mintzberg and his associates (Mintzberg and McHugh 1985; Mintzberg and Waters 1982, 1985), to take the most prominent advocates of a process perspective on strategy, have done a lot to sensitize us to the importance of the emergent features of strategy. What, however, Whittington usefully adds is the concern with the social embeddedness of strategy making, which has, admittedly, been missing from much of process research. By social embeddedness Whittington means seeking connections between firm-level changes with broader, society-level changes, such as, for example, the rise of neo-liberal ideology in the political sphere and the introduction of new public management in the public sector, or strategic changes within a firm (such as ICI) and broader changes leading to the professionalization of management in the UK in the 1980s. This is useful and interesting, yet, at the same time, it has been the least studied feature of strategy making. Most Strategy as Practice researchers have focused on strategy practitioners within the organization, refraining from systematically connecting organizational changes with extra-organizational contexts. Insofar as this has been the case, it is not particularly clear how the work of Strategy as Practice researchers, as currently practised at least, differs from that of their process cousins. Moreover, much as looking into generic roles and the social embeddedness of strategies is important, this should not be at the expense of

looking into the creative process of strategy making, which is inextricably tied to local contexts of action and to experiential trials and errors in perceived unique conditions (Mintzberg 1987, 1990; Weick 2001). This is where the process approach has been at its best. The challenge is both to retain sensitivity to local conditions and actors’ responses to them and to the social embeddeness and interconnections across levels of analysis. How can this be achieved? What kind of onto-epistemology is needed to frame inquiry accordingly? For a third stream of researchers, Strategy as Practice is beset by the same weaknesses as process research, chief among which is adherence to methodological individualism, namely the explanation of strategic behaviour in terms of self-contained agents consciously acting on their environment. The patterns researchers note are thought to be generated by agents conceived in individualistic terms, hence the emphasis on what individual agents say or do to one another. Analytical primacy is given to actors’ visible doings rather than to ‘culturally and historically shaped tendencies and dispositions acquired through social practices internalized by the actors’ (Chia and MacKay 2007, p. 226). Moreover, as will be argued later in this chapter, the individualist bias of most versions of Strategy as Practice research is shown when ‘strategy making’ is identified with ‘strategizing’ (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007). It is not often appreciated that while the making of strategy may occur in both nondeliberate and deliberate ways, strategizing is a conscious activity, typically involving deliberate actions. By conflating the two, an important distinction is leveled. Methodological individualism should be avoided and the focus should shift to ‘trans-individual social practices’, argue Chia and MacKay (2007, p. 226) convincingly, drawing inspiration from Heideggerian phenomenology (see also Chia and Holt 2006). Change should be seen as immanent in things and human situations, not as externally brought about. Individuals are primarily defined by their membership of practices, which are carriers of cultural dispositions and tacit understandings. Consequently, for the proponents of this view (‘post-processual’ as Chia and MacKay (2007) call it), individual actions are less the outcomes of

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individual choices and more the unself-conscious responses to surrounding circumstances. Strategies are secondary stabilized effects of culturally transmitted practices. To put it simply, actors are culturally predisposed to act in particular ways due to their membership of practices. Once observers retrospectively recognize consistency in actors’ actions, they label the resulting pattern strategic. But this is a secondary characterization, imposed retrospectively by observers; actors themselves primarily act non-deliberately. What observers secondarily recognize as strategy is the outcome of the primary propensity to act non-deliberately in particular ways; strategy is immanent in practical action (Chia and Holt 2006). The ‘post-processual’ approach is undoubtedly promising insofar as it allows for transindividualist explorations of strategy and for non-deliberate modes of action to be taken into account. However, unless further developed, it risks pushing us too much in the opposite direction. When Chia and Mackay (2007, p. 235) argue that ‘strategy subsists on each and every mundane and seemingly isolated act we perform’, they are right, but tell only part of the story. Another part is about deliberate action, which, although recognized in passing in their paper, is not analytically related to non-deliberate action. While it is true that the infusion of practitioners with an internalized style of engagement, grounded in culturally transmitted social practices, affords action consistency over time, and thus apparent purposefulness, it is also true that goal-directed actions and reflexive monitoring are not only possible but systemically built into formal organizations (Giddens 1991, p. 16). Strategy away-days, for example, or scenario planning exercises, aim at creating the sort of reflective distance between the non-deliberate mode of ordinary, improvisational, practical coping and the more explicitly articulated, deliberate mode of acting that is characteristic of strategic episodes. Clearly, we have evidence of both: patterns of practical-coping actions that retrospectively can be seen as forming a strategy and deliberate actions that commit (or fail to do so) an organization to a new course of action. How can we be attentive to both? How can we make room for both types of engagement?

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To be sure, for all their differences of vocabulary, Whittington and Chia and MacKay agree that Strategy as Practice will live up to its name, and thus differentiate itself from process research, insofar as it widens its attention to embrace the broader contexts that make organizational patterns of actions possible. They both argue for the need to ‘de-centre’ (Whittington, 2007, p. 1578) the organization as the locus of strategy making. Whittington points to the levels of industry and society over and above the organization, while Chia and MacKay point to ‘practice complexes’ (2007, p. 233), namely to extra-organizational techniques, language, artefacts and canonical examples through which propensities to act in particular ways are transmitted. I will argue here that an onto-epistemological framework inspired by Heideggerian phenomenology (see Dreyfus 1991a, 1991b, 2000; Heidegger 1962; Spinosa et al. 1997; Schatzki 2000, 2005) enables us to see how the organization may be ‘decentred’ and how strategy making may be studied in its various manifestations. It is hoped that such a framework will: (a) enable Strategy as Practice researchers to overcome the individualist bias Chia and MacKay have rightly identified in dominant conceptions of Strategy as Practice, while allowing space for creative action; (b) analytically relate non-deliberate and deliberate types of action; and (c) suggest how Strategy as Practice, conceived along Heideggerian lines, differs substantially from the process approach, at least as the latter has been traditionally practised. Below, I will outline a Heideggerian vocabulary, which will be applied in the subsequent section to Strategy as Practice. Finally, in the conclusions the argument presented here is summarized and the benefits of a Heideggerian onto-epistemology are discussed.

Practice, coping, and awareness: a Heideggerian vocabulary Human agency is necessarily (i.e. non-contingently) exercised in the context of sociomaterial practices. Sociomaterial practices are organized, openended human activities transpiring within material arrangements, unfolding in time, carried out by skilful agents whose actions are based on: tacit

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understandings, explicit rules and teleoaffective structures; the bodily coordination and orientation of an agent to the task at hand; and the incorporation of tools within the field of an agent’s bodily comportment (Dreyfus 1991b, p. 27; Orlikowski 2007; Reckwitz 2002, p. 249; Rouse 2000, p. 9; Schatzki 2005, p. 471). Particular human activities and particular sociomaterial practices are mutually constituted. The practice of grading students’ scripts in a university, for example, consists of particular activities such as pondering grades and recording them. The activities are moments of the practice; one cannot exist without the other. Broadly speaking, grading is a sociomaterial practice that incorporates certain tacit understandings of how to grade; is based on certain explicit rules about grading; it incorporates a teleoaffective structure consisting of the appropriate ends to be pursued (assessing and developing students through grading their written work, for example), activities to be pursued for these ends (e.g. pondering and recording grades), and acceptable uses of relevant equipment. Thus, a particular episode of grading consists of the activities of pondering and recording grades, which are inextricably tied to a particular grading sociomaterial practice. Similarly, what a particular grading practice is depends on the exercise of the particular grading activities. In scrutinizing a grading episode, one scrutinizes the practice, and vice versa (Schatzki 2005, p. 468). To enter a sociomaterial practice – to become, say, an academic, a manager or a surgeon – is to enter a practice whose identity is constituted through the normative use of language, body and equipment (Hardy et al. 2005, p. 61; Harré and Gillett 1994, pp. 28–29). To be a human agent is to experience one’s situation in terms of already constituted meanings and acceptable emotions, articulated through the discourse that defines the practice (Dreyfus 1991a, Ch. 5; Taylor 1985b, p. 27; Taylor 1985a, pp. 54–55). This is so because a human being is, in Taylor’s (1985a, p. 45) well-known phrase, a ‘self-interpreting animal’. It is a being for whom things matter; whose identity is constituted by qualitative distinctions made in language, worked out within a form of life (Dreyfus 1991a, p. 23). The self-descriptions underlying human

action situate humans relative to some standards of excellence, obligations (MacIntyre 1985, pp. 187– 194; Taylor 1991, p. 305) or ‘normative boundaries’ (Kogut and Zander 1996, p. 515). For example, Gawande (2002, pp. 13–15), a surgical resident at a hospital in Boston, describes the sense of ‘ineptitude’ he felt when, in his fourth week in surgical training, he tried for the first time to install a central line into a patient’s chest so that the patient could be fed intravenously (see also Benner 1994, pp. 137–140). The trainee surgeon’s felt inadequacy came from the realization, following an exchange with the chief resident who was supervising the procedure, of not having done certain things as well as he should – not having attained a level of professional competence. This example is instructive in reminding us that to have an experience, such as ‘ineptitude’ in this case, involves the application of a particular meaning concerning work standards – namely, seeing that certain descriptions apply, along with the associated emotions they typically come with – and an appropriate use of bodily skills and equipment. No wonder why, later, Gawande (2002, p. 14) chastised himself: ‘I failed to check his platelet count’; ‘I forgot to bring the extra syringe for flushing the line when it’s on’. Admissions of perceived inadequacy or failure are possible insofar as certain standards of excellence are not achieved or normative boundaries are transgressed. Practitioners are initiated into a sociomaterial practice by learning to make relevant distinctions in practice (Benner et al. 1999, pp. 30–47; Polanyi 1962, p. 101). Gawande gives a vivid account of his initiation in medical practice. Through dealing with particular incidents with patients, initially under the supervision of, and later in collaboration with, more experienced members of his practice, the trainee surgeon was learning to use the key categories implicated in a surgeon’s job; to make proper use of the relevant equipment; and to bring his body into a certain level of coordination with the task at hand. Through his participation in this practice he was gradually learning to relate to his circumstances ‘spontaneously’ (Wittgenstein 1980a, §699), that is to say, non-deliberately: to use medical equipment, to recognize certain symptoms, to relate to colleagues and patients. The

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needles and how to use them in patients’ chests, the X-rays and how to read them and his relationships to others were not objects of thought for him, but ‘subsidiary particulars’ (Polanyi and Prosch 1975, pp. 37–38) – taken-for-granted aspects of the normal setting in all its recognizable stability and regularity. As Wittgenstein (1979, §§473–479) aptly noted, the basis of a sociomaterial practice is activity, not knowledge; practice, not thinking; certainty, not uncertainty. With the help of more experienced others we first learn to act, that is to accept the certainties of our particular sociomaterial practice (e.g. to use needles, to recognize the symptoms of pulmonary disease, to relate to patients), and thus relate spontaneously to our surroundings, and later we reflect on them. Experience comes first, knowledge later. ‘Language’, as Wittgenstein (1980b, p. 31) famously remarked, ‘is a refinement, “in the beginning was the deed” ’. The ‘spontaneous’ aspects of the activities practitioners undertake are primary and constitute what Wittgenstein (1979, §94) calls the ‘inherited background’ against which practitioners make sense of their particular tasks (Shotter and Katz 1996, p. 225; Taylor 1993, p. 325, 1995, p. 69). Practitioners are aware of the background but their awareness is largely ‘inarticulate’ (Taylor 1991, p. 308) and implicit in their activity (Ryle 1963, pp. 40–41). The background provides the teleoaffective structure that renders their explicit representations comprehensible and makes certain emotions acceptable (Dreyfus 1991a, pp. 102–104; Taylor 1993, pp. 327–328, 1995, pp. 69–70). As Dreyfus (1985, p. 232) notes, ‘What makes up the background is not beliefs, either explicit or implicit, but habits and customs, embodied in the sort of subtle skills which we exhibit in our everyday interaction with things and people. […] We just do what we have been trained to do. […]’ (emphasis added). In other words, the exercise of particular skills within sociomaterial practices is non-deliberate – an array of spontaneous responses to the developing situation at hand. At the same time, this non-deliberate activity is oriented towards attaining certain ends that determine it as the activity it is. For example, explaining Strategy as Practice to students in class, and for the sake of being an effective communicator, a lecturer uses the whiteboard in

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order to draw a chart. This is non-deliberate (spontaneous) acting oriented towards a particular end. Not unlike driving a car, the lecturer, immersed in his activity, does what the situation calls for without paying attention to his actions. The teleological structure of the sociomaterial teaching practice makes the particular act of drawing a chart on the board sensible. As Schatzki (2000, p. 33) notes: These ‘in order tos’, ‘toward whichs’, and ‘for the sake ofs’ – in more conventional terms, purposes, tasks, and ends – orient [the teacher’s] activity in the sense of structuring what he is up to: in conjunction with the current situation, they specify that writing on the board makes sense – that is, is the appropriate and needed thing (given the situation and the purposes and ends involved). They determine, in other words, what might be called the practical intelligibility that informs nondeliberate activity.

To sum up, when agents act non-deliberately, they respond spontaneously to circumstances in order to get on with the tasks at hand. They do not pay explicit attention to what they do – they do what makes sense to them. However, what makes sense to them is teleologically structured – their sensemaking is oriented towards certain ends. That is why it can be said that agents act purposively without having a purpose in mind (Chia and MacKay 2007, p. 235; Schatzki 2000, p. 33). When responding spontaneously to the solicitations of the task at hand, agents not only do not pay attention to what they do, they do not, moreover, have a representation of the goal they pursue (Wakefield and Dreyfus 1991). Non-deliberate acting is practical coping with the situation at hand: it is not mediated by mental representations; it results from an ongoing integration of one’s activity as a teacher, a manager, a physician, etc., within a sociomaterial practice (Rouse 2000, p. 12). When language is used in practical coping, as is often the case, it is used as equipment assimilated in the activity, and thus it functions in a non-propositional way. When, for example, in the middle of an operation, a surgeon says ‘scalpel’ and a nurse hands him one, he uses language non-propositionally, namely in a way to enable him get on with the task at hand rather than make assertions about the task or the world at large (Dreyfus 2000, p. 317).

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When practical coping is interrupted by a ‘breakdown’, intentional directedness takes over, and it can take two forms – explicit awareness and thematic awareness. With explicit awareness, agents pay attention to what they do when their activities run into trouble. The computer does not respond as expected and the operator cannot do what she wants, the violinist finds she is unable to play smoothly because a string has broken, or a teacher is facing a rather unresponsive class. In such instances of breakdown the agent becomes aware of her activity, of what she was trying to accomplish, the equipment she was using – she starts acting deliberately. When the situation requires attention, mental content arises, consisting of beliefs, desires and propositional attitudes. Subject–object polarity emerges and now the deliberate agent is oriented towards her activity through mental states causing deliberate actions. Drawing on an illustration by Dreyfus (1991a, pp. 69–70), Schatzki (2000, p. 35) aptly notes: When the door knob sticks, one’s focused efforts to move it are caused by the desire to open it in conjunction with the belief that greater force will accomplish this, and repeated attempts are guided by the intention in action to budge it. […] The content of each of these mental states – what one is up to, how things work, what needs to be done – is explicit to the actor. Hence not only does deliberate action differ from its nondeliberate cousin by virtue of actors paying attention to their activity; whereas nondeliberate action rests on the exercise of skills, deliberate action is caused by mental states (where mental states are causally efficacious states of being explicitly aware of something). As a result, when someone deliberately acts purposively, she has a purpose in mind, that is, she is explicitly aware of what she is out to accomplish (this purpose can be said to constitute the content of one’s desires).

Moreover, when someone is explicitly aware of something, that act of awareness is brought to one’s awareness too – the agent is aware that he is aware. By contrast, when the agent is absorbed in the task, as is the case with practical coping, namely when the agent is non-explicitly aware of something, the agent is not aware that he is aware of it. Self-consciousness and the accompanying

subject–object split have not yet arisen (Schatzki 2000, p. 36). Notice that when practical coping is interrupted, the agent stays involved in the activity, although he now pays attention to what he does. Explicit awareness is still oriented towards practical ends. When, however, the agent detaches himself from a specific practical situation and stares at it from a reflective distance, aiming to know its properties, then the practical situation becomes occurrent and the agent develops thematic awareness. The latter brackets particular, immediate practical concerns and aims at finding out about, or reflecting on, the abstract properties of the situation at hand. Thus, whereas in explicit awareness the physician might say ‘this scalpel is not sharp enough’, thus becoming explicitly aware of its limited sharpness, in thematic awareness the physician comes to know that the object she has been using as a scalpel is an object with the property ‘sharpness’. Whereas in the former case the proposition refers to a situated aspect of the scalpel (‘it is not sharp enough for me to do the job’), in the latter case it refers to a desituated property of the scalpel (i.e. it has ‘bluntness’ in any situation), and thus to scalpels in general (Dreyfus 2000, pp. 317–318). With thematic awareness the agent moves from aspects to properties and from practical to quasi-theoretical understanding. There is one more kind of thematic awareness to be briefly discussed here, and that is theoretical understanding. It concerns more theorists than practitioners. Recall that in practical coping, language is used as a situational coping skill; in explicit awareness it is used propositionally to refer to a particular aspect of a situation, with a particular practical purpose in mind; and in thematic awareness it is used propositionally to make assertions about properties that bear no relevance to a particular practical situation, but which enable one to refer to things and events in the rest of the world. Now, when not only a practical situation is bracketed but a shared meaningful world of a particular sociomaterial practice is bracketed too (e.g. the world of clinical medicine), then we can talk of theoretical understanding, in which an object is ‘de-worlded’ and reintegrated into theory, and, insofar as this is the case, reinserted into a different world – the world of theory (Dreyfus 2000, p. 317). The scalpel is not

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just an occurrent object with the property ‘sharpness’, but an entity whose material composition, design and making may be studied independently, and a system of causal relationships ascertained. Theoretical understanding goes beyond thematic awareness insofar as it goes beyond merely detaching an object from a practical situation and recontextualizes it into a corpus of theory. For example, organizational properties such as ‘decentralization’, ‘cost leadership’, ‘dynamic capabilities’, etc., when studied by organization theorists, are concepts that are parts of theories (and of the world of theories), not of the (business) world. This Heideggerian phenomenological line of thinking has important implications for how we view strategy and, crucially, it helps furnish Strategy as Practice with an onto-epistemology that makes room for different types of action and intentionality. In the next section I will show its relevance for Strategy as Practice.

Strategy as Practice from a Heideggerian perspective As Mintzberg and his associates’ research has shown, when streams of actions may be identified over time, one can speak of an emergent strategy. Whether we talk about Steinberg’s entrepreneurship, McLaren’s films in the National Film Board of Canada (Mintzberg and Waters 1982, 1985), or the inductive-cum-exploratory strategies developed in the organizational periphery in Regnér’s (2003) firms, we talk about strategy ex post facto. Notice, however, that practitioners do not necessarily have the sense that they strategize – this is, usually, researchers’ attribution. More likely, practitioners respond spontaneously, that is to say, non-deliberately, to the developing practical situation they find themselves in. The label for a particular ‘strategy’ they pursue is given to a patterned stream of actions either by practitioners themselves when they retrospectively make sense of what they do (Weick 1995, pp. 76–80, 2001, p. 354), namely when they become explicitly aware of what they do because of some difficulty or interruption they have encountered, or by theorists who

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‘de-world’ the stream of action they study and reinsert it in their world of theory. The ex post facto ascription of ‘strategy’ is clearly shown in the analysis of Porac et al. (1989) of seventeen high-quality manufacturers of knitted outerwear, predominantly from the Hawick area in Scotland. As the authors note, the Scottish firms are embedded in a part of the UK that has had a long history in the production of wool, with formal wool trade associations dating as far back as the mid 1600s. Scottish expertise in the preparation of cashmere and its use in the production of knitted and woven garments has been historically strong. The Industrial Revolution facilitated the establishment of several Scottish knitwear manufacturers. The seventeen firms studied have been following a long tradition of wool production; they buy the dyed yarn from local spinners and employ mostly local people, trained in several local, wellrespected colleges. Against such a background, Porac et al. (1989, p. 404) describe the ‘strategy’ their firms have followed as follows: In Porter’s (1980) terms, the Scottish knitwear manufacturers seem to be following a ‘focus’ strategy by concentrating their efforts upon a narrow segment of the retail market. The aim is to sell premium quality, expensive garments through specialist distribution channels to a limited number of high income consumers. Two aspects of this strategy are noteworthy. First, the strategy seems more evolutionary than planned, having developed over several decades in response to problems encountered in the marketplace. Ten years ago, the Scottish firms sold in fewer international markets and with a more limited product range than is currently the case. They have gradually been forced by competing knitwear firms to expand both their range and their international customer base. Although the Scottish firms manufacture with up-to-date electronic knitting equipment, they have historically used traditional, labour intensive methods of hand finishing. Such methods permit the manufacture of very high quality sweaters, and the pool of skilled workers available to these companies has allowed them to exploit fully the traditional methods. On the other hand, traditional methods are not as efficient as more modern manufacturing techniques. As other domestic and

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A number of points are worth noting in this account. First, the ‘focus strategy’ – namely, ‘sell[ing] premium quality, expensive garments through specialist distribution channels to a limited number of high income consumers’ – is the researchers’ ascription in an effort to make sense of the patterned stream of actions they found in the behaviour of the Scottish firms. Second, the researchers perceptively note that this ‘strategy’ developed over a long stretch of time, in a piecemeal, pragmatic way, ‘in response to problems encountered in the market place’. We are not given historical evidence as to what these responses were responses to, but we are usefully told that the sociomaterial practice of knitwear manufacturing has, among other things, been historically using traditional, labourintensive methods of hand finishing. The Scottish firms have been drawing on the ‘inherited background’ – the resources of the environment they have found themselves embedded into – in order to produce their knitwear. They had to make do with whatever was available to them and, in that sense, their actions were non-deliberate, but shaped by historically and culturally transmitted propensities. The practical coping with the surrounding situation (i.e. to produce knitwear in that particular environment) was shaped by what Chia and MacKay (2007, p. 232) aptly call, drawing on Bourdieu (1990), a ‘sociality of inertia’ – namely, the social, cultural and technological tradition these firms found themselves in, which infused practical coping and enabled agents to act appropriately (namely, according to the norms and with the materials at hand), although not necessarily deliberately. From this perspective, Chia and MacKay (2007, p. 236) are certainly right in construing strategy making ‘as a collective, culturally shaped accomplishment attained through historically and culturally transmitted social practices and involving dispositions, propensities and tendencies’. This type of analysis

meets Whittington’s criterion of ‘de-centring’ upwards the organization, since it shifts the focus from the activities within particular organizations to the historically and culturally transmitted fields of sociomaterial practice that are constitutive of those activities. Empirical research on the making of strategy, informed by a Heideggerian onto-epistemology, would seek to describe the practical-coping activities of agents embedded within a broader field of sociomaterial practice: how agents spontaneously (non-deliberately) draw on the particular sociocultural norms and material resources available to respond to developing practical situations. Such studies could range from micro-sociological studies of the practical-coping activities of particular people in particular circumstances of situated interaction (as, for example, in the case of Honda’s senior managers’ efforts to sell the 50cc Supercubs in the US in the late 1950s; see Pascale, 1984) to more historically or anthropologically oriented studies aiming at describing the mutual constitution of a sociomaterial practice and its component activities (Langley 2007, pp. 273–274). In both cases, ‘strategy’ is a second-order label aiming to capture, in retrospect, a pattern of actions coping with a developing practical situation over time, as, for example, in the phrase: “[traditional, labour intensive methods of hand finishing] permit the manufacture of very high quality sweaters, and the pool of skilled workers available to these companies has allowed them to exploit fully the traditional methods” (Porac et al. 1989, p. 404). However, the rationalizing language of retrospectively accounting for strategy should be minimal so that it does not obscure the practical coping involved when agents act in the context of broader, open-ended sociomaterial practices. The non-deliberate acting that is associated with practical coping may be interrupted by breakdowns, crises or unexpected events and developments, several of which are caused by competitors, technological change and/or governmental interventions. In such cases, deliberate coping takes over, whereby agents pay explicit attention to what they do; it marks the beginning of strategic thinking. For example, when costs became an issue – namely when a ‘breakdown’ occurred – Scottish

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knitwear manufacturers were forced to think explicitly about what it was that had enabled them to develop with success so far and what might give them the edge from then on. Thus, they consciously articulated what they had been doing all along as a strategy of ‘high-quality’ (Weick 1995, p. 78). Porac et al. (1989, p. 404) note: ‘On the other hand, traditional methods are not as efficient as more modern manufacturing techniques. As other domestic and foreign firms began to produce lower cost, higher volume, and lesser quality garments, the Scottish manufacturers, intendedly or unintendedly used the “high quality” strategy to defend their position in the market. This strategy seems to be based upon certain beliefs about the nature of demand for Scottish products and the skills necessary to satisfy such demand.’ As Weick (1995, p. 78) playfully notes, ‘how can I know what I’ve made until I see how it’s sewn?’. On this view, strategy making is articulating or reinterpreting what an agent has already been doing as a matter of course (i.e. non-deliberately). Capitalizing on retrospective reframing is what effective strategists do all the time, notes Weick (1995, p. 78). Articulating occurs when a hitherto non-deliberate activity is brought into sharper focus – when an aspect of an activity is revealed (Spinosa et al. 1997, pp. 24–25). Reinterpreting occurs when an aspect of an activity is embedded within a new conversation and acquires new meaning. The case of Scottish knitwear manufacturers is a case of articulating. The now legendary story of how 3M developed its famous Post-it note is a case of reinterpreting. Here is how the story goes according to Sawyer (2007, p. 45). Spencer Silver, a research scientist at 3M, tries to improve the adhesive used in tape. As a research scientist he acts non-deliberately, pretty much like the lecturer explaining Strategy as Practice to his students, discussed earlier. The kind of new adhesive he develops, however, bonds rather weakly and thus is not quite the improvement he was hoping. Silver describes the new adhesive to several colleagues for five years, but no one could think of ways of using it in a product. No one, except Art Fry, working in new product development, who, frustrated by paper bookmarks falling out of his hymnal when singing in church, realizes that

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Silver’s adhesive could be used to make the sort of bookmark he had always wanted. The now-legendary Post-it note was invented! Notice that the new adhesive Silver had created assumed importance in retrospect – after it was taken up by someone else. The organizational significance of a new initiative cannot be assessed except in retrospect, namely after the initiative has been discursively woven into other ideas and initiatives created by others. A mundane change today may turn out to be important tomorrow, or may give rise to further, more consequential, changes later. Serendipity is the name we normally give to the process of favourable consequences arising while aiming at something else. But consequences are recognized as being favourable in retrospect, namely after they are embedded in subsequent conversations and projects. Spencer’s new adhesive had not been recognized as usefully new until another organizational member could see it as relevant to his practical concerns. Strong adhesives were what 3M had been making all along, until it saw potential in weak adhesives – that is to say, until it distanced itself from (i.e. reinterpreted) the habitual (i.e. non-deliberate) way of approaching adhesives. Retrospective reframing – articulating or reinterpreting the premises of non-deliberate actions – discloses an aspect of the practice and enables an agent to be explicitly aware of it. The agent now forms beliefs, desires and propositional attitudes concerning the task at hand. The agent’s actions are no longer solicited by the practical task at hand but deliberately caused by mental content – certain desires and beliefs. Moreover, as discussed in the previous section, when a practical situation is looked at from a reflective distance, detached from a specific practical concern, the latter becomes occurrent, and the agent develops thematic awareness. This is typically the case with strategizing (strategic planning sessions, scenario planning interventions and strategic episodes generally). Planners and strategy practitioners at large, especially consultants, look at the organization as a detached object whose properties may be discerned and/or re-described. Unlike the case of explicit awareness, in which practitioners try to coherently find their way around by articulating or

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reinterpreting what they do, planners bracket any immediate, particular practical concern, aiming to highlight relatively abstract organizational properties, such as organizational strengths and weaknesses, capabilities, past strategies, competitors’ strategies or scenario-based threats and opportunities, in order to articulate their strategic intent. This bracketing is often symbolically manifested in away-day strategy meetings, in which the hurlyburly of organizational life is pushed back to create space for detached, analytical thinking, whereby those involved try to experience the organization as occurrent, and thus bring it to their thematic awareness as an object of reflection. For example, in the case of the Scottish firms, a strategy for ‘premium quality’ was at some stage deliberately articulated. Furthermore, certain organizational-cum-environmental properties, such as ‘expensive garments’, ‘specialist distribution channels’, ‘high income consumers’ (see Porac et al. 1989, p. 404) were highlighted and sought to be related to one another in a coherent and mutually reinforcing manner. Similarly, as Jarzabkowski and Wilson (2002, pp. 363–364) found in their study of the strategy making of the top management team at Warwick University, the strategic intent of consolidating and maintaining the institution’s position as a leading research university in an increasingly competitive environment was clearly articulated in the Warwick Strategic Plan, which included four main areas of strategic action. The language of such a plan was relatively abstract and included setting targets, highlighting properties (e.g. strengthen the capacity for income generation, achieve research excellence, etc.) and describing an array of actions to operationalize the plan. Coherence between strategic intent and actions was noted by the researchers. In strategic planning routines and strategizing episodes, formal representations that depict the organization and its environment in abstract terms are typically used and reasoning tends to acquire a quasi-syllogistic form (Regnér 2003, pp. 71–74). Thematic intentionality, abstract language and desituated organizational properties and their relationships are developed. Looked at as an outcome, strategy forms a quasi-theoretical framework, namely a relatively abstract description of

the organization causally related to some desired outcomes, whose components, ideally, are consistent with one another. The aim is for action to be guided by an explicit intentionality, often centrally formulated, which sets priorities and deadlines, commits resources, and outlines actions for the organization to implement in order for particular outcomes to be attained. Setting strategy amounts to achieving coherent thematic awareness in a way that will enable strategic clarity and intent to be realized coherently through prioritized actions. If the outcome of a strategizing episode is a strategic plan, or at least the elements of a strategic orientation, a Strategy as Practice perspective can shed light on how such a plan (i.e. a discursive object) is generated, and how it is further related to the rest of the organization. How do actors interact and what broader practices do they draw upon (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007, p. 8)? What particular issues are brought to the attention of what organizational members (especially senior and middle managers), in what ways? How are issues framed, by whom, and why (Laine and Vaara 2007; Rouleau 2005)? Different theories, such as actor network theory, conventionalist theory, communication theory, etc. may be used to address these questions (Denis et al. 2007). In other words, the very process of developing thematic awareness merits attention in its own terms, and it is here where, predominantly, Strategy as Practice has usefully contributed so far. Maitlis and Lawrence (2003, p. 125), in their case study of the (failed) attempt to develop an artistic strategy in a British symphony orchestra, allude to this when they note: ‘As actors begin to discuss [an] issue, both formally and informally, it becomes a strategic organizational issue – an event, development or trend that is seen as having organizational implications.’ An issue becomes strategic insofar as actors begin developing thematic awareness about it, namely when actors bracket any immediate, particular practical concern and focus on relatively abstract organizational properties. This is far from being a straightforward process, as is shown by Maitlis and Lawrence (2003). For example, for some the orchestra was lacking a ‘commercially viable strategy’ (Maitlis and Lawrence 2003, p. 125), for others the problems lay

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with an ‘incoherent artistic product’ (p. 125), while for the musicians ‘the artistic strategy had neither coherence nor commercial viability’ (p. 125). Each one of these statements pointed to an ‘issue’ that was brought, in rather abstract terms, to the thematic awareness of the people involved in strategizing. Clearly, how language is used to frame issues, how certain organizational events are rhetorically mobilized, how outside influences and developments are rhetorically brought ‘into’ the organization, how relevant meetings are conducted, how objects and artefacts (e.g. PowerPoint presentations, flip charts, etc.) are used, how emotions are handled and what forms of knowledge are mobilized, are all highly relevant facets of strategizing episodes that merit empirical investigation, especially with the help of ethnographic and ethno-methodological methods (Samra-Fredericks, 2003).

Conclusions Let me summarize the argument put forward in this chapter. To appreciate what Strategy as Practice has to offer strategy researchers, and to fully realize its potential, Strategy as Practice needs to be grounded on an onto-epistemology that acknowledges the various ways through which strategies qua practices may develop as well as the various modes of intentionality and language use that, crucially, underlie strategy making. Strategy as Practice will go beyond the valuable insights offered by the process approach to the extent it de-centres the organization in order to focus on the macro-practices agents draw upon as well as the micro-practices they engage in. Strategy as Practice researchers should be particularly alert to exploring the tacit understandings and internalized styles of practical coping; the body and its constitutive involvement in skilled action; and the use of tools (including language) by agents. At the same time, Strategy as Practice should make space for deliberate modes of acting, which have traditionally been ignored by process researchers and, more recently, by scholars who privilege trans-individualistic analyses. I have tried to show in this chapter that a fully developed Heideggerian onto-epistemological framework provides a coherent way for different types

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of strategy making to be researched from a practice perspective. More specifically, my argument has been as follows (see Table 3.1). As members of sociomaterial practices, agents act on the basis of distinctions they have internalized through their involvement in practice(s). Such distinctions constitute an inherited background which enables agents to relate spontaneously to the solicitations of the tasks at hand, and therefore to act non-deliberately. Non-deliberate acting is practical coping with a developing situation: it is not mediated by mental representations and comes about from an ongoing integration of one’s activity as a practitioner within a particular sociomaterial practice. The latter has a teleoaffective structure, making action within it purposive and sensible. The patterned action that is often discernible in practical coping is mainly due to agents’ acting from the same inherited background that shapes their actions. Strategy here emerges over time from the coherent coping of actors with developing practical situations. Although one may speak of strategy as a pattern in a stream of actions, one may not speak of strategic thinking or strategizing. In practical coping language is not used propositionally but as a situational coping skill. When actors encounter breakdowns in the spontaneous flow of their activities, they develop explicit awareness and move to deliberate coping: they pay explicit attention to what they do and retrospectively try to make sense of it through articulation or reinterpretation. Strategy here is retrospective reframing. Capturing those reframings in action – describing ‘the ways in which new interpretations of old actions bubble up in ongoing events’ (Weick 1995, p. 78) – shows an additional way through which patterned action may emerge over time. Now it is not merely the acting out of taken-for-granted assumptions and propensities, but also the deliberate thinking about past patterns of actions in order for them to be further advanced or reconstituted. Strategic thinking emerges as a process of deliberately looking-back-in-order-tolook-forward, and it arises from a practical concern with the task at hand. Language is now propositionally used to refer to a particular aspect of a situation, with a particular practical purpose in mind. Creativity here is potentially at its highest insofar

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Table 3.1 Action, intentionality and strategy making: a Heideggerian framework Type of action

Practical coping

Deliberate coping

Detached coping

Type of intentionality

Tacit understanding (non-deliberate)

Explicit awareness Articulation Reinterpretation

Thematic awareness

Type of language use

Situational coping skill

Propositional (aspects)

Propositional (properties)

Type of strategy making

Emergent pattern of actions

Retrospective reframing

Strategizing

as meaning is attributed to past actions in order to provide the basis for future actions. Finally, when agents develop thematic awareness about the organization, the latter becomes a detached object of reflection to be described in terms of abstract properties. Here is where strategic thinking proper, or to be more precise, strategizing, takes place, typically in strategic planning sessions, strategy away-days and strategic episodes at large. In strategizing, agents move from deliberately coping with situational aspects of practical situations to being thematically aware of desituated properties of occurrent objects of attention. Strategy-making practitioners (typically senior managers as well as internal and external consultants) bracket immediate, task-related practical concerns, in order to discern relatively abstract organizational properties which, when systematically and coherently interrelated, will make up strategic intent. Thinking is rather analytical, deductive and forward-oriented. The organization is represented through abstract formulations, and explicit beliefs and desires are articulated. Although strategizing involves abstraction and the formulation of intentionality, this is still a sociomaterial and thoroughly political process involving the use of tools, especially language. In thematic awareness, language is used propositionally to make assertions about properties that bear no relevance to a particular practical situation, but enable one to refer to properties of both the organization and its environment as occurrent objects and to the rest of the world. Strategic learning is an outcome of such a use of language. The Heideggerian onto-epistemology advanced here overcomes some of the problems in process and Strategy as Practice strategy research correctly identified by Whittington, and Chia and MacKay. Whittington has rightly criticized process research

for reifying organizations and for not paying sufficient attention to strategic intent. In his words: ‘first, by defining strategy as what the organizations does, [Mintzberg] denies the sense of strategy as a kind of work that people do; second, by stressing how organizational outcomes are so frequently detached from strategic intent, he reduces that strategy work to a vain, even absurd endeavor to control the uncontrollable. […] For Mintzberg, why bother to explore the actual roles, adaptations and impacts of planning in practice, if strategic plans are typically not realized in organizational outcomes?’ (Whittington 2007, p. 1581). They are both very sensible points, which can be accommodated within the framework offered here. More specifically, strategy has been shown to emanate from the practical coping, deliberate coping or strategizing of individuals situated in sociomaterial practices. In practical coping, the inherited background of sociomaterial practices is the launching pad for non-deliberate actions in response to a practical situation at hand (recall the Scottish knitwear firms in their early days, discussed earlier). In deliberate coping, both the inherited background and the explicit awareness of individuals are intertwined in the face of breakdowns. Strategy is making retrospective sense of what has been going on in order to consolidate, further refine or change a pattern of actions (think of the Post-it notes story discussed earlier). In strategizing, the organization is an occurrent object, which enters the thematic awareness of the participants, and its desituated properties are identified (think of strategic planning meetings conducted at the British symphony orchestra mentioned earlier). Notice that each one of these three modes of strategy making involves work that is carried out within sociomaterial practices consisting of tacit understandings, bodily

Practice, strategy making and intentionality

involvement and tools (especially language). How such work is organized and carried out over time, with what effects, is an important theme Strategy as Practice researchers typically aim at exploring. Chia and MacKay (2007) have rightly criticized both the process approach and the dominant understanding of Strategy as Practice for individualistic bias, which tends to portray strategy making as the doing of purposeful agents. Subscribers to a Heideggerian onto-epistemology are alert to the tacit understandings, embodied capacities and historically shaped tendencies that reside in extraorganizational sociomaterial practices. That much is eloquently said by Chia and MacKay, who also share a Heideggerian onto-epistemology. What, however, they seem to underestimate (although they mention its possibility without developing it; see Chia and Mackay 2007, p. 238) is deliberate action and the associated practice of strategizing. From a Heideggerian phenomenological perspective, strategizing, namely the process of forming thematic awareness, is a distinctive moment of being-inthe-world that comes about when people step back from immediate practical tasks and reflect on an entity in a detached manner, seeking to identify its properties in abstracto. How thematic awareness develops, with what results, is a fascinating topic to study from a practice perspective. It should be noted, however, that thematic awareness, although aiming at decontextualization, detached analytical thinking and abstraction, itself constitutes a practical task. Detached reflection does not come ready-made but involves work, and thus draws on relevant sociomaterial practices and skills: like any practice, it relies on tacit understandings, the body and particular tools. Thematic awareness is a social accomplishment. How people argue, how they abstract, how they draw each other’s attention to certain things, how they relate to others, etc. are activities shaped by broader sociomaterial practices on which people draw (Latour 2007). Chia and MacKay (2007, p. 229) are right in pointing out that a particular strategist’s relational–rhetorical skills, as studied by Samra-Fredericks (2003), are no mere individual traits but social accomplishments, namely ways of arguing and relating that worked in this particular case insofar as they drew on established

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practices with which the rest of participants could identify. The micro-practices people engage in (i.e. the patterns of interactions locally instantiated) and the macro-practices people draw upon (i.e. the tacit understandings, the bodily comportment and the tools used) are important topics to study, although it may not be always possible to do both things at once. Finally, a Heideggerian framework enables us to avoid the circular definitions of strategy that so often beset the field. Jarzabkowski et al. (2007, p. 8) argue that ‘an activity is considered strategic to the extent that is consequential for the strategic outcomes, directions, survival and competitive advantage of the firm’. The problem with such a definition, however, is that it conflates ‘strategy making’ with ‘intentionality’ – two distinct and contingently linked phenomena. Some types of activity are considered ‘strategic’ because participants define them as such, as, for example, strategic planning sessions, strategy away-days, etc., not because they are necessarily consequential for the organization. This is what has been described in this chapter as strategizing and is necessarily linked with intentionality and thematic awareness. However, Mintzberg (1994) was right to point out that it is not uncommon for strategic planning exercises to be just that – ritual exercises – bearing no clear relationship to organizational outcomes. What is intended is not necessarily consequential. Conversely, what may turn out to be of major consequence for the competitive advantage of a firm may not be an outcome of a ‘strategic’ activity as such (namely, an outcome of strategizing) but may emerge from a pattern of actions practically coping with a developing situation, as, for example, was the case of the Scottish knitwear firms relying on traditional methods of hand finishing their sweaters. Or a competitive advantage may emerge from a stream of practical-coping activities after they have been retrospectively made sense of by practitioners. Non-deliberate practical coping, although purposive, is not directed at generating particular (consequential) outcomes, and thus it is not purposeful; it merely enacts a particular inherited background over time. Deliberate coping meshes spontaneous responses to a developing practical situation with articulating or reinterpreting the

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emerged pattern of actions. What is consequential is a retrospective attribution. In conclusion, keeping ‘strategy making’ separate from ‘intentionality’ is beneficial, since it allows us to better see their connections. ‘Strategy’ was traditionally considered to be identical with senior managerial intentionality and its manifestations (i.e. strategic plans). The process approach widened our appreciation of ‘strategy’ by enabling us to see how patterns in streams of non-deliberate actions can be seen as de facto forming a strategy. Whereas traditional approaches attributed a coherent pattern of organizational actions to the strategic intent of relevant practitioners, process researchers bracketed that assumption in the search for patterns of action independently of their origin. Strategy as Practice can further contribute, first by bringing intentionality under scrutiny and showing how it is constructed in strategizing episodes through practitioners drawing upon particular sociomaterial practices (something which the process approach refrained from doing); and second, by showing the inherited background from which practitioners engage in coherent practical coping and exploring how aspects of the inherited background are brought to explicit awareness in the face of breakdowns, with what effects (something which has been immanent in the process approach but not fully realized, nor explicitly theorized, due to its individualist bias). A Heideggerian onto-epistemology does not, of course, solve all problems related to strategy research, but it provides us with the vocabulary to better understand what it is that Strategy as Practice should be researching.

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Practice, strategy making and intentionality development in an engineering group, Human Relations, 60/1: 29–58. Lakatos, I. (1978) The methodology of scientific research programmes. In J. Worrall and G. Currie (eds.), Philosophical Papers (Vol.1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langley, A. (2007) Process thinking in strategic organization, Strategic Organization, 5: 271–282. Latour, B. (2007) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue (2nd edn). London: Duckworth. Maitlis, S. and Lawrence, T. B. (2003) Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: Understanding failure in organizational strategizing, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 109–140. Mintzberg, H. (1987) Crafting strategy, Harvard Business Review, 65: 66–75. (1990) The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management, Strategic Management Journal, 11: 171–195. (1994) The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. New York: Free Press. Mintzberg, H. and McHugh, A. (1985) Strategy formation in an adhocracy, Administrative Science Quarterly, 30: 160–197. Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J. A. (1982) Tracking strategy in an entrepreneurial firm, Academy of Management Journal, 25/3: 465–499. (1985) Of strategies, deliberate and emergent, Strategic Management Journal, 6: 257–272. Orlikowski, W. (2007) Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work, Organization Studies, 28: 1435–1448. Pascale, R. (1984) Perspectives on strategy: The real story behind Honda’s success, California Management Review, 26/3: 47–72. Pettigrew, A. (1992) The character and significance of strategy process research, Strategic Management Journal, 13/S2: 5–16. Polanyi, M. (1962) Personal Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of the Chicago Press. Polanyi, M. and Prosch, H. (1975) Meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Porac, J. F., Thomas, H. and Baden-Fuller, C. (1989) Competitive groups as cognitive communities: The case of Scottish knitwear manufacturers, Journal of Management Studies, 26: 397–416. Reckwitz, A. (2002) Towards a theory of social practice: A development in cultural theorizing,

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European Journal of Social Theory, 5/2: 243–263. Regnér, P. (2003) Strategy creation in the periphery: Inductive versus deductive strategy making, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 57–82. Rouleau, L. (2005) Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day, Journal of Management Studies, 42: 1413–1443. Rouse, M. (2000) Coping and its contrasts. In M. A. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science: 7–28. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ryle, G. (1963) The Concept of Mind. London: Penguin. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003) Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 141–174. Sawyer, R. K. (2007) Group Genius. New York: Basic Books. Schatzki, T. (2000) Coping with others with folk psychology. In M. A. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science: 29–52. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (2005) The sites of organizations, Organization Studies, 26/3: 465–484. Shotter, J., and Katz, A.M. (1996) Articulating a practice from within the practice itself: Establishing formative dialogues by the use of a ‘social poetics’, Concepts and Transformation, 1: 213–237. Spinosa, C., Flores, F., and Dreyfus, H. L. (1997) Disclosing New Worlds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Taylor, C. (1985a) Human Agency and Language, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1985b) Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1991) The dialogical self. In D. R. Hiley, J. F. Bohman and R. Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: 304–314. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (1993) Engaged agency and background in Heidegger. In C. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger: 317–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1995) Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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CHAPTER

4

Constructivist epistemologies in Strategy as Practice research S I M O N G R A N D , JO H A N N ES RÜEGG- STÜRM a n d W IDA R VO N A R X

Introduction The practice turn in strategy research and the Strategy as Practice research programme (Johnson, Melin and Whittington 2003) imply an interest in explicitly reconsidering the epistemological and theoretical premises of conducting strategy research (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002). Particularly, theories, methodologies and perspectives based on constructivist epistemologies play an important role, either explicitly or implicitly. Looking at main contributions to Strategy as Practice research over the last few years, a few patterns dominate (Johnson et al. 2007): on an empirical level, strategy and strategy making are seen as involving multiple processes and activities, with multiple actors distributed inside and outside the organization over multiple organizational layers. On a theoretical level, the study of strategy making as practice requires perspectives which grasp this heterogeneity of processes, activities and actors, and their situatedness, embeddedness and idiosyncrasy; it is argued that a focus on the practice of strategy making implies a discussion of the underlying action theories (Grand and McLean 2007; Jarzabkowski 2004; Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002). On an epistemological level, this emphasis on strategy making as practice requires a reflection of scientific research as practice (Knorr Cetina 2002). In this chapter, we explore why an interest in strategy practice(s) promotes constructivist epistemologies by discussing important particularities and their relevance for strategy research. To focus our discussion, we ask one main question: How do constructivist epistemologies shape Strategy as Practice research? We explore this question in three steps. First, we introduce influential constructivist epistemologies, exploring their commonalities,

idiosyncrasies and differences. Second, we discuss the impact of constructivist epistemologies on research in the Strategy as Practice field and, in particular, on the study of strategizing practices, the understanding of strategy and the conduct of strategy research. Third, we outline a constructivist research programme in strategy research. We conclude this chapter by identifying critical issues which are essential for extending Strategy as Practice research in the perspective of constructivist epistemologies.

Constructivist epistemologies Out of the multiple perspectives and approaches, we focus on three central, but distinct approaches, which represent the commonalities as well as the heterogeneities of the constructivist research programme: we discuss the research programme of social construction (Berger and Luckmann 1967; Luckmann 1992), systemic constructivism (Maturana and Varela 1987; Luhmann 1996) and the empirical programme of constructivism (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr Cetina 1981). Constructivist programmes share four fundamental concerns: 1. Concern 1. They challenge the predominance of unquestioned dichotomies in the social sciences, between micro and macro, or between situated activities and collective practices (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1996). 2. Concern 2. Agency is not automatically associated with particular entities (‘individual’, ‘organization’), but it must be studied as distributed and related in particular ways in particular contexts (Latour 2005). 63

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3. Concern 3. The constructivist programmes question a conception of ‘reality’ as something that is ‘objectively given’; this explains why constructivist perspectives imply epistemological considerations. 4. Concern 4. Therefore, the constructivist programmes explicitly study the status of ‘knowledge’ (Tsoukas 2005), the relation to the ‘world’ (Goodman 1987) or the status of scientific knowledge creation (Knorr Cetina 2002). Although these constructivist programmes share major concerns, they differ with respect to their basic premises (Knorr Cetina 1989; Hacking 1999).

Research programme of social construction The research programme of social construction is embedded in a phenomenological reinterpretation of the social sciences (Husserl 1931; Schütz 1932), studying ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ as resulting from social construction processes; reality is always a reality for humans and from humans. Thereby, it is important to understand how it is possible that particular ‘realities’ are accepted as ‘objective’, ‘given’, ‘external’ or ‘natural’. In the perspective of the research programme of social construction, knowledge is studied as resulting from social construction processes and, in particular, institutionalization, objectivation and legitimation (Berger and Luckmann 1967), describing these processes as leading to the experience of a stable, given, justified background knowledge and social order. Scientific knowledge results from second-order knowledge creation, the construction of scientific ‘knowledge’ on the social construction of ‘knowledge’. Every phenomenon can thus be studied as the result of social construction processes (Hacking 1999), social construction being the ‘objectivation’ of meaning towards shared understanding and common knowledge. More recently, the research programme of social construction has explicitly turned towards a theory of social action (Luckmann 1992), identifying social action and interaction as the primary locus of social meaning making. This is a coherent extension of the

initial research programme, which emphasizes that common-sense knowledge is a central focus of any sociology of knowledge, similar to the practice turn in the social sciences. In the perspective of the fundamental concerns of constructivist research programmes (see above), social constructivism focuses on the construction of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ as resulting from particular construction processes. Instead of pre-assuming the existence of social order, common knowledge and the world (concern 3), this research programme focuses on the importance of legitimation, institutionalization and objectivation. Thereby, social action is shaped and enabled by the taken-for-granted social knowledge which is legitimate and objective in a particular situation or context, but which gains its legitimacy and objectivity through the social construction processes which transcend individual situations and contexts (concern 1). Although this research programme refers to ‘knowledge’, the ‘social’ and social ‘action’ as a conceptual foundation and an essential theoretical reference (‘proto-sociology’; Eberle 1992), their meaning is contextual (concern 2). Thereby, the research programme of social construction is understood as ‘sociology of knowledge’ (concern 4). Social ‘reality’ is grasped as ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. The objective reality, although resulting from social construction, appears to the individual as given; the subjective reality refers to the continuous meaning making in everyday interactions. While this perspective has been influential in the social sciences and in most discussions of constructivist epistemologies, it is often cited without a careful consideration of these underlying premises. Furthermore, various difficulties of this perspective have been discussed over time: it is argued that the application of this perspective can become tautological, if ‘social’ phenomena are seen as resulting from ‘social’ construction (Latour 2005); it remains difficult to demonstrate in an empirical study that ‘something’ is socially constructed (Hacking 1999); the approach assumes a collectively shared common understanding of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’, while their fragility and heterogeneity are underexplored. Overall, the intuition behind the research programme of social construction is a

Constructivist epistemologies in Strategy as Practice research

central reference for constructivist epistemologies, but without a careful consideration of the underlying premises, the simple assertion of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ as being constructed becomes trivial.

Systemic constructivism In line with this critique, and in order to identify a more explicit conceptual foundation, constructivism can be understood as the epistemology and methodology of systems theory. Human cognition in everyday activities and scientific practice is not representing an objective, given world, but is an active process of constructing and inventing reality (Watzlawick 1984). There is no correspondence between an outer world and its ‘representation’ or construction in our brains. The brain operates according to structures and criteria which do not have the aim of correctly representing the world. The only relevant criterion is viability, understood as the capacity to successfully cope with the ‘real’ world. As a consequence, the cognition process itself does not work in a given and stable manner. Rather, it itself undergoes a historical development and differentiation process depending on previous cognition and experience. Whatever is recognized to be real, relevant and true has an impact back on the cognition process itself and vice versa. Cognitive structures and content are mutually dependent; this phenomenon is called ‘self-referentiality’. On the basis of such an understanding, information or knowledge are not regarded as given entities but as processes of informing and knowing. Hence, reality is not conceptualized as a given entity, but as a fragile process of becoming. What we call ‘reality’ or ‘knowledge’ is an ongoing contingent process of enactment (Weick 1979). Constructivism is therefore understood as an ‘operative epistemology’ (Von Foerster 1981): any information is ‘a difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson 1972). Such an epistemological conceptualization fundamentally challenges traditional ideas of reality and knowledge, as well as our understanding of good social research; at the same time, it marks a fundamental epistemological turn in systems theory itself: the shift from first-order to second-order cybernetics (Von Foerster 1981). A first domain where this process of constructing

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and enacting reality occurs are cognitive systems. The so-called Radical Constructivism (Glasersfeld 1995; Watzlawick 1984) focuses on processes of cognitive construction, supplemented by insights from genetic epistemology (Piaget 1995) and from the theory of autopoietic systems (Maturana and Varela 1987). A second domain where this process of constructing and enacting reality occurs is communicative systems (Luhmann 1986, 1996). In this perspective, communications (and not human beings) are the basic elements of social systems. What is considered as real, relevant and true in a communication process depends on the context of this process, which is itself continuously cocreated in the ongoing communication process. From a systems theory perspective, the working mode of cognitive systems and of communicative systems is characterized by operational closure. Any data are processed according to the (cognitive or communicative) structures which have historically evolved. However, cognitive and communicative systems operate structurally coupled. There is a mutual dependence, but nevertheless each system operates autonomously. Particularly relevant for practice research is the aspect that the ‘social’ represents a separate domain characterized by operational autonomy and with idiosyncratic structures; human beings represent the ‘environment’ of these social systems. Both social and cognitive systems process meaning and enact structures. But in order to enable (collective) action there is no congruence between social and mental structures required. Rather, thoughts and communications need to be mutually compatible and connective, so that ongoing sensemaking is possible. Systemic constructivism thus strives to explain the social, not from the individual’s mental structures, but by conceptualizing the social as an autonomous reality domain (Luhmann 1996). Systemic constructivism addresses some of the open issues in the research programme of social construction (see above). Particularly, systemic constructivism makes a distinction between cognitive and social systems, thereby not taking individual agency or social entities as the basis for studying social phenomena, but the ongoing processes of communication (concern 2). This leads to a decentralization of agency, which means

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relying on communication itself, which has always already taken place and which creates ‘reality’, independent of individual consciousness (concern 3). Thereby, one focus lies on the processes of drawing distinctions as the fundamental premise for shaping social ‘reality’ and the organization of ‘knowledge’. This allows for internalizing the difficulties associated with many unquestioned dichotomies in the social sciences (concern 1). As a consequence, systemic constructivism is inherently reflexive. It emphasizes the necessity of observing the process of observation as the essence of research (concern 4). Thereby, systemic constructivism is an operative epistemology (Von Foerster 1981), which means that there is never a final description of a phenomenon, but knowledge creation is inherently processual and open towards future development. The fundamental shift in systemic epistemology lies in its focus on communication. This shift coincides with the linguistic turn in philosophy (Rorty 1989), identifying communication as the central process enacting ‘reality’ and creating ‘agency’ in the social world. One important difference from the other constructivist epistemologies lies in the conceptualization of situated activities, which are reduced to manifestations and actualizations of communication. Thereby, some issues and problems of this perspective have been raised over time: while most social theories explicitly take the everyday theorizing of the social actors as an important informant about social meaning, systemic constructivism neglects individual consciousness as being not important for the study of communication and social reality; furthermore, the process of making distinctions assumes the possibility of rather clear-cut distinctions, while it can be argued that most empirical phenomena and social references are characterized by an inherent ambiguity and fuzziness (Latour 1999).

The empirical programme of constructivism Contrary to the other two research programmes, the empirical programme of constructivism argues that it is problematic to pre-assume any theory of construction, because this implies that the study

of construction processes is pre-conceptualized and not empirically analysed (Latour 2005). The empirical programme of constructivism argues that it is fundamental to studying the multiple construction processes involved in the creation of ‘reality’, the ‘world’ or ‘knowledge’. They are studied as resulting from multiple, heterogeneous, situated and fragile activities (Knorr Cetina 1989). The research process is not guided by theoretical premises, but by a specific repertoire of research devices and methodological practices. Thereby, the empirical programme is looking for the selfevident, which is taken for granted and must be deconstructed by the research process, opening the black boxes of social ‘reality’ (Latour 1999). As a consequence, this research programme is interested in studying the inherently controversial, heterogeneous, fragile, situated nature of any social phenomenon. This explains the prominent status of the science studies in this research programme. Scientific research as the locus of knowledge creation is a prototypical context for understanding the construction of ‘true’, ‘objective’, ‘valid’, ‘natural’ worldviews in modern societies (Knorr Cetina 2002; Latour and Woolgar 1979). Furthermore, this research interest is closely related to the socalled practice turn in the social sciences (Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1971; Schatzki et al. 2001), which is interested in understanding how the ‘stability’ and ‘objectivity’ of ‘reality’ is created in mundane activities, situated actions, and local practices. Finally, this explains the relation of this research programme to anthropological perspectives (Geertz 1973), which cultivate the creation of an alienated view on the self-evident. Neither pre-specified theories, nor everyday theories of the actors involved, can guide the research process, but they must be described in their creation (Latour 2005). The main preoccupation of research is thus to develop methodologies which allow us to study ‘world creation’ (Knorr Cetina 1989) as the continuous ‘manufacturing’ of knowledge under conditions of uncertainty (Knorr Cetina 2002). This reconceptualization of research provides several insights: the empirical programme of constructivism not only challenges unquestioned dichotomies in the social sciences, but any

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unquestioned and taken-for-granted foundation (concern 1). This is relevant for the study of ‘reality’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘fact’, which cannot be taken for granted, but must be described in their creation (concern 3); in parallel, it is relevant for the study of ‘agency’, which cannot be seen as inherent to any ‘individual’ or ‘organization’, but must be seen as situated, controversial and resulting from idiosyncratic creation processes (concern 2). As a consequence, this research programme always reflects epistemological issues, including the status of (scientific) ‘knowledge’ and the idiosyncratic procedures of (scientific) knowledge creation (concern 4). The research programme propagates an understanding of research which is concerned with the world ‘as it could be’, instead of focusing on the world ‘as it is’, because the ‘world’ is the result of construction processes. The criterion for ‘good’ research is the creation of unconventional, new worldviews and perspectives (Knorr Cetina 1989), which requires ‘discovery technologies’, not theories. This perspective is related to multiple approaches which are important in the practice turn (Schatzki et al. 2001). Among others, it resonates with grounded theory building (Strauss and Corbin 1990) and related pragmatist epistemologies (Joas 1992), emphasizing the creative nature of action and research; it also relates to the interest in creative theories of action (Joas 1992; Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002). Furthermore, it is in line with the approaches of social practice (Foucault 1971; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1996), which emphasize the importance of reflecting the practice of doing research, shifting the focus from social theories to methodological issues (Latour 2005). This explains why the empirical programme insists on ‘symmetry’ as central for ‘good’ research (Knorr Cetina 1989). It implies that what it explores in terms of the creation of ‘reality’ and the ‘world’ holds for scientific research. And it implies that while the other constructivist epistemologies argue for particular theoretical perspectives, the empirical programme of constructivism focuses on the heterogeneity and variety of situated mechanisms and idiosyncratic activities, relevant for the construction and stabilization of ‘reality’ in particular contexts (Knorr Cetina 1989).

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Constructivist epistemologies, practical relevance and research practice If the world is seen as ‘constructed’, as it is argued in constructivist epistemologies, this implies that ‘it could be otherwise’. Obviously, this awareness of contingency is a methodological issue, but it can also be seen as the starting point for changing the world as it is, and thus as a pragmatic and normative stance, in various degrees of constructivist engagement (Hacking 1999, p. 39). This is of importance for the issue of the practical relevance of research in the social sciences as well as in management research, as it identifies different types of relevance (Grand 2003). Four types of constructivist engagements are particularly interesting. First, a constructivist perspective can be conceptualized as a methodology emphasizing the construction mechanisms underlying particular phenomena. The value of an ‘analytical’ engagement (Foucault 1971) lies in reconstructing phenomena as they are, and identifying alternatives of how they could be. Second, this can lead to an ‘ironic’ engagement, which means that the contingency of a phenomenon is taken as a starting point for ironically discussing positions which accept phenomena as ‘real’ or ‘objective’ (Rorty 1989). Third, based on a normative valuation of a phenomenon as it is, this can lead to a ‘reformist’ engagement in which the fact that something could be otherwise is used to criticize the phenomenon as it is (Hacking 1999, p. 40): it is here that we can see the transition towards a practical engagement (Dahrendorf 2005; Elkana 1986). Fourth, this can also lead to a ‘revolutionary’ approach which opts for fundamental change as the only possibility of transforming the phenomenon as it is. These degrees of constructivist engagement can be found in different constructivist research programmes, including the Strategy as Practice research programme, which does not only focus on describing the practice of strategy, but explores alternative ways of making strategy (Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington 2007). Independent of their level of engagement, constructivist epistemologies share basic intuitions. First, constructivist epistemologies not only discuss the world ‘as it is’, but reflect the contingency

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of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’, which leads to an interest in identifying possible worlds ‘as they could be’ (Latour 2005) or even in changing the world ‘as it is’ (Hacking 1999). Second, constructivist epistemologies explore what is required to be able to be talking of individual and organizational ‘agency’ (Knorr Cetina and Cicourel 1981). Instead of pre-assuming ‘agency’, it is important to study its pre-requisites and preconditions. Third, this implies an attempt to describe social phenomena beyond traditional dichotomies (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Fourth, an explicit consideration of uncertainty and openness of any social interaction and future development is crucial (Gomez and Jones 2000). Fifth, research is seen as constructing ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’, emphasizing the creativity and self-reflexivity of research.

Constructivist epistemologies and Strategy as Practice research We now turn to the recent contributions and discussions of the Strategy as Practice research programme to see whether and how fundamental premises of constructivist epistemologies are incorporated, explored and reflected. We concentrate on three fundamental ‘black boxes’ in the Strategy as Practice research programme which are important in the perspective of constructivist epistemologies: the notion of ‘practice’, ‘strategy’ and ‘research’.

The construction of strategizing practices A fundamental shift in the Strategy as Practice research programme is the focus on the everyday micro-activities of managers in constructing strategy (Whittington 1996). In line with constructivist epistemologies, the major attempt is in opening the black box of strategy creation, instead of relying on taken-for-granted pre-conceptualization of how strategy is made (Mintzberg 1971); furthermore, the focus is on understanding the particular strategies as they are created (Johnson et al. 2003). This approach emphasizes the importance of describing the ‘internal life of process’ of strategy making (Brown and Duguid 2001), which is not covered by existing strategy research (Johnson et al. 2003;

Samra-Fredericks 2003; Whittington 1996). This interest is close to the empirical programme of constructivism. Thereby, it can be argued that ex ante, every managerial activity and local interaction of people within and outside an organization can potentially lead to an idea, opportunity, initiative or project which gains strategic importance. In parallel, strategic is understood as the ex post ascription of the label ‘strategic’ to particular activities, either by the managers themselves, or by the researchers studying them. Understanding strategy creation implies that the empirical focus must be extended beyond the interaction of top management teams in formal settings dedicated to strategy. Middle managers (Balogun and Johnson 2004; Floyd and Lane 2000; Westley 1990) and specialized strategists (Grant 2003; Pettigrew 1985), line managers and specialized units (Ahrens and Chapman 2007; Brown and Eisenhardt 1997; Orlikowski 2002), external stakeholders, including customers (Christensen and Bower 1996), investors (Bower and Gilbert 2005), strategic partners (Dyer and Singh 1998), technology partners (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003) and consultants are involved in strategy creation. This heterogeneity of actors and activities, which are actually or potentially relevant for the creation of strategy, indicates an opportunity and a challenge for studying strategy creation. Thereby, strategy creation is understood as being shaped by idiosyncratic, firm-specific, context-dependent, situated and local repertoires of construction practices and strategizing routines (Feldman and Pentland 2003). In line with the practice turn in the social sciences, and as a result of the empirical study of strategizing practices, it is argued that it is not the dispersed, situated activities themselves, nor the heterogeneous actors, activities and artefacts in different contexts, that are key, but their embeddedness in routinized repertoires of strategy creation practices, which makes them ‘strategic’. It is thus important to describe the firm-specific rituals, activities, settings, tools and processes in which strategy is created. Among the various contributions, the studies of metaphorical discourses (Morgan 2006), discursive practices (Vaara et al. 2004), styles of engagement (Chia and MacKay 2007), micro-processes (Salvato 2003) or

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leadership practices (Denis et al. 2001) are exemplary. Thereby, it is important to understand how managers make use of their agency to shape these repertoires of strategizing practices while creating strategic ‘agency’ through referencing to these repertoires (Balogun and Johnson 2004).

The construction of strategy in practice The study of strategizing practices implies an emphasis on the situatedness of strategy creation (Tsoukas and Chia 2002). Strategy creation takes place in concrete situations, it gains relevance and significance in those situations, and it must be interpreted in the perspective of these particular contexts. Hence, words and ideas, concepts and terms, including concepts of ‘strategy’, cannot be understood independently of the language games and local interactions in which they are produced and actualized (Seidl 2007). This implies that similar activities have different meanings according to the contexts in which they occur, as well as depending on the particular perspectives of the actors involved (Engström and Blackler 2005; Samra-Fredericks 2003; Suchman 1987). Therefore, the definition of what ‘strategy’ means must be seen as idiosyncratic and processual (van de Ven 1993). There are phases in which strategy creation takes place according to established processes, which are taken for granted, while these processes, as well as related practices, are questioned, redefined, adapted and changed in other phases. This is in line with the research programme of social construction, and in particular, the distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. Furthermore, there is a continuous interplay between established strategizing practices and strategy concepts, and the implicit, informal strategy-related creative activities of managers and other people in the organization. Over time, these interactions change and develop ‘agency’ of their own (Burgelman 1996; Greenwood and Hinings 1996; Mintzberg and McHugh 1985), a perspective, which resonates with systemic constructivism. The Strategy as Practice research programme makes various suggestions with respect to the conceptualization of ‘strategy’: in line with the idiosyncratic and situated nature of strategy practices,

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strategy is associated with those practices and concepts which are identified as ‘strategic’ by the actors themselves (Heracleous and Marshak 2004; Maitlis 2005; Weick and Roberts 1993); this perspective is in line with the research programme of social construction. Certain predefined sets of practices are assumed as ‘strategic’ by the researchers involved (Jarzabkowski 2003; Regnér 2003), including coordination and decision making, planning and budgeting, the creation of episodes (Hendry and Seidl 2003) and the allocation of resources (Bower 1970; Bower and Gilbert 2005). These are taken-for-granted concepts of ‘strategy’ in strategy research. The fact that these concepts are taken for granted, but contingent, resonates with systemic constructivism. Finally, some practices are identified as ‘strategic’ by the institutional context, both academic and managerial (Whittington 2007). The decisive activities in shaping the strategy of an organization can only be identified ex post (Bower 1970; Burgelman 1994; Johnson 1987; Mintzberg and McHugh 1985; Pettigrew 1987); in line with the empirical programme of constructivism, this process of strategy creation can be studied as resulting from circulating references, black boxing and translation (Latour 1999; Callon 1986). While research in the area of strategic management in most cases either pre-assumes that it is clear what ‘strategic’ means, or uses a particular conceptualization of ‘strategy’, the Strategy as Practice research programme emphasizes the importance of understanding the construction of what ‘strategic’ means in line with constructivist epistemologies. However, this implies that the concept of ‘strategy’ is important enough to be reflected in any strategy research project. Furthermore, it can become a research area itself, leading to some fundamental reflection of strategy research (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002).

The construction of strategy in strategy research It is on the methodological level where the Strategy as Practice research programme is most ambiguous. On the one hand, major perspectives in this research programme emphasize the radical

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implications of the new research programme for the conduct of strategy research (Johnson et al. 2003; Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002); on the other hand, it is argued that a new research programme can only succeed if it successfully relates to predominant theories, methodologies and themes in existing, established strategy research. While many scholars in the Strategy as Practice research programme emphasize the importance of firm-specific, idiosyncratic conceptualizations of strategy, and thus share constructivist epistemologies, other scholars try to reconcile the Strategy as Practice research programme with dominant, nonconstructivist streams in the strategic management field in order to relate their research to taken-forgranted concepts of strategy. Strategizing practices are related to strategy concepts like firm-level outcomes (competitive advantage, success) and intermediate references (performance of the strategy process); strategy practices are thus identified as a source of competitiveness (Johnson et al. 2007). Organizational performance and realized strategy are studied as emerging from the situated strategic activities and strategy practices (Bower and Gilbert 2005; Johnson et al. 2007). The interdependencies between research streams in strategic management (dynamic capabilities, strategic change, innovation) and Strategy as Practice research are explored (Paroutis and Pettigrew 2007; Regnér 2003); this requires us to reconcile existing theories in strategy and theories of social practice. Finally, the heterogeneity of activities, actors, actions and practices is incorporated into integrative frameworks (Bower and Gilbert 2007; Floyd and Lane 2000; Johnson et al. 2007). A fundamental ambiguity in the Strategy as Practice research programme becomes visible in the perspective of constructivist epistemologies: through the emphasis on the idiosyncratic and constructed nature of strategizing ‘practices’, ‘strategy’ and strategy ‘research’, this research programme potentially or actually contradicts taken-for-granted premises of strategy research and strategic management. By striving to reconcile the two, Strategy as Practice research inevitably neglects some of its most fundamental premises and contributions, and in particular, the situatedness, path-dependence, idiosyncrasy and

constructedness of strategy (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002; Chia and MacKay 2007).

Implications of constructivist epistemologies for Strategy as Practice research From the perspective of constructivist epistemologies, an alternative would be to transcend some fundamental oppositions which underlie the differentiation of Strategy as Practice as a new research programme, and strategy research as it is understood in dominant academic and managerial discourses (Johnson et al. 2007). In particular, five points are important: 1. Strategy research should emphasize the importance of constantly unpacking and deconstructing fundamental, taken-for-granted concepts in strategy research and strategic management. Opening the black boxes, and disassembling and reassembling strategy (Latour 2005) could be identified as a primary focus. Obviously, this focus is ambiguous, as the pre-assumption of unquestioned black boxes is a precondition for establishing a research programme, while the systematic deconstruction of central black boxes is essential for the Strategy as Practice research programme. However, it is this ambiguity of relying on and at the same time deconstructing strategy-related black boxes which ensures the dynamism and creativity of this research programme. 2. In order to be able to disassemble the black box ‘strategy’ and strategy-related black boxes, it is important to cultivate alienating perspectives (Latour 2005). One common pattern of constructivist epistemologies is exactly this alienating effect, which is often criticized as the usage of abstract vocabulary (Luhmann 2002; Latour 2005). However, this is central to these research programmes, because they explicitly do not build on common sense or everyday theorizing concerning central concepts and terms. They introduce concepts and terms which must gain meaning through their translation in particular contexts and specific situations (Latour 1999). Furthermore, this leads to an ongoing

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reflection and reconstruction of concepts and terms in research practice. 3. It is exactly the insistence on alienating perspectives which at the same time creates a precondition for being able to consider particularities, contexts and idiosyncrasies in empirical research. A related approach in empirical research is the attempt to exclude any theoretical perspective and concept from the initial entry into the field (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Obviously, both extremes, alienation through abstraction and alienation through the absence of abstract notions, are impossible to realize in research practice (Latour 1999). However, to take them as references leads to a continuous reflection of the premises and black boxes, which is important for any research programme in the perspective of constructivist epistemologies (Law 2004). 4. This reflection of research indicates that research is creation and construction. Whereas traditional epistemologies discuss the inherent creativity of research as a problem which must rather be disciplined through particular methodological tools, constructivist epistemologies would, on the contrary, insist on the central importance of creativity for (good) research (Joas 1992). In this line of thought, the empirical programme of constructivism explicitly emphasizes the importance of understanding methodology as ‘discovery technologies’ (Knorr Cetina 1989). Research methodologies are understood as enabling, ensuring and fostering creativity in research practice (as it is discussed in the science studies; see Knorr Cetina 2002). 5. If research is interpreted as creation and construction, it must be enabled by particular methodologies, technologies, practices of creation and construction (Knorr Cetina 1989). This implies that any closure of a research programme, any predefinition of central concepts and terms, or any unquestioned foundation of research on one particular theory must be understood as relying on black boxes (Latour 1999). As we have discussed above, such black boxes are necessary for research practice, but at the same time they are always also inherently

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problematic (Elkana 1986); they are an expression of a particular thought style and thought community (Fleck 1980) which results from particular creation and construction processes. In the next section, we explore some implications of a constructivist epistemology for strategy research in general, as well as for the Strategy as Practice research programme in particular.

Towards a constructivist research programme in strategy research In the perspective of constructivist epistemologies, strategy research would focus on the creation, construction, translation and transformation of strategy concepts and strategizing practices. Thereby, it is important to study their self-evident, unquestioned nature. Strategy and strategizing practices are neither something strategy research can assume as taken for granted, nor are they something that is only situated. Strategy and strategizing practices are the result of continuous (re-)construction, through the creative activities of the actors and researchers involved, and through interactions between actors and researchers.

The situated construction of strategy concepts and strategizing practices Strategy practices refer to taken-for-granted strategy concepts. However, it is a situated, controversial and empirical issue to describe those strategy concepts. Strategizing practices refer to different, firm-specific and general strategy concepts, and they refer to multiple concepts in parallel, at the same time, and over time. What is understood as ‘strategic’ is changing across situations and over time, and it must thus be (re-)created, actualized and confirmed in each situation. Although strategy concepts and strategy practices are the result of enactment, they are most of the time taken for granted by the actors and researchers involved, and are thus experienced as ‘objectively’ given. This is a precondition for strategy making in organizations, because these self-evident references orient, stabilize and coordinate strategy-related activities.

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At the same time, every strategy concept is potentially questioned and challenged, and replaced and transformed by the actors and researchers involved. The heterogeneity of concepts and practices, and the reduction and extension of this heterogeneity are therefore central issues. While heterogeneity enlarges the flexibility of strategy, it increases the ambiguity among those concepts and practices; while reducing the variety of concepts and practices enables coordination, it introduces rigidity. In the perspective of a constructivist research programme, the construction and deconstruction of strategy concepts and strategizing practices are studied as simultaneously coexisting in strategy making. A fundamental interest in strategy research is to understand whether, how and why particular strategy concepts and strategizing practices relate to any realized strategy (Bower and Gilbert 2005), organizational performance or other outcomes (Johnson et al. 2007). Thereby, a specific repertoire of concepts and measures has been established as robust and relevant for studying performance, and for studying performance differences among organizations (Barney 1991). However, it is important to study dominating concepts of ‘realized’ strategy and ‘performance’ as they are defined in a particular situation and context (Pettigrew 1987). Furthermore, to study the strategic references and measurement systems for performance is important, because they have an impact on the identification of strategizing practices evaluating the ‘strategic relevance’ of planning and budgeting, and of particular meetings and workshops, concepts and issues. A constructivist research programme brings the contingency of strategy concepts and strategizing practices, and the uncertainty and ambiguity of related concepts of performance to the centre of research. Thereby, strategic management as an academic discipline, research field, teaching area and managerial practice has an impact on the contextualization and change, and stabilization and destabilization of particular definitions and conceptualizations, both within particular organizations, as well as for relevant communities. The interaction and reflexive relationship between the construction of strategy in managerial practice and

the construction of strategy in strategy research is a central precondition for conducting strategy research (Tsoukas 2005).

Uncertainty, strategy concepts and strategizing practices Strategy is conceptualized as crucial for successful organizational development in future-oriented, fundamentally uncertain, contested and open situations (Schendel and Hitt 2007). It is in those situations in which it is challenging, but important, to build and stabilize strategy concepts and strategizing practices as taken for granted and self-evident (Gomez and Jones 2000). Binding concepts of performance and success, established repertoires of procedures and methods, and unquestioned tasks and issues are central for productive, coordinated strategy making under uncertainty and ambiguity. They are necessary to conclude endless discussions about the appropriate conceptualization of ‘strategy’ and infinite regresses of defining such references as ‘success’ and ‘performance’. Paradoxically, taken-for-granted references must be stabilized as given, knowing that they are contingent and potentially questionable. This is in line with a constructivist research programme which focuses on the dynamic interplay of confirming and transforming, routinizing and deconstructing, and actualizing and revising strategic references. The ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences emphasizes promising perspectives here, including the concepts of: routines as routinization (Feldman 2003); habitus as the embodied repertoire of practices, which define whether someone is part of a particular community (Bourdieu 1977); structuration as the continuous confirmation and adaptation of action patterns (Giddens 1984); black boxing as the activities and artefacts, which translate and transform situated ideas into stable references (Latour 1999); conventions as a way of understanding the constructive, but unquestioned nature of the references (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991; Gomez and Jones 2000); and common knowledge, which results from the collective objectivation and typification of embedded experiences and situated interactions (Berger and Luckmann 1967; Wenger 1998).

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A constructivist research programme in strategy research can relate to existing research on organizational processes and managerial activities under uncertainty and ambiguity: these activities are described as situated and local, embedded and contextual, specific and task oriented, focused and operational (Mintzberg 1971). However, various empirical patterns can be identified, including the observation that decision-making under uncertainty and ambiguity is proactive and assertive (March and Shapira 1987), involving experimenting (Gherardi and Nicolini 2002), continuous sensemaking (Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991; Weick 1995) and framing and interpretation (Bower and Gilbert 2005). Thereby, actors and organizations anticipate the fact that they must react to and work in the context of unexpected events and new situations (Weick and Sutcliffe 2001). While most strategy research emphasizes the importance of considering the uncertainty of strategy making (Porter 1985), it builds on epistemological and theoretical perspectives, which are often not really sensitive to uncertainty (Grand et al. 1999). A constructivist research programme demonstrates the implications of taking the openness of the future and its inherent uncertainty seriously.

The stabilization of strategy concepts and strategizing practices Talking about self-evident strategy concepts and unquestioned strategizing practices does not mean that they are ‘stable’, but are seen as ‘stabilized’. As has been shown (Garfinkel 2002), facts or concepts, insights or routines, have to be confirmed, actualized and reproduced anew in every situation (Feldman and Pentland 2003). By understanding strategies and strategizing as resulting from the enactment of these practices and routines by the multiple situated activities of the people involved, the focus lies on how managers and other people in the organization create and construct the stability, coherence and robustness of a strategy (Westley 1990). At the same time, it reminds us of its contingency and fragility. It is thus important to understand how taken-for-granted strategy concepts and strategizing practices are constructed

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and stabilized by the managers and other people involved in strategy making. To transcend the contingency and situatedness of taken-for-granted references, they must be stabilized and anchored as self-evident and unquestionable. In this context, the practice turn provides important perspectives, conceptualizing construction and stabilization as discourse formation (Foucault 1978), language games (Wittgenstein 1967), circulating references (Latour 1999) or translation activities (Callon 1986). Thereby, dispersed strategy-related activities are coordinated and aligned in the organization and, over time, due to the formation of shared expectations and ‘objectivized’ interpretations, tools and methods are recognized as relevant for strategy making. Thereby, practice communities not only actualize and confirm the repertoires and routines of strategy making, but construct and constitute their identity as those who make strategy (Brown and Duguid 2001); furthermore, the emphasis on the importance of a ‘porte parole’ points to the fact that the ability to construct reality depends on the power position of the respective actor and action (Bourdieu 1982); finally, the material culture of strategy making is emphasized, including the artefacts, tools, methods and techniques of strategy making (Knorr Cetina 1999; Latour 1999). They condense repertoires of strategy making in the form of templates and analytical tools, ways of presentation and representation, and visualization and documentation (Orlikowski 2000, 2002). The multiple strategy tools, strategic frameworks and strategizing methods in an organization are an expression of multiple ways of packaging and focusing strategy concepts and strategizing practices; the same holds for the multiple frameworks, concepts, methods and models in strategy research, which are an expression of different ways of conceptualizing strategy. Thereby, it has been suggested (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Orlikowski 2000) that technologies, artefacts, symbols, tools and instruments have their own agency. They transform strategy concepts and argumentative patterns into stabile structures and tangible references, which are used by the managers and researchers involved. In the perspective of a constructivist research programme, to study strategy making

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implies to describe and reflect the construction technologies (Knorr Cetina 1989) which managers and researchers use to create, establish, maintain and change particular strategy concepts and strategizing practices.

The deconstruction of strategy concepts and strategizing practices In the perspective of a constructivist research programme, it is finally important to understand how taken-for-granted references are deconstructed and questioned, and creatively enacted and reassembled (Grand and McLean 2007; Joas 1992). In particular, this includes a conceptualization of strategy in the perspective of the creativity of action (Grand and McLean 2007; Joas 1992), situated action (Suchman 1987), symbolic interaction (Goffman 1971) and interpretative flexibility (Callon 1986). It is important that strategy research considers this creativity in strategizing and the distinctive forms of how this happens in practice fields (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002). This creative reinvention of strategy practices explains why taken-for-granted references and practices shift and transform themselves across situations and over time (Joas 1992). Stories and repertoires, and tools and artefacts, referring to strategy are never unambiguous; they have to be reinterpreted in any new situation. In the perspective of a constructivist research programme, this can be seen as one source of creativity, innovation and strategic renewal in strategy making. Another driver for the deconstruction of unquestioned strategy concepts and strategy practices is changing contexts (Pettigrew 1987). Whereas strategy process research often predefines and conceptualizes contexts in general terms, it is important to consider contexts as they are continuously enacted by the actors themselves. Thereby, given strategies and strategizing practices are deconstructed and reinterpreted, and translated and transformed. The idiosyncrasies in each context, as well as the situated improvisations of each person involved, lead to the invention of new strategic concepts and strategizing activities. Over time, these new concepts and activities become objectivized new concepts and practices which transcend the individual situation and context. Finally, entrepreneurial and

managerial activities themselves challenge and reflect the appropriateness of established strategies and practices, either in formalized or informal ways and settings. Thus, the deconstruction of the current strategy itself is enacted and shaped by particular strategizing practices. This indicates an important methodological and epistemological starting point for the empirical study of strategy concepts and strategizing practices. It is fundamental to open the central black boxes of the strategy field, instead of accepting and pre-assuming their taken-for-granted nature in an organization and in strategy research. In the perspective of a constructivist research programme, epistemologies, theories and methodologies have the essential role of enabling the study of the creation and construction, as well as deconstruction and transformation, of these black boxes. It is a programme to foster stability and instability, creation and destruction, and action and reflection in strategy making and strategy research.

Conclusions A constructivist research programme in strategy research implies the development of alienating perspectives. Although constructivist epistemologies differ in their premises, they share a scepticism against anything which is just taken for granted, self-evident and unquestioned (Hacking 1999). At the same time, more recent perspectives in these epistemologies share an in-depth understanding of the importance of taken-for-granted, self-evident, unquestioned references, concepts and practices for robust managerial action and scientific research, given the fundamental uncertainty and ambiguity in these contexts (Gomez and Jones 2000). In parallel to a call for theories of creative action to advance the conduct of strategy research (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2002), we plead for the advancement of a constructivist research programme for strategy research. In essence, this implies the following points. First, this implies a research focus on the creation and construction activities of the actors studied (Joas 1992), in relation to the construction activities of strategy research itself (Knorr Cetina 2002); second, this

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implies an emphasis on the creative and constructive nature of research, which is in line with earlier methodological perspectives (Glaser and Strauss 1967); third, this implies a focus on the ambiguity of taken-for-granted references, which at the same time are essential for action under uncertainty, and are always potentially problematic (Thevenot 2006); fourth, both managers and researchers require discovery technologies. These are methodologies and theories, and concepts and tools, which support the deconstruction and reconstruction of the self-evident (Knorr Cetina 1989; Latour 2005). In this view, one central criterion for evaluating ‘good’ research and ‘good’ management is the ability to create new perspectives on what we take for granted (Weick 1989). References Ahrens, T. and C. S. Chapman. (2007), ‘Management Accounting as Practice’. Accounting, Organizations and Society 32:1–27. Balogun, J. and G. Johnson. (2004), ‘Organizational Restructuring and Middle Manager Sensemaking’. Academy of Management Journal 47:523–549. Barney, J. (1991), ‘Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage’. Journal of Management 17:99–120. Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann. (1967), The Social Construction of Reality. London: Penguin. Boltanski, L. and L. Thevenot. (1991), De la justification: les economies de la grandeur. Paris: Edition Gallimard. Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1982), Ce que parler veut dire. Paris: Fayard. Bourdieu, P. and L. Wacquant (1992), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (1996), Reflexive Anthropologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bower, J. L. (1970), Managing the Resource Allocation Process: A Study of Corporate Planning and Investment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

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Bower, J. L. and C. G. Gilbert. (2005), From Resource Allocation to Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2007), ‘How Managers’ Everyday Decisions Create or Destroy Your Company’s Strategy’. Harvard Business Review 85:72–79. Brown, J. S. and P. Duguid. (2001), ‘Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective’. Organization Science 12:198–213. Brown, S. L., and K. M. Eisenhardt. (1997), ‘The Art of Continuous Change: Linking Complexity Theory and Time-paced Evolution in Relentlessly Shifting Organisations’. Administrative Science Quarterly 42:1–34. Burgelman, R. A. (1994), ‘Fading Memories: A Process Theory of Strategic Business Exit in Dynamic Environments’. Administrative Science Quarterly 39:24–56. (1996), ‘A Process Model of Strategic Business Exit: Implications for an Evolutionary Perspective on Strategy’. Strategic Management Journal 17:193–214. Callon, M. (1986), ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’, in, J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge?, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 196–223. Chia, R. and B. MacKay. (2007), ‘Post-Processual Challenges for the Emerging Strategy-as-Practice Perspective: Discovering Strategy in the Logic of Practice’. Human Relations 60:217–242. Christensen, C. M., and J. L. Bower. (1996), ‘Customer Power, Strategic Investment, and the Failure of Leading Firms’. Strategic Management Journal 17:197–218. Dahrendorf, R. (2005), Engagierte Beobachter. Die Intellektuellen und die Versuchungen der Zeit. Wien: Passagen Verlag. Denis, J.-L., L. Lamothe and A. Langley. (2001), ‘The Dynamics of Collective Leadership and Strategic Change in Pluralistic Organizations’. Academy of Management Journal 44:809–837. Dyer, J. H. and H. Singh. (1998), ‘The Relational View: Cooperative Strategy and Sources of Interorganizational Competitive Advantage’. The Academy of Management Review 23:660–679. Eberle, T. (1992), ‘A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge: “The Social Construction of Reality” After 25 Years’.

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Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 2:493–502. Elkana, Y. (1986), Anthropologie der Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am. Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Engström, V. and F. Blackler. (2005), ‘On the Life of the Object’. Organization 12:307–330. Feldman, M. S. (2003), ‘A Performative Perspective on Stability and Change in Organizational Routines’. Industrial & Corporate Change 12:727–752. Feldman, M. S. and B. T. Pentland. (2003), ‘Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change’. Administrative Science Quarterly 48:94–118. Fleck, L. (1980), Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt am. Main.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. Floyd, S. W., and P. J. Lane. (2000), ‘Strategizing Throughout the Organization: Managing Role Conflict in Strategic Renewal’. Academy of Management Review 25:145–175. Foucault, M. (1971), Die Ordnung der Dinge. Eine Archäologie der Humanwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1978), The History of Sexuality – An Introduction. New York: Random House. Garfinkel, H. (2002), Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO; New York; Toronto; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Geertz, C. (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Gherardi, S. and D. Nicolini. (2002), ‘Learning in a Constellation of Interconnected Practices: Canon or Dissonance?’ Journal of Management Studies 39:419–436. Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gioia, D. A. and K. Chittipeddi. (1991), ‘Sensemaking and Sensegiving in Strategic Change Initiation’. Strategic Management Journal 12:433–448. Glaser, B. G. and A. Strauss. (1967), The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine. Glasersfeld, V. (1995), Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: The Falmer Press.

Goffman, E. (1971), Interaktionsrituale: Über das Verhalten in direkter Kommunikation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Gomez, P.-Y. and B. C. Jones. (2000), ‘Conventions: An Interpretation of Deep Structure in Organizations’. Organization Science 11:696–708. Goodman, N. (1987), Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Grand, S. (2003), ‘Praxisrelevanz versus Praxisbezug der Forschung in der Managementforschung’. Die Betriebswirtschaft 63:599–604. Grand, S. and D. McLean. (2007), ‘Researching the Practice of Strategy as Creative Action: Toward an Action Theoretics Foundation of the Research Program’. Paper presented at the 23rd EGOS Colloquium, Vienna. Grand, S., G. von Krogh and A. M. Pettigrew. (1999), ‘Strategic Thinking and Acting under Ambiguity’. Paper presented at the 15th EGOS, Colloquium, Warwick. Grant, R. M. (2003), ‘Strategic Planning in a Turbulent Environment: Evidence from the Oil Majors’. Strategic Management Journal 24:491–517. Greenwood, R. and C. R. Hinings. (1996), ‘Understanding Radical Organizational Change: Bringing Together the Old and the New Institutionalism’. Academy of Management Review 21:1022–1054. Hacking, I. (1999), The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hendry, J. and D. Seidl. (2003), ‘The Structure and Significance of Strategic Episodes: Social Systems Theory and the Routine Practices of Strategic Change’. Journal of Management Studies 40:175–196. Heracleous, L. and R. J. Marshak. (2004), ‘Conceptualizing Organizational Discourse as Situated Symbolic Action’. Human Relations 57:1285–1312. Husserl E., (1931), Cartesianische Meditationen. Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie. Hamburg: Meiner. Jarzabkowski, P. (2003), ‘Strategic Practices: An Activity Theory Perspective on Continuity and Change’. Journal of Management Studies 40:23–55. (2004), ‘Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation and Practices-in-Use’. Organization Studies 25:529–560.

Constructivist epistemologies in Strategy as Practice research Joas, H. (1992), Kreativität des Handels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Johnson, G. (1987), Strategic Change and the Management Process. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, G., A. Langley, L. Melin and R. Whittington. (2007), The Practice of Strategy: Research Directions and Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, G., L. Melin and R. Whittington. (2003), ‘Micro Strategy and Strategizing: Towards an Activity-Based View’. Journal of Management Studies 40:3–22. Knorr Cetina, K. (1981), The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. (1989), ‘Spielarten des Konstruktivismus. Einige Notizen und Anmerkungen’. Soziale Welt 40:86–96. (1999), Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Harvard: Harvard University Press. (2002), Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Knorr Cetina, K. and A. Cicourel (eds) (1981). Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Towards an Integration of Micro- and Macrosociologies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Latour, B. (1999), Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2005), Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. and S. Woolgar. (1979), Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Los Angeles: Sage. (1986), Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Law, J. (2004), After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Abingdon: Routledge. Luckmann, T. (1992), ‘Social Construction and After’. Perspectives 15:4–5. Luhmann, N. (1986), ‘The Autopoiesis of Social Systems’, in F. Geyer and J. van der Zouwen (eds) Sociocybernetic Paradoxes. Observation, Control and Evolution of Self-steering Systems. London: Sage, 176–192. (1996), Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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(2002), Einführung in die Systemtheorie. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag. Maitlis, S. (2005), ‘The Social Processes of Organizational Sensemaking’. Academy of Management Journal 48:21–49. March, J. G., and Z. Shapira. (1987), ‘Managerial Perspectives on Risk and Risk Taking’. Management Science 33:1404–1418. Maturana, H. and F. Varela. (1987), The Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala. Mintzberg, H. (1971), ‘Managerial Work: Analysis from Observation’. Management Science 18:B-97-B-110. Mintzberg, H. and A. McHugh. (1985), ‘Strategy Formation in an Adhocracy’. Administrative Science Quarterly 24:580–589. Morgan, G. (2006), Images of Organization, Updated edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Orlikowski, W. J. (2000), ‘Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations’. Organization Science 12:404–428. (2002), ‘Knowing in Practice: Enacting a Collective Capability in Distributive Organizing’. Organization Science 13:249–273. Paroutis, S. and A. Pettigrew. (2007), ‘Strategizing in the Multi-Business Firm: Strategy Teams at Multiple Levels and Over Time’. Human Relations 60:99–135. Pettigrew, A. M. (1985), The Awaking Giant: Continuity and Change in ICI. Oxford: Blackwell. (1987), ‘Context and Action in the Transformation of the Firm’. Journal of Management Studies 24:649–670. Piaget, J. (1995), The Essential Piaget: An Interpretative Reference and Guide. Edited by H. E. Gruber and J. J. Voneche. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson. Porter, M. E. (1985), Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: The Free Press. Regnér, P. (2003), ‘Strategy Creation in Practice: A Development in Cultural Theorizing’. Journal of Management Studies 40:57–82. Rorty, R. (1989), Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Salvato, C. (2003), ‘The Role of Micro-Strategies in the Engineering of Firm Evolution’. Journal of Management Studies 40:83–108. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003), ‘Strategizing as Lived Experience and Strategists’ Everyday Effort to Shape Strategic Direction’. Journal of Management Studies 40:141–174. Schatzki, T. R., K. Knorr Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds). 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Schendel, D. and M. A. Hitt. (2007), ‘Comments from the Editors: Introduction to Volume 1’. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 1:1–60. Schütz, A. (1932), Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Seidl, D. (2007), ‘General Strategy Concepts and the Ecology of Strategy Discourses’. Organization Studies 28:197–218. Strauss, A. and J. Corbin. (1990), Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Suchman, L. (1987), Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thevenot, L. (2006), L’action au pluriel: Sociologie des régimes d’engagement. Paris: Editions La Découverte. Tsoukas, H. (2005), Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsoukas, H. and R. Chia. (2002), ‘On Organizational Becoming: Rethinking Organizational Change’. Organization Science 13:567–582. Tsoukas, H. and C. Knudsen. (2002), ‘The Conduct of Strategy Research: Meta-Theoretical Issues’, in A. M. Pettigrew, H. Thomas and R. Whittington (eds) Handbook of Strategy and Management, London: Sage, 477–435. Vaara, E., B. Kleymann and H. Serist. (2004), ‘Strategies as Discursive Constructions: The Case of Airline Alliances’. Journal of Management Studies 41:1–35.

van de Ven, A. (1993), ‘Managing the Process of Organizational Innovation’, in G.P. Huber and W. Glick (eds) Organizational Change and Redesign. New York: Oxford University Press, 269–294. von Foerster, H. (1981), Observing Systems. Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications. von Hippel, E. and G. von Krogh. (2003), ‘Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science’. Organization Science 14:209–223. Watzlawick, P. (ed.) (1984), The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? New York: W.W. Norton. Weick, K. E. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York,: McGraw-Hill. (1989), ‘Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination’. Academy of Management Review 14:516–513. (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations. London: Sage Publications. Weick, K. E., and K. H. Roberts. (1993), ‘Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks’. Administrative Science Quarterly 38:357–381. Weick, K. E., and K. M. Sutcliffe. (2001), Managing the Unexpected. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westley, F. R. (1990), ‘Middle Managers and Strategy: Microdynamics of Inclusion’. Strategic Management Journal 11:337–351. Whittington, R. (1996), ‘Strategy As Practice’. Long Range Planning 29:731–735. (2007), ‘Strategy Practice and Strategy Process: Family Differences and the Sociological Eye’. Organization Studies 28:1575–1586. Wittgenstein, L. (1967), Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

CHAPTER

5

Constructing contribution in ‘Strategy as Practice’ research K A R E N G O L D E N -B ID D L E a nd JASON AZUMA

The emerging stream of Strategy as Practice research ‘has grown rapidly’ in just a few years (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007 p. 5), with the response that ‘has been nothing short of impressive’ (Chia 2004, p. 29). As such, the development of Strategy as Practice provides an intriguing glimpse into how knowledge-creating professions constitute themselves and maintain organization and power through networks of texts such as journal articles, books and websites (e.g. www.strategy-as-practice.org) that frame and focus topics of interest. In this chapter, we focus attention on how Strategy as Practice is constructing opportunities for contribution through the genre of journal articles, the location of crucial public discourse among researchers (Winsor 1993; Yearley 1981; Zuckermann 1987). We first present our analyses of how empirically based Strategy as Practice articles construct contribution to the field of organizational studies. Then, we map these constructions onto an extant framework of contribution (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997) to disclose opportunities for contribution that have been pursued as well as those which have been neglected.

How Strategy as Practice research constructs opportunities for contribution How do ‘Strategy as Practice’ researchers relate the academic and field-based worlds to develop theoretically relevant insights regarded as a contribution by academic readers? To address this question, we drew on a recent listing and review of published or in press articles in the Strategy as Practice field (Jarzabkowski and Spee forthcoming). From this

list, we selected all empirical work published in peer reviewed journals. This resulted in a sample of twenty-six articles. As prior work has shown (Bazerman 1993; Golden-Biddle and Locke 1993; Knorr-Cetina 1981; Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997; Swales and Najar 1987), it is in the introductions of journal articles that authors offer readers plausible proposals of knowledge for their consideration. It is here that constructing contribution takes centre stage. Consequently, we focused our analytic attention on the introductions of the articles in our sample. To guide our analyses, we drew on an extant framework of constructing opportunities for contribution (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997) generated from a grounded theory analysis of eighty-two articles published over twenty years in Administrative Science Quarterly and Academy of Management Journal. The framework is constituted in two processes: constructing intertextual coherence and problematizing the situation. These processes show how published journal articles must first re-present and organize existing knowledge so as to configure a context for contribution that reflects a consensus of previous work. At the same time, they must in a sense turn on themselves, subverting or problematizing the very literature that provides the basis of their efforts. As described in the original study (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997, p. 1029), ‘These two processes speak to the tension between, on the one hand, authors needing to relate present works to existing research programs so that the works’ importance and relevance to the organizational studies community are established and, on the other hand, needing to demonstrate that the works identify occasions for original contribution’. 79

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Process 1: constructing intertextual coherence This process concerns how an article makes connections among extant work, and between extant work and the present study. These connections, or networks of prior work, have been conceptualized as intertextual fields (Bazerman 1993; Gephart 1988; Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997). When discussing prior literature, authors seek to make space for their research and illuminate the contribution that it can make. Rather than a fixed and immutable description of ‘what is out there’, there is sufficient fluidity and ambiguity for authors to plausibly shape the literature in a number of distinct ways. Prior work has disclosed three strategies for shaping this intertextual field in organization studies: progressive coherence, synthesized coherence and noncoherence (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997; Golden-Biddle and Locke 2007).

Progressive coherence To construct an intertextual field consisting of progressive coherence, authors draw on work already explicitly connected, highlighting shared theoretical perspectives or methods in research areas that have been advanced cumulatively over time. These articles depict an additive knowledge growth in the research stream, often via multiple and intensive use of references. The result is a portrayal of a well-developed and focused line of inquiry as a consensus view among scholars. The vast majority of the Strategy as Practice articles (twenty-two out of twenty-six) analysed for this chapter used a progressive coherence strategy to construct the intertextual field. Early empirical work took one of two directions in their use of this strategy. A few articles (Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002; Jarzabkowski 2003) construct progressive coherence in order to situate and delineate the Strategy as Practice domain. For instance, the excerpt below locates Strategy as Practice within the broader ‘practice turn’ occurring in the social sciences. A study of micro strategy may be located within the growing body of research upon ‘practice,’

which focuses upon how people engage in the doing of ‘real work’ (Cook & Brown, 1999: 387). Practice scholars examine the way that actors interact with the social and physical features of context in the everyday activities that constitute practice. The practice concept has recently penetrated the strategy literature as practice, recommending that we take strategists and their work seriously (Whittington, 2002). Strategy as practice endeavors to explain how managerial actors perform the work of strategy […] (Hendry, 2000; Whittington, 1996, 2002). (Taken from Jarzabkowski 2003, pp. 23–24)

By contrast, other articles construct progressive coherence in a prior literature outside Strategy as Practice. Then, these articles exported Strategy as Practice as an approach or perspective to construct opportunities for contribution to that other literature. Such a strategy of progressive coherence has been used to elaborate the resource-based view of the firm (Ambrosini et al. 2007), sensemaking theory (Balogun and Johnson 2004), evolutionary theory (Salvato 2003) and identity dynamics (Beech and Johnson 2005). For example, the following excerpt shapes the extant literature on the resource-based view of the firm in order to create space for a micro-perspective associated with a Strategy as Practice approach to make a contribution. This empirical research makes a contribution […] to the recent debate on the resource-based view (RBV) (Barney, 2001; Priem & Butler, 2001a, 2001b). Indeed our micro-level approach to understanding firm performance is a step toward responding to one of the key criticisms of the RBV, which is that it currently suffers from a high level of abstraction (Priem & Butler, 2001a). (Taken from Ambrosini et al. 2007, p. 60)

More recent articles construct progressive coherence within the Strategy as Practice literature, signalling the development of a more focused line of inquiry in this emerging stream of research. In the examples below, note the presence of two hallmarks of a progressive coherence construction: use of multiple citations to Strategy as Practice (no fewer than four and up to seven references) and depiction of scholarly consensus about the topical area of Strategy as Practice.

Constructing contribution in ‘Strategy as Practice’ research The strategy as practice perspective refocuses research on the actions and interactions of the strategy practitioners and the situated practices they draw upon in doing strategy (Balogun et al., 2007; Jarzabkowski et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2003; Whittington, 1996, 2003, 2006; Whittington et al 2003) … (Taken from Hoon 2007, p. 922) Empirical studies in the strategy as practice area are increasingly providing us with accounts of the ways in which managers strategize (Maitlis & Lawrence, 2003; Oakes et al., 1998; Salvato, 2003; Samra-Fredericks, 2003). (Taken from Paroutis and Pettigrew 2007, pp. 101–102) How responsibility is interpreted is a question that has now been raised for a strategy agenda (Jarzabkowski 2004: 549–550). Descriptions of what people should do when they implement strategy do not agree with the emerging evidence of what they actually do (Johnson et al. 2003a). This suggests a need for empirical and theoretical investigations of accounts of how and where strategizing and organizing is actually done (Whittington 2003: 119) which has given rise to the ‘strategyas-practice’ approach (Whittington 1996, 2003; Hendry 2000; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002; Jarzabkowski 2004). (Taken from Sillince and Mueller 2007, p. 157) […] an emerging literature in micro-strategy that aims at understanding the micro activities of strategy, as well as ‘the practices guiding and fueling those activities’ (Jarzabkowski, 2004, 2005; Jarzabkowski et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2003; Whittington, 1996, 2003, 2006). (Taken from Mantere 2008, p. 295)

Synthesized coherence This strategy of constructing an intertextual field assembles and draws connections between works previously unrelated. Some of these articles assemble and relate discrepant references around an overarching idea. Alternatively, others create topical intersections – commonalities – between two or more distinct research programmes. Just three of the twenty-six articles in the sample used the strategy of synthesized coherence to construct the intertextual field. Below, the first

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example connects two social science research streams with each other and then with Strategy as Practice research to cultivate a ‘critical lens’ on Strategy as Practice. In terms of this paper, the key point is that each of the two social science traditions – Habermas and ethno-approaches – provide a way for opening up theoretical, conceptual and analytical routes to generate a critical understanding of everyday strategic practice and the interactional constitution of ‘power effects’. This is the prime contribution here – having ‘researched differently’ as argued elsewhere (Samra-Fredericks, 2003b; see also Samra-Fredericks, 1994, 1996, 2000, 1998, 2004a). Hence, while recognizing the immense problems, concerns and debates that Habermas and ethnoscholars such as Garfinkel/Sacks and their key proponents have generated (see Alvesson, 1996; Button, 1991; Giddens, 1977; Heritage, 1984; Reed, 1992; Thompson, 1982; Turner, 1988), this paper remains focused upon outlining how each may supplement the other to provide penetrating and critical lenses on SasP. (Taken from SamraFredericks 2005, p. 806)

The next example relates practice research, and then more specifically Strategy as Practice research, with institutional theory to contribute to both literatures. In this paper, we examine the case of the creation of active money management practice in the US mutual fund industry, drawing on both institutional and practice scholarship, to develop a process model of new practice creation that redirects attention toward the multiplicity of actors that interactively produce change. (Taken from Lounsbury and Crumley 2007, p. 993)

The final example assembles disparate research areas ‘within or closely related to strategic management’ around one common core idea; that of championing activities. In particular, it draws on and seeks to contribute to the literatures of issue selling and strategy. Note the variety of work in different topical areas pulled together around championing. While championing activities have been discussed by a variety of literatures, within or closely related to strategic management, including internal evolutionism (Burgelman, 1991; Noda and Bower,

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Karen Golden-Biddle and Jason Azuma 1996; Lovas and Ghoshal, 2000), innovation management (Schön, 1963; Chakrabarti, 1974; Howell and Higgins, 1990; Day, 1994), strategic learning (Crossan and Berdrow, 2003) and strategic renewal (Floyd and Lane, 2000; Floyd and Wooldridge, 2000), this discussion has not yet addressed those champions willing, but unable, to play a role. Issueselling authors (see Dutton et al., 2002 for the latest discussion) have sought to ‘unravel and make sense of the microprocesses that compose strategic change’ (Dutton et al., 2001: 732). The issue selling discourse has provided us with important knowledge about the characteristics of successful championing processes […] The goal of this article is to explore the enablers and disablers of the championing of strategy practitioners. Enabled and thwarted champions at all organizational levels are granted a voice about what practices enable and disable their championing. Utilizing a framework introduced by Jarzabkowski (2004), I will analyze the enabling and disabling strategic practices as either adaptive or recursive, thus linking my results firmly into the discussion of strategy-as practice, as an empirical exploration of one of its central theoretical frameworks. (Taken from Mantere 2005, pp. 158–59)

Noncoherence Articles using a strategy of noncoherence to construct extant literature present referenced work as belonging to a common research programme. However, in contrast to the previous two forms of coherence, literatures are now linked together in disagreement. Consequently, the focus of constructing noncoherence is on discord among researchers who may nevertheless agree on the importance of the research domain. There was just one example of the noncoherence strategy in the sample of Strategy as Practice empirical articles. In it, the authors articulate contrasting conceptualizations of gaps between intentions and outcomes adopted by traditional strategy research and a ‘different perspective’ adopted by ‘another stream of implementation research’. Traditional strategy research has tended to focus on the extent to which change initiatives succeed in transforming organizations by putting a new strategy in place. Gaps between strategic intentions and outcomes are presented as problems of

control, commitment or loyalty that need to be eliminated, or at least minimized. For example, Johnson-Cramer et al. (2003) refer to gaps between intentions and outcomes as infidelity, arguing that one way to avoid infidelity is through participation. Another stream of implementation research takes a different perspective. Instead of viewing gaps between intentions and outcomes as problematic, this literature is concerned with understanding and explaining the reciprocal relationship between a change initiative and the organizational context (Lozeau et al., 2002; Whittington, 2003; Balogun & Johnson, 2005). (Taken from Stensaker and Falkenberg 2007, p. 138)

In analysing the process of constructing intertextual coherence for the Strategy as Practice sample, we observed articles using all three strategies for depicting ‘the literature’: progressive coherence, synthesized coherence and noncoherence. Such depictions are not simply retrieved from material lying ‘out there’ in the literature. Indeed, even though the Strategy as Practice articles used all three strategies of structuring the extant literature, the vast majority (twenty-two of twenty-six) chose to construct the literature using the strategy of progressive coherence. How scholars construct the literature is an important resource (Golden-Biddle and Locke 1997, 2007) in developing opportunities for contribution and in shaping and constituting the emerging Strategy as Practice research stream. We will discuss the implications of these results after we present the analyses of the second process in constructing opportunities for contribution.

Process 2: problematizing the situation In the second process, the article not only relies upon but now also calls into question the intertextual field constructed. In subverting the very literature just constructed, the article creates a gap, enabling it to argue the uniqueness and value of the proposed contribution. In other words, it creates a space for the present study to contribute. Analysis of how authors problematize the literature in organizational studies (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997) disclosed three strategies: incompleteness, inadequacy and incommensurateness. The prefix,

Constructing contribution in ‘Strategy as Practice’ research

‘in’ is used intentionally to express the negation, even subversion, of some aspect of the literature just constructed. Proceeding along the continuum of these three constructions increases the negation and upheaval of the literature.

Incompleteness In problematizing the literature as incomplete, the article identifies where further specification is needed in the structured intertextual field. In doing so, it claims that the extant literature is not fully specified and proposes to contribute by filling in what is not finished. The hallmark of an incomplete problematization is identification of a gap representing what needs to yet be filled in. In the Strategy as Practice articles examined, fourteen of the twenty-six articles problematized the constructed literature as incomplete. The following three articles construct this ‘incomplete’ gap within the Strategy as Practice literature that has been constructed as progressive coherence. Note how each takes a specific element discussed in the Strategy as Practice literature, e.g. strategic practices and strategy workshops, and suggests ‘further elaboration’ or more attention is required. The present paper focuses on the day-to-day interactions in which senior management engages. It represents an attempt to describe and understand what is happening in what Jarzabkowski (2003) refers to as strategic practices. The concept of strategic practice has been launched as a central element in the overall practice of strategic management, but it requires further elaboration if we are to understand how such an activity actually contributes to a specific outcome. (Taken from Sminia 2005, p. 269) Our research takes a strategy-as-practice perspective, prioritising what managers do in strategy making, rather than focusing on the types of strategies organisations might adopt (Johnson, Melin, & Whittington, 2003; Whittington, 1996). Hendry and Seidl (2003) have argued that much strategy practice is episodic in nature, in other words bounded by time periods, with discernable beginnings and endings. The most obvious example here might be a board meeting, but strategy

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workshops also fit this episodic pattern. While boardroom behavior has been studied, workshops have received very little attention (Pettigrew & McNulty, 1005). The only three empirical papers that consider strategy workshops do so indirectly […] (Blackler, Crump & McDonald, 2001; Hodgkinson & Wright, 2002; Mezias, Grinyer & Guth, 2001). In short, we know very little about a phenomenon that, on the face of it, appears to be important in understanding the practice of making strategy. (Taken from Hodgkinson et al. 2006, p. 481) With its recent turn towards practice-based theorizing (Balogun et al. 2007; Hendry 2000; Jarzabkowski 2005; Johnson et al. 2003, 2007; Whittington 1996, 2003, 2006) strategy research has developed a particular interest in the everyday activities of strategy practitioners […] Actors do not act in isolation but draw upon regular, socially defined modes of acting that make their actions and interactions meaningful to others (Balogun et al. 2007; Chia and Mackay 2007; Suchman 1986; Wilson and Jarzabkowski 2004; Whittington 2006) […] This line of practice theorizing conceptualizes the mundane, micro practices through which strategy work is constructed as widely diffused resources that may be drawn upon to perform patterned sequences of strategic activity (Giddens 1984). However, despite their routinization, such practices are not immutable (Feldman 2000; Lounsbury 2001). They neither form rigid patterns nor are interconnected in the same ratios, types and combinations over time (Feldman and Pentland 2003) […] Strategy practices are thus associated both with stabilizing patterns of activity because they represent widely accepted, socially-defined ways of acting and at the same time are micro-mechanisms of strategic change according to the way they are used (Tsoukas and Chia 2002; Whittington 2006). This article takes this approach, examining strategy meetings as typically occurring social practices that have implications for stabilizing or destabilizing the flow of strategy activity within organizations. Despite their pervasiveness, we know little about the effects of meetings upon the organizations in which they take place. (Taken from Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008)

The final example creates an incomplete gap in the sensemaking literature which was constructed as progressive coherence. Specifically, the authors

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suggest that how change initiatives are interpreted remains an ‘under-explored research avenue’ and that Strategy as Practice research can help to fill this gap. Although we know from studies that examine the way interpretations of change initiatives develop through time (Balogun and Johnson 2004; Brown and Humphreys 2003; Isabella 1990; Labianca et al. 2000) that these recipient processes of interaction are key during change, they remain an under-explored research avenue. (Taken from Balogun and Johnson 2005, p. 1576)

Inadequacy A strategy of problematizing the literature as inadequate clears a space for contribution by pointing out an oversight and suggesting that an alternative perspective or framework is required to address it. Here, extant literature is represented as needing more than further specifying. Rather, it is represented as having not sufficiently incorporated different perspectives and alternate views of the phenomenon under investigation. Illuminating oversights or missing perspectives is the hallmark of texts that problematize the field as inadequate. In our analysis, twelve of the articles used this strategy. In most cases, Strategy as Practice was used to provide a new perspective to a different literature that was problematized as inadequate. In the first example, Strategy as Practice as the ‘new stream of research’ is used to develop a missing, though ‘complementary point of view’, on strategic sensemaking and sensegiving that illuminates how such processes ‘are embedded in a broader social context’. Research on strategic sensemaking and sensegiving has mainly had a macroprocess orientation, centred upon iterative and sequential models that culminate in the interpretation of strategic discourse (Craig-Lees, 2001). These processes have mainly been described as resulting from the conscious activity of top managers, and the importance of managers’ tacit knowledge has been neglected (Huisman, 2001; Jameson, 2001). Moreover, the process of constructing and diffusing meaning in strategic change is generally defined within the self-referential context of

change, as if it were separated from the social context in which it is embedded (Wright et al., 2000). In this article, I adopt a complementary point of view inspired by a new stream of research holding that success or failure in strategic change depends on how managers interpret and enact the new orientation during their interactions and conversations (Johnson et al., 2003; Samra-Fredericks, 2000, 2003). I examine how strategic sensemaking and sensegiving patterns are produced and reproduced daily and I demonstrate how these processes are anchored in managers’ tacit knowledge and how they are embedded in a broader social context. (Taken from Rouleau 2005, p. 414)

Similarly, the next two examples adopt the Strategy as Practice perspective in order to problematize prevailing strategy research as overlooking critical, micro-level phenomena. Note the logic and particular language used by the articles to illuminate the inadequacy of extant research. Although recent strategy research has been dominated by a focus on the outcomes and effects of organizational strategy (e.g., Makadok, 2001; Mata and Portugal, 2000; Porter, 1996; Williamson, 1991), it is in the micro-processes of strategizing that managers and other organizational members are involved day-to-day, and these which determine the ability of organizations to formulate and implement strategies (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Gioia and Thomas, 1996; Pettigrew, 1987). Management research has also tended to focus its attention on successful, high performance organizations with strong records of developing and implementing corporate strategy (e.g., Pettigrew; 1985, 1987; Prahalad and Hamel, 1990; Raynor and Bower, 2001; Teeriink, 2000). Thus, what we do know about the micro-processes of strategizing largely reflects the practices of more successful businesses. An important and overlooked area of inquiry in strategy research concerns the organizational practices associated with the failures in strategic decision making that are commonplace in many organizations (Nutt, 1999). This topic is critically important because the majority of organizations are not high-performing, leading edge or exemplary; most organizations face both success and failure in their strategizing processes. To understand how strategizing occurs in most organizations, we therefore need to investigate both its successes and failures (Pettigrew and

Constructing contribution in ‘Strategy as Practice’ research Whipp, 1991). (Taken from Maitlis and Lawrence 2003, pp. 109–110) How do managers create and develop strategy? This simple question seems to be fundamental for strategic management, but there are still surprisingly few answers in strategy research. Strategy process research (e.g. Johnson, 1987; Johnson and Huff, 1988; Mintzberg, 1978; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985; Pettigrew, 1985; Quinn, 1980) has provided rich and systematic descriptions showing that strategy making comprises a variety of actors and contextual influences. However, it seems as if we still have an imperfect understanding of the particulars of these since less attention has been devoted to the micro-level, including the actual activities, practices and actors involved in strategy making (Johnson and Huff, 1998; Whittington, 1996, 2002) […] The specifics of managerial activities and actors seem particularly vaguely defined regarding the development of entirely new strategies, in strategy creation, where traditional planning and analysis practices and top management might play a less significant role. It appears as if ‘what managers really do’ in terms of strategy creation and development remains as a residue… (Taken from Regnér 2003, pp. 57–58)

The final example takes an opposite approach to the earlier examples by suggesting that Strategy as Practice research itself is inadequate because it has overlooked discourse analysis. Strategy as Practice needs the discursive perspective in order to address ‘the most fundamental questions in strategy and strategizing’. In recent years, we have seen an increasing interest in the ‘strategy-as-practice’ perspective (e.g. Whittington, 1993, 2003; Johnson et al., 2003; Jarzabkowski, 2005). This research stream has focused on social practices constituting strategizing, and can as a whole be understood as a plea for serious analysis of this micro-level of strategy. This should also include discourse analysis (e.g. Hendry, 2000; Samra-Fredericks, 2003; Vaara et al., 2004; Jarzabkowski et al., this issue). In fact, a discursive perspective provides opportunities to map out and critically examine some of the most fundamental questions in strategy and strategizing that are not easily approached with more traditional perspectives. This is the case with ‘subjectivity’, which can be understood as

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a discursively constructed sense of identity and social agency in specific contexts. In their seminal article, Knights and Morgan (1991) examined how strategy discourse can transform ‘individuals into subjects whose sense of meaning and reality becomes tied to their participation in the discourse and practice of strategy’ (p. 252). Since then, other discursive analyses have also touched upon subjectivity. Nevertheless, empirical studies focusing on the discursive construction of subjectivity and its various implications in organizational strategizing are still rare in this area. (Taken from Laine and Vaara 2007, p. 30)

Incommensurability In contrast to the previous two strategies, an incommensurate problematization clears space to contribute by suggesting that the literature is wrong in some respect. That is, the literature has a misguided perspective or has moved in the wrong direction. The hallmark of this construction is the direct advocacy for an alternative idea or thesis that is better than those put forth in extant literature. Partisanship is clearly conveyed. There were no examples of this problematization in the Strategy as Practice articles examined. In the process of problematizing the situation, analyses of empirical studies in Strategy as Practice show that they use two of three possible strategies: incompleteness and inadequacy. Fourteen of the twenty-six articles problematized the literature as incomplete, whereas twelve problematized the literature as inadequate. There were no problematizations of incommensurability.

Considering contribution opportunities in Strategy as Practice research When both processes are incorporated, we can arrange our sample of Strategy as Practice articles in terms of their constructed opportunities for contribution. Table 5.1 arrays these twenty-six articles by the two processes: structuring the intertextual field (as progressive coherence, synthesized coherence or noncoherence) and problematizing the situation (as incomplete, inadequate or incommensurate). In combination, the two processes create

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Table 5.1 Opportunities for Contribution in Strategy as Practice research Process 1: structuring the intertextual field

Process 2: problematizing the situation Incompleteness

Inadequacy

Progressive coherence

Balogun and Johnson 2004 Balogun and Johnson 2005 Beech and Johnson 2005 Hodgkinson et al. 2006 Hoon 2007 Jarzobkowski 2003 Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008 Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002 Mantere 2008 Salvato 2003 Sillince and Mueller 2007 Sminia 2005

Ambrosini et al. 2007 Laine and Vaara 2007 Maitlis and Lawrence 2003 Mantere and Vaara 2008 Paroutis and Pettigrew 2007 Regnér 2003 Rouleau 2005 Samra-Fredericks 2003 Vaara et al. 2004 Whittington et al. 2006

Synthesized coherence

Mantere 2005

Samra-Fredericks 2005 Lounsbury and Crumley 2007

Noncoherence

Stensaker and Falkenberg 2007

nine possible constructions of contribution (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997). The Strategy as Practice sample of articles employed five of nine possible opportunities for contribution: progressive incomplete, progressive inadequate synthesized incomplete, synthesized inadequate and noncoherence incomplete. Among these, twenty-two of twenty-six articles, or approximately 85 percent constructed one of two primary opportunities for contribution: progressive incompleteness (twelve articles) and progressive inadequacy (ten articles). This is quite different from the original study (Locke and Golden-Biddle 1997) results which found slightly more than one-third of the articles constructed these two opportunities for contribution. Beyond these two dominant constructions, the remaining four articles in the Strategy as Practice sample constructed opportunities for contribution as follows: synthesized incomplete (one article), noncoherence incomplete (one article) and synthesized inadequate (two articles). Whereas four opportunities for contribution went unused in this sample – progressive incommensurability, synthesized incommensurability, noncoherence incommensurability and noncoherence inadequacy – in the original study these same constructions accounted for approximately one-quarter of all contribution constructions.

Incommensurability

The mapping of the Strategy as Practice articles and its general comparison with the earlier study presents an interesting point of reflection on the emerging field of Strategy as Practice. In the remainder of this section, we present some observations from our analyses and examine possible implications of these findings for Strategy as Practice research to date and the continuing development of the Strategy as Practice stream of research.

Observation 1: two opportunities for contribution dominate extant empirical research An obvious observation from our analyses is that an overwhelming predominance of the sample (twenty-two articles) constructed progressive incompleteness and progressive inadequacy opportunities for contribution. These constructions can be useful in gaining legitimacy, especially for a new area while it gets its bearings. In an emerging field of study, a progressive incomplete construction of contribution is useful in establishing what constitutes the field. Indeed, the articles show increasing consensus on the conceptualization of Strategy as Practice (a microperspective and ‘the doing of strategy’) and on its

Constructing contribution in ‘Strategy as Practice’ research

foundational texts, as indicated in the repeated use of work by particular scholars. Moreover, other literature, especially practice theory, has been imported to refine and strengthen the conceptualization of Strategy as Practice. As well, a progressive inadequate construction of contribution can be used to illuminate an oversight in another literature, and one which Strategy as Practice theory can address. A number of articles used this strategy to highlight oversights in strategy, as well as sensemaking and other areas. Strategy as Practice highlights emphasis on the micro-strategy making.

Observation 2: missing cells identify limits of extant empirical research While useful in elaborating and augmenting extant strategy research, and consolidating some early underpinnings of what constitutes the emerging field, primary emphasis on only two opportunities for contribution limits Strategy as Practice’s potential contribution to the strategy arena. While the temptation might be to continue to legitimate Strategy as Practice research by refining and elaborating its own domain and that of traditional strategy research, analyses provide glimpses into how Strategy as Practice could provoke new possibilities that would further develop Strategy as Practice research and more generally, could enhance or challenge how the field theorizes strategy. Turning attention to the empty cells helps to illuminate these limits. Most notable are the absence of the incommensurate problematization – the far right column in Table 5.1 – and the presence of only one example of a noncoherence structuring of extant work by Stensaker and Falkenberg (2007). The closest construction to incommensurability in the present sample may well be the statement by Whittington et al. (2006, p. 615) that, ‘Strategy research needs to move beyond its traditional domain of economic analysis’. The incomplete and inadequate problematizations as well as progressive and synthesized structuring of the literature are based in agreement with prevailing research domains. It is the

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incommensurability problematization and noncoherence structuring of the literature that are based on disagreement with extant research and thus enable the text to challenge prior literature. That is, instead of suggesting refinements or oversights in extant literature, articles directly challenge extant work as ‘misguided’ or ‘wrong’. Some prior strategy research (cf. Eisenhardt 1989; Mintzberg and Waters 1982, 1985) has used an incommensurate problematization of extant literature. An article by Eisenhardt (1989) that explores the speed of strategic decision-making advocates for an alternative thesis bolstered by empirical findings. Note the direct challenge and juxtapositioning of findings with extant research to accomplish this challenge. The results reported here are a set of propositions challenging traditional views of strategic decision making. The evidence suggests that fast decision makers use more, not less, information than do slow decision makers. They also develop more, not fewer, alternatives. In contrast to current literature […] Finally, integration among strategic decisions and between decisions and tactical plans speeds, not slows, decision making.

Research using a noncoherence construction of extant literature makes contentious characterizations, identifies internal challenges, negates findings or dichotomizes approaches (Locke and Golden-Biddle, 1997). For example, a study by Gersick (1994) links prior work in their disagreement, calling out internal differences by constructing ‘opposing camps’ of researchers on the organizational adaptability issue, and locating a group of researchers in each: ‘One camp associated with theorists such as […] Theorists such as […] anchor an opposing camp, arguing …’ The discussion and examples of incommensurability and noncoherence above suggest important possibilities for Strategy as Practice in constructing opportunities for contribution that ‘move beyond the strategy domain’ (Whittington et al. 2006). Indeed, one of the more creative possibilities include pairing a progressive structuring of traditional strategy literature that depicts the presence of a long-standing agreement among researchers with an incommensurate problematization of that

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literature that directly challenges that long-standing consensus. In this respect, using the matrix of contribution opportunities not only provides a means to map extant work in a domain of study, but also to disclose preferred contribution constructions and to generate alternative possibilities that to date, have been neglected.

Conclusion In concluding this chapter, we encourage the continuing efforts of Strategy as Practice scholars to move beyond their predecessors and establish an area of research that sheds important new light on embedded strategy making. In doing so, we join recent calls (cf. Chia and MacKay 2007) for Strategy as Practice scholars to continue to mindfully cultivate an alternative perspective that can shed new light on the strategy phenomenon. One means for cultivating such a perspective is for Strategy as Practice researchers to attend to the empty cells of the contribution matrix. But this activity can generate new lines of sight only if Strategy as Practice researchers continue to intentionally embrace what they, and we as a field, don’t see and don’t know about strategy making (Locke et al. 2008). Indeed, an important contribution of Strategy as Practice as a field of research could be how it cultivates space for scholars to generate new lines of sight on strategy making and new possibilities in theorizing about strategy. By embracing our hesitations, questions and hunches about the strategy phenomenon, such a space could help Strategy as Practice researchers get into a better position to notice puzzles in the familiar and gain insight for moving beyond the traditional economic analyses dominating strategy research (Whittington et al. 2006), strategy as process research (Chia and MacKay 2007) or other influencing bodies of work.

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CHAPTER

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The challenge of developing cumulative knowledge about Strategy as Practice A N N LA N G L E Y

The ‘Strategy as Practice’ perspective has recently attracted a substantial following of scholars interested in developing a better understanding of strategy as ‘something people do’ rather than something that ‘organizations have’ (Johnson et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington 2006). Under this banner, researchers have begun to examine issues like what happens in strategy meetings (Schwartz and Balogun 2007; Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008; Hodgkinson et al. 2006), how various strategic management tools are used (Kaplan and Jarzabkowski 2006; Stenfors et al. 2007) and how middle managers can and do contribute to strategy making (Balogun and Johnson 2004; Rouleau 2005). There is also a more critical stream in Strategy as Practice writing that has focused on the discursive practices of strategists (Laine and Vaara et al. 2007; Ezzamel and Wilmott, 2008) or on the roles of the wider strategy community including academics in the legitimation of potentially doubtful strategy practices (Whittington et al. 2003). Finally, there have been several attempts to position the Strategy as Practice perspective with respect to broader currents in theories of practice (Hendry and Seidl 2003; Chia and MacKay 2007; Johnson et al. 2007; Seidl 2007; Whittington 2006; Jarzabkowski 2004). This chapter begins to address a set of key but deceptively simple questions about this emerging body of work. Where is it heading? Is it, as many of its advocates hope, following a path likely to generate cumulative learning about the practice of strategy that will result in ‘a societal shift towards better everyday strategizing praxis, empowered by more effective practices and a deeper pool of

skilled practitioners’ (Whittington 2006, p. 629)? Indeed, is this ambition even reasonable or desirable? If so, how might it be achieved? More generally, how can progress in the understanding of Strategy as Practice be achieved in a sub-field whose empirical focus still remains rather loosely defined, whose theoretical roots emphasize the situated and the particular, and whose corresponding research methods tend to be qualitative and exploratory? Some scholars might consider this question as irrelevant, seeing situated knowledge of particular episodes of strategy practice as sufficient unto themselves for the local insight they offer over and above more traditional models of strategy. I believe that more is needed if the Strategy as Practice perspective is to develop fully and be taken seriously. In fact, I was originally inspired to think about these issues following an exchange with Leif Melin, co-author on a book that we wrote jointly with Gerry Johnson and Richard Whittington (Johnson et al. 2007). Our book introduces the Strategy as Practice perspective and presents some theoretical and methodological resources for developing it. The book also includes eight illustrative articles that in our view begin to offer some insights into strategy as a practice. As coauthors, we were discussing how to formulate the conclusion of the book when Leif pointed out that while we had devoted considerable space to the theoretical and methodological implications of the eight illustrative articles, we had not devoted much space to what they actually told us about the practice of strategy: i.e. the substantive knowledge that emerged from them. We did not resolve that issue in the book – indeed this was not its purpose.

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The illustrative articles were merely that: they examined different issues relevant to practice but came nowhere near to providing a basis to generalize. However, Leif’s point was important, and the remark stimulated me to think about what it is that we actually know about the practice of strategy, and whether the work currently being undertaken in its name could one day be integrated into another kind of book, one that would be comprehensive, credible, insightful and substantively useful to strategists. If so, what might that book look like? And what should we be doing now to make it possible? In this chapter, I present three alternative sets of answers to the questions raised in the last two paragraphs, each based on a different conception of the nature of knowledge accumulation and progress in organization studies and the social sciences that I label the normal science perspective, the practice-theory based perspective and the pragmatic perspective. These should be viewed as extreme ‘ideal types’ that do not necessarily reflect realistic predictions or prescriptions but rather establish the palette of orientations to cumulative knowledge that might be considered. The normal science perspective is empiricist in focus, and emphasizes the accumulation of knowledge through the extension and elaboration of nomological networks of relationships among variables. The practice-theory based perspective views progress in terms of increased idiographic understanding of the nature of practical activity. Its contribution to the improvement of practice appears largely conceptual rather than instrumental. Finally, the pragmatic perspective views knowledge of practice as deeply embedded in practice, and thus accumulating principally through direct experience. I illustrate each of the perspectives with an exemplar: a published book that represents the materialization of the perspective in an area of study adjacent to Strategy as Practice. Finally, I examine the extent to which the different perspectives are compatible with the nature of the Strategy as Practice field of research as it is currently organized and I conclude with some personal reflections on the potential for knowledge accumulation and improvement in the practice of strategy.

A normal science view of progress and knowledge accumulation Focus and precepts: extension and elaboration of nomological networks Beyond the specific question of developing knowledge about ‘Strategy as Practice’ the strategic management field overall has recently been characterized by considerable soul-searching concerning progress and knowledge accumulation. Various authors have declared the field to be unduly fragmented (Hambrick 2004; Volberda 2004), several have called for researchers to invest more intensively in replication (Singh et al. 2003; Mezias and Regnier 2007) and even those who have lauded the progress of ‘strategic management’ since its inception in the late 1970s have recognized the diversity of perspectives inhabiting the field and have drawn attention to its tendency to advance through pendulum swings between internal and external foci (Hoskisson et al. 1999). Soul-searching of a similar nature has characterized organization studies more generally (Pfeffer 1993, 1995, 2007; McKinley 2007; Tsang and Kwan 1999) as well as the related disciplinary field of sociology (Cole 2001; Davis 2001). With some exceptions, those initiating discussion on these issues tend to view scientific progress in terms of the development of ever more accurate, general and useful causal statements about the relationships between important phenomena observable in the empirical world. The orientation thus tends to be resolutely positivist in tone and based on a ‘normal science’ conception of knowledge as expressed in the form of established relationships between variables, where dependent variables generally represent some notion of performance. ‘Normal science’ perspectives are not necessarily the espoused norm for Strategy as Practice scholars who tend to favour constructivist assumptions and qualitative methodologies. Nevertheless, it is worth considering what if anything can be said about the potential for cumulative knowledge about the practice of strategy from an angle that considers the social world to be patterned by underlying relationships that can be expressed in nomothetic terms. In Johnson et al. (2007), Gerry

Developing cumulative knowledge about Strategy as Practice

Johnson insisted that the Strategy as Practice perspective will be irrelevant if it does not help explain or predict outcomes that are important to successful practice. Jarzabkowski et al. (2007), Johnson et al. (2007) and Whittington (2006) have argued that while it would be illusory to expect micro-level strategy research to explain organizational performance outcomes directly, it can and should focus on intermediate outcomes related for example to the effectiveness of strategists or to the effectiveness of the practices they engage in. Thus, it certainly makes sense to ask whether current research is heading towards building better explanations of the performance of strategic practices, and what exactly researchers should be doing to achieve this. Writers from the mainstream literature on strategy and organization studies offer some specific suggestions for improving this kind of knowledge accumulation. For example, Carlson and Hatfield (2004) argue that to enhance cumulative knowledge development in strategic management, scholars need to focus on the twin objectives of improving prediction (expressed as amount of variance explained) and improving generality (by testing relationships established in earlier studies in a variety of new contexts). They therefore propose that researchers should take as their starting point the phenomenon to be explained or predicted rather than the testing of any particular theory, and that a variety of theories should be mobilized as needed to help explain more of the variance. These authors argue emphatically for the need to build on prior research by including in each study all the variables that have been found important in the past. They further urge the use of valid and reliable measures and samples that are as large as possible to enhance generalizability. In the same vein, McKinley (2007) insists on the need for the standardization of measures across studies to ensure that they are comparable and to allow research results to accumulate. Finally, Mezias and Regnier (2007) cite the practices of certain prestigious political science and economics journals that demand that authors’ databases be archived and made available to other researchers, and that a fixed proportion of pages be allocated to replication. All these prescriptions are based on the idea that each individual

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study is a small piece in the collective construction of an increasingly robust edifice of ‘truth’ that will ultimately enable scholars to offer stronger and more valid recommendations to practitioners.

Example: Finkelstein and Hambrick (1996) on strategic leadership In 1984, Hambrick and Mason (1984) wrote a now famous paper in Academy of Management Review proposing an ‘upper echelons’ theory of strategy that subsequently stimulated a very productive stream of research. Finkelstein and Hambrick (1996) followed up with a book that elaborated the theory and reviewed the state of accumulated knowledge about the ‘impact of top executives on organizations’ at that point in time. Research in this stream has continued since then. In 2007, the authors of the original article, Don Hambrick and Phyllis Mason received the Academy of Management Review’s award for the most ‘innovative and frame-breaking’ article during its first decade of existence (Kilduff 2007, p. 332). To commemorate the occasion, Hambrick (2007) was invited to present an update of ‘upper echelons theory’ in the journal. In parallel with this, at least one systematic review and one meta-analysis of the upper echelons research programme have appeared, another sign that researchers have replicated previous work and that some kind of accumulation is occurring (Carpenter et al. 2004; Certo et al. 2006). Both Finkelstein and Hambrick (1996) and Carpenter et al. (2004) summarize the conceptual frameworks driving the research programme using a set of diagrams illustrating relationships between variables associated with top management team characteristics, team behaviour and performance. Of course, Finkelstein and Hambrick’s (1996) book is not a volume about Strategy as Practice. It focuses not so much on what top executives or strategists do, but on who they are and on how this affects what organizations do and thence organizational performance, generally with little attention to what happens in between. Interestingly however, in his most recent article, Hambrick (2007) moves closer to the interests of Strategy as Practice scholars by calling for more attention to what he calls the ‘black box’ of upper echelons research: specifically

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the ‘actual psychological and social processes that serve to transform executive characteristics into strategic action’ (Hambrick 2007, p. 337). He argues that this is essential to improve relevance to practitioners. However, Hambrick is somewhat pessimistic about progress in this area as it ‘requires very intrusive access to large numbers of executives and TMTs who are notoriously unwilling to submit themselves to scholarly probing and poking’ (p. 337). Of course, this is exactly what many practice scholars have embraced. As an alternative, he proposes the development and use of a highly complex strategy simulation game that would provide a controlled context to observe and learn from pseudo-top management team dynamics in the laboratory. While moving closer to a practice perspective, the emphasis remains on developing the theory through elaboration of the patterns of relationships among decontextualized variables, and identifying the moderating factors that influence these relationships. The overall point however, is that so far, the upper echelons approach as a sub-field of strategy has been fairly successful in gathering adherents and in developing a cumulative and relatively coherent body of knowledge. Will the Strategy as Practice community have as much to show for itself after a similar period of development?

Application and limitations: normal science and Strategy as Practice To consider the implications and relevance of the above perspective for Strategy as Practice, I take the example of strategy workshops or meetings as a phenomenon where there seems to be some attempt at cumulative understanding. Several researchers – most in the UK – have recently invested considerable effort on this (Hodgkinson et al. 2002, 2006; Johnson et al. 2006; Seidl et al. 2006; Jarzabkowski and Seidl, 2008; Schwarz and Balogun 2007; MacIntosh et al. 2007; Bowman 1995; Blackler et al. 2000; Bürgi et al. 2005). A workshop to discuss the research was organized in London in 2003, and a second research workshop took place at Aston University in April 2008. It would seem that if there is any focused ‘Strategy

as Practice’ topic that has engaged some kind of enthusiasm from a large number of researchers, this could be it.1 To develop cumulative knowledge about strategy workshops in a normal science vein, Carlson and Hatfield (2004) would require researchers to begin by defining a clear dependent variable that might be called – say – ‘strategic workshop effectiveness’, and then mobilize their energies towards explaining it, drawing on a variety of theoretical resources. One can see the beginnings of such an attempt in MacIntosh et al.’s (2007) study of the determinants of effectiveness of workshops in achieving change in ten different organizations. After an initial period of exploration, McKinley (2007) would argue that everyone working in the focal research area should then converge on the same measure of the dependent variable and of its predictors to ensure that different studies are comparable. At some point, after some inductive studies that investigate the phenomenon in depth to identify key constructs (Carlile and Christensen 2005), there would be a need to isolate the variables that affect these outcomes, defining them in a general enough way that they will be widely applicable, and testing the research apparatus on a sufficiently large number of contexts to be able to argue for their generalizability. The community could then begin to construct – through successive studies that built upon each other – a valid and tested theory of strategy workshops that would enable managers to understand the practices and conditions that lead to their success. This image has, of course, several problems, not least of which is the relatively poor fit of the normal science perspective with the constructivist epistemological assumptions preferred by many practice scholars. Four concrete issues that may concern them will be mentioned here. First (and notwithstanding the attempt by Macintosh et al. (2007) mentioned above), is the question of what one might mean by the ‘effectiveness’ of strategy workshops and how one might isolate that notion independently of its context or of a moment in time 1

At time of writing, a good deal of this work is still in the grey literature. Hopefully, more of it will appear within the next two or three years.

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at which it might be recognized. While participants may feel that an event was successful in the short term, its longer term impact may be quite a different thing (Bowman 1995; Schwarz and Balogun 2007). As some of the work on workshops has suggested, strategy development activities are often imbued with paradox – the more radically innovative they are in conceptual terms, the harder they may be to reconnect with daily action (Hendry and Seidl 2003; Johnson et al. 2006). Thus, agreeing on what effectiveness means is problematic. Second, while an individual workshop may accomplish or ‘perform’ things (e.g. producing a new strategic planning document, reinforcing a leader’s credibility, patching up a conflict), those effects are highly context dependent and indeed constituted by and imperfectly distinguishable from the micro-activities and specific practices that compose them as well as the implicit or explicit strategies of their participants. What ultimately occurs depends partly on people’s conceptions of what they are doing, partly on the cultural, material and practical resources that they draw on and partly on how they creatively and recursively mobilize these resources in interaction. Thus the assumption of the separability and generality of dependent variables representing outcomes and independent variables representing practices is simplistic. The vast quantitative literature on strategic planning illustrates this problem. Although meta-analyses (Boyd 1991; Miller and Cardinal 1994) have suggested that the use of planning is somewhat related to organizational performance, the results of this research provide little guidance about precisely what a given company should do in any particular case. Third, and related to the points above, the normal science perspective on knowledge accumulation in strategic management promoted by Carlson and Hatfield (2004) and others seems to focus exclusively on variance-based understandings to the exclusion of process thinking that considers how phenomena evolve over time (Langley 2007; Van de Ven and Poole 2005). Indeed, Carlson and Hatfield’s (2004) conception of knowledge as virtually time-independent is astonishing when one considers the inescapability of temporal influence. Thus, such a perspective will not be sensitive to

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important practical questions such as how workshops play themselves out over time, how they are linked to the chains of events that precede them and how they are connected to those that follow. Finally, the ‘strategy workshop’, like any social or managerial practice, is a historically embedded phenomenon. Tools of strategizing wax and wane, shift and mutate, with fashion, experience, technology and institutional mores, as well as through their recursive reproduction and adaptation in the routines of particular firms (Jarzabkowski 2004). Using the example of gender relations, Cole (2001) suggests that one of the reasons for the lack of cumulative knowledge in sociology is that the phenomena of interest change faster than the speed at which scholars are able to understand and describe them. Thus, any empirical regularities that might be detected concerning the determinants of performance of strategy workshops can quickly become obsolete and anachronistic as the tools and techniques that generated the regularities are replaced by others and as the label ‘strategy workshop’ comes to mean something different. In summary, although the normal science perspective is the dominant mode of thinking about scientific progress – and indeed for some, still the only way of conceiving the possibility of progress – its usefulness as a model for the development of knowledge about Strategy as Practice is rather questionable. What alternate models might be helpful?

A practice theory-based view of progress and knowledge accumulation Focus and precepts: deeper theoretical understanding My second attempt to define what knowledge accumulation might mean for Strategy as Practice is based not on the ideal of a single truth, but on the search for increasingly insightful interpretations or representations of strategy viewed as a social practice. Rather than building increasingly elaborate nomological networks to explain or predict the performance of practical activity, this perspective involves placing stronger and deeper bets on the

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theories of practice that Strategy as Practice scholars have often claimed as their intellectual inspiration (as described in Part II of this handbook) and developing these concertedly, determinedly and coherently to enrich the understanding of strategy. This view thus rejects the rather backwardlooking normal science conception of a single legitimate path to scientific progress based on enhanced prediction and generalization and is more compatible with current ideas from the philosophy of science in which scholarly disciplines are seen to form a number of distinct epistemic communities that develop different sets of ontological and methodological commitments and pursue different research programmes (Laudan 1977; Zald 1995). Each of these communities has its own internal conceptions of progress, and its own modes of evaluation concerning what constitutes a valuable contribution (Zald 1995). From this angle, the question that then arises is: Does the Strategy as Practice community qualify as an ‘epistemic community’? If so what are its specific ontological and methodological commitments? How and to what extent are they different from those described previously? The answer to this question remains rather ambiguous, and this is in many ways the central puzzle underlying this chapter. ‘Strategy as Practice’ currently has a rather loose identity organized around an interest in an empirical phenomenon (the doing of strategy), an appeal to the theoretical resources from practice theory and the use of qualitative research methods to capture and analyse the micro-activities associated with strategizing (Johnson et al. 2007). Beyond the general reference to theories of practice, Whittington (2006) and Jarzabkowski et al. (2007) have drawn on Reckwitz (2002) in an attempt to offer a tripartite conceptual framework that might serve to integrate work in this sub-field around the notions of practices (routines, tools or discourses at organizational and extra-organizational levels), praxis (the concrete activities actually carried out in a specific situation) and practitioners (the sets of people who mobilize practices in their everyday strategy praxis). However, there are many different ways in which the elements of this framework could be used and there is as yet no clear consensus concerning its completeness or relevance. Indeed,

Chia and McKay (2007, p. 223) argue that while there is some ‘straining towards a revised vocabulary for theorizing strategy practice’, much of the empirical work published so far under the banner of Strategy as Practice does not necessarily reveal a strongly practice-based ontology in which practices rather than the activities of individuals or organizational processes are taken to be the central focus of attention. To complicate matters further, within the broader ‘practice turn’ in social theory, the definition of what constitutes a practice and how this concept should be used remains a topic of debate (Schatzki et al. 2001). The language of this debate is, moreover, highly complex, not to say opaque. It is widely recognized even by those who have used them in empirical studies that the writings of key theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, Vygotsky and Latour can be challenging to master and operationalize credibly in empirical research (e.g. Pozzebon 2004) – let alone to communicate to practitioners. There are many competing but somewhat overlapping theories of practice that vie for attention, each of which requires its adherents to invest considerable intellectual effort. The ‘barriers to entry’ into the world of sophisticated practice theorizing are as high if not higher than the methodological and statistical barriers that have been mounting around the world of normal science based strategic management research. Nevertheless, as its proponents have argued, a practice-theory based perspective offers a number of distinctive contributions (Whittington 2006; Chia and McKay 2007) that are encouraging many strategy researchers to aspire to penetrate that world. The focus on practices brings strategy down to the level of the activities of human beings interacting in observable situations. It bridges notions of agency and structure by recognizing the individual skills and knowledge involved in the enactment, adaptation and regeneration of practices within strategizing activities while acknowledging the partly extra-individual and even extra-organizational source of those practices. Moreover, practice theories recognize to different degrees the roles of material artefacts in enabling and constraining practical activity. So what kinds of contributions might be generated by running sufficiently hard

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with these ideas to build them into more substantial cumulative insights?

Example: Gherardi (2006) on organizational knowledge and knowing in practice I have chosen Gherardi’s (2006) recent book Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning to illustrate the potential for the development of cumulative knowledge from a practice-theory based perspective because it is the strongest example I know of a long-term research programme that has taken practice ideas seriously and has developed them into a comprehensive contribution within the broader field of organization studies. However, this book does not offer a perfect parallel to the Finkelstein and Hambrick (1996) book described earlier because it does not integrate other related research perfectly into its conceptualization and it emphasizes only one albeit very extensive programme of empirical study carried out specifically by Silvia Gherardi and her colleagues (more particularly Davide Nicolini and Antonio Strati) since 1994. Gherardi draws on other work dealing with communities of practice, learning and knowledge development as a backdrop to her own thinking rather than as an inherent part of it. A complementary article by Østerlund and Carlile (2005) goes some way towards integrating and connecting the diverse contributions of key theorists on communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger 1998; Brown and Duguid, 1991, 2001). However, a book that fully cumulates the stream of research on work-place learning has yet to be written. Nevertheless, Gherardi’s (2006) book is impressive in the way it has taken a single key workplace issue – safety – and has explored its multiple ramifications in social practices across different levels. Inspired by Cooper and Fox (1990), she uses the notion of a ‘texture’ of knowing in practice to describe interconnectedness across a complex field of layered and interwoven practices that all have something to do with the way that safety is constructed in situated contexts. The work involved a series of interrelated research initiatives giving

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rise to separate publications with a variety of coauthors constituting what Gherardi calls a spiral case study. For example, one study looked at how novice building-site managers became practitioners and learned about safety on the job. Another study looked at how understandings of safety are enacted within a community of practitioners. A third described how different communities of practice in the construction industry interact around questions of safety. A fourth examined repair practices following breakdown. A fifth looked at the distributed network of actors influencing the construction of safety in the wider context. Together these studies generate a rich portrait of how safety and knowledge of safety are embedded in a field of interrelated practices.

Application and limitations: practice theories and Strategy as Practice Again, Gherardi’s book is not about Strategy as Practice. However, the book inspires reflection as to whether it might be possible to do for strategy what Gherardi has done for safety. A similar texture of interwoven practices could be seen to constitute knowledge about strategy and strategizing. At the risk of overdrawing the parallels, novice strategists learn strategy practices on the job, strategy is enacted within communities of practitioners and between different communities in interaction. Strategic practices may take rather different forms when a firm needs to repair its position than under routine circumstances. Finally, as Whittington et al. (2003) indicate, a network of distributed actors contributes to the construction of what strategy means and to which forms of strategy are considered legitimate. Moreover, practices of strategy are both locally situated, interconnected across communities and organizations, and in perpetual flux. If the Strategy as Practice research community could draw on practice theorizing to fill out the portrait of how this occurs, perhaps it might come closer to developing a cumulative and integrated body of knowledge. So far, however, most research programmes in the Strategy as Practice area have had a narrower focus, and the use of practice theory has been both more opportunistic and more eclectic than

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the work described above. Only Jarzabkowski’s (2005) monograph has so far attempted to offer an empirical analysis drawing on practice theories in book-length form. Jarzabkowski (2005) used an activity theory lens to examine strategy making in universities. This lens is not, however, necessarily pursued in her other work that draws also on structuration theory (Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002; Jarzabkowski 2008), institutional theory (Jarzabkowski et al. 2009) and discourse analysis (Jarzabkowski and Sillince 2007). Like many scholars whose work has been associated with Strategy as Practice (including myself), Jarzabkowski has chosen to draw on multiple theories to multiply insights rather than deepening the insights derived from applying a single integrated theoretical frame to a range of topics. As I shall argue later, this approach has its advantages and it is something that I have personally found enriching. I have even argued in favour of it in previous publications (Denis et al. 2007). However, it is true that such an approach does not necessarily enable individual studies to build strongly on one another with the result that the Strategy as Practice perspective does not yet have the clarity and unity of other perspectives on strategy (e.g. the resourcebased view) or of other perspectives in organizational theory. Indeed, another book – that by Scott (2008) on institutional theory, now in its third edition – might suggest another valuable model for cumulative and integrative theorizing that practice theorists of organization would find inspiring. However, the requirements for developing a more comprehensive and cumulative understanding of Strategy as Practice building on practice theory would seem to be quite difficult to meet. The convergence of teams of researchers around relatively similar practice-based theoretical frames is hampered by the complexity and interpretive flexibility of these frames as well as by a research culture that tends to favour the distinctiveness of individual contributions (Hambrick 2004). Should pockets of convergence occur, narrow adherence to one or another theoretical approach (especially the more complex practice theories) may be accompanied by blinders and barriers to communication with adherents of other frames, leading paradoxically to a splintering of what is currently a fairly

cohesive though eclectic and open community. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to remain both open to different approaches to understanding and committed to a focused theoretical perspective. Since the practice of strategy is an empirical phenomenon, it would seem desirable that those working in this area remain able to transcend this paradox. However, another rather different issue is raised by the emphasis on practice theory. This concerns the potential for developing knowledge that might be useful to practitioners. Clearly, academic research that draws on theories of practice may assist in describing the nature of such practices and this in itself may be of interest. For example, practice theorists have revealed how storytelling among practitioners within the same community of practice contributes to learning to a greater extent than codified explicit knowledge of the type found in formal education programmes or procedures manuals (Orr 1996; Gherardi 2006). At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, practice theorists have also revealed how boundary objects such as documents and other artefacts serve to connect different groups of practitioners embedded in different thought-worlds (Star and Greisemer 1989; Carlile 2002, 2004). These are interesting insights typical of practice-based theorizing and research. And yet, are insights like these sufficient to meet Whittington’s ambition quoted earlier of ‘a societal shift towards better everyday strategizing praxis, empowered by more effective practices and a deeper pool of skilled practitioners’ (Whittington 2006, p. 629)? Interestingly, Gherardi’s (2006) book includes a three-and-a-half-page section at the end of the final chapter entitled ‘actionable knowledge’. This is the only part of a 265-page volume that addresses the implications of her research for practice. To be fair, this was not her primary objective. And yet, the thinness of this section might give us pause. Is that all there is? What does a practice-theory based approach add over and above a normal science perspective that might be immediately useful? Drawing on Pelz (1978), Astley and Zammuto (1992) identified three potential ways in which academic research may be practically useful: instrumental (immediate and direct application of

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knowledge), conceptual (a more diffuse application of the theoretical ideas in reflexive practice) and symbolic (the mobilization of the results of research to support preconceived ideas). I believe that the contributions of the approach described in this section are likely to be largely at the conceptual rather than the instrumental or symbolic levels. At its best, practice-based research may help provide valuable conceptual tools for reflecting on concrete situations. However, it is unlikely to be directly usable in instrumental ways or even to serve as a source of legitimation (symbolic use) given its relatively situated nature. In contrast, normal science based research may be more widely mobilized in symbolic mode because it bears the more traditional stamp of ‘science’ while providing insufficiently detailed prescriptions to enable instrumental use in particular cases. I would argue that another type of approach to be described in the next section offers more potential for ‘instrumental’ use than either of the two described so far.

A pragmatic view of progress and knowledge accumulation Focus and precepts: learning through practice and experience The third perspective on what knowledge accumulation and progress might mean for Strategy as Practice is labelled here ‘pragmatic’ in reference to the pragmatist philosophy of Pierce, Dewey and James revived by Rorty (1980), that has offered inspiration for practice theories in general and Strategy as Practice in particular (Johnson et al. 2007). Pragmatism values the instrumental nature of knowledge and emphasizes the way in which knowing is embedded in and regenerated through practical activity (Cook and Brown 1999). Specifically, as I define it here, a pragmatic view of progress and knowledge accumulation considers practical knowledge to be constituted through direct participation in practice (Gherardi 2006; Calori 2002). Taking this as a starting point, it is clear that competent and experienced practitioners of strategy can be viewed as possessing a rich store of cumulative

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tacit knowledge about strategy. From a pragmatic perspective, then, one of the most important aims of Strategy as Practice researchers ought to be to uncover that knowledge, render it explicit and make it available to others – a process that Pierce labelled ‘abduction’ (Locke et al. 2008). And the best way to capture such knowledge would actually be to become a practitioner. Of course, many academics are indeed also strategy consultants. Yet, when this happens, their writings usually tend to emphasize formal techniques and not the everyday experience of doing strategy. The other problem is that as soon as a strategy practitioner becomes an expert, the tacit knowledge involved in the practice may become quite unconscious (Polanyi 1966). The people who are perhaps the most able to render the tacit explicit are ‘apprentice-novices’, those who learn the practice through experience in close contact with experts and yet who are still able to articulate that learning. All this suggests that one potentially valuable approach to developing knowledge on practice is actually to find a ‘master’ (recognized strategy practitioner expert or consultant), to become an ‘apprentice’ and then to commit one’s cumulatively developing learning to writing. This does in some sense represent the logical conclusion of accepting a strong-form practice-based view of strategy. It is also in this context that different forms of collaborative research may be relevant (Balogun et al. 2003; Calori 2002). For example, Balogun and Johnson (2004) used diaries and focus groups to collect data on practices at the same time as engaging the practitioners involved in their study in reflection about what they were doing and how well it was working. In an initiative based on Argyris et al.’s (1985) action science framework, Stronz (2005) videotaped naturally occurring strategy implementation team meetings over a period of several months. She then chose excerpts from these meetings to present to implementation team members individually, questioning them about their goals during meetings, their action strategies, what they felt they could have done differently and how they viewed the results of these meetings. The capacity to engage practitioners in productive reflection on their own practice developed by Balogun

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and Johnson and Stronz creatively combines data collection for academic research with constructive learning opportunities for those involved. Yet if this kind of work produces only local learning for participants and abstract formalized knowledge in the form of academic articles and monographs, its subsequent wider usefulness in developing better praxis, practices and practitioners will remain limited. Thus a truly pragmatic (i.e. instrumentally useful) perspective on progress and knowledge accumulation should also mean finding ways to transfer the practical knowledge. Clearly, there is an embedded paradox here. If practice is needed to learn about practice, then the academic researcher may simply be a redundant intermediary. However, some researcher/practitioners in the field of strategy have made an effort to render their own practical learning accessible in written form, and it is worth examining one of these contributions as an example of what can be achieved.

Example: Eden and Ackermann (1998) on making strategy Taking a pragmatic view of progress and knowledge accumulation, Eden and Ackermann’s (1998) book Making Strategy is a remarkable achievement. In one sense, it is a manual or a textbook, but unlike other textbooks that generally provide an overview of different dimensions of the phenomenon drawing on classic literature, Harvard-style case studies and a loose integrative frame, Eden and Ackermann’s book represents the delineation, development and illustration of a very distinctive practical approach to making strategy that evolved through the consulting experience of the authors over a period of almost twenty years. The approach developed in the book is grounded in Colin Eden’s early experimentation with cognitive mapping tools in the late 1970s followed by the development of the SODA software for strategic analysis in the 1980s and 1990s and many subsequent strategy consulting applications. The book itself is structured in a quite unusual way. The first part presents an overall normative model of strategy making called the journey. It is perhaps the most classic part of the book, introducing the authors’ theory of strategy making as a

process and insisting on the objective of building political feasibility. The approach demonstrates a sensitivity to the practical activities of negotiating strategy that is unusual in strategy texts and could only be acquired through experience. The last part of the book is a presentation of some specific techniques and tools that the authors have developed over time, including an impressive degree of detail on how to analyse the information generated and how to organize strategy workshops, again based on the experience of the authors. Meanwhile the middle part of the book bridges the other two sections and embeds the overall conceptual model and the specific tools in concrete situations. The ten socalled ‘vignettes’ offer blow-by-blow accounts of doing strategy using the tools and ideas presented. Although no doubt a little sanitized to protect individuals (including the authors), these accounts read as genuine and earthy. In addition to illustrating how the tools were used, they offer insight into the tensions that developed during workshop sessions, they reveal the micro-decisions made on the fly, and they show the high commitment, minute attention to detail and improvisational skills needed by workshop facilitators. In other words, they come as close or closer to describing the doing of strategy than many more academically oriented contributions in the Strategy as Practice field. To the extent that their approach is comprehensive and builds on a lifetime of experience, we have here an example of the development of a cumulative body of knowledge. Is this a perspective that might be mobilized more systematically to achieve the objectives of improving Strategy as Practice?

Application and limitations: pragmatism and Strategy as Practice If knowledge of practice is to a large extent embedded in practice, then some would argue that it is only through practice that knowledge of it may be acquired and transferred. As noted above, this would seem to suggest an increased role for action research or collaborative research to develop and test better tools and techniques and to cumulatively refine skills in everyday strategizing. In addition to the book mentioned above, there have been a limited number of published studies that have taken

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such an action-oriented approach. For example, Macintosh and Maclean (1999) propose and test a complexity theory based approach to strategy intervention, Hodgkinson and Wright (2002) present an analysis of a failed scenario-planning intervention in which they were consultants, and the research group at the Imagination Lab in Lausanne has produced a continuous stream of research results based on experimentation with construction kits (specifically LEGO) as strategy making tools (e.g. Bürgi et al. 2005; Oliver and Roos 2007; Heracleous and Jacobs 2008). These streams, and particularly the last, may perhaps have some cumulative potential. However, action research is not currently a central focus for most of those interested in Strategy as Practice. While willing and eager to learn about strategy as flies on the wall, many of us are not so inclined to place ourselves on the front lines as practitioners, or if we are – to then reveal all in the first person in academic publications. A recent exchange in Organization Studies (Whittington 2006; Hodgkinson and Wright 2006) suggests one reason why. An important part of the learning involved in practice includes learning from negative experiences such as that recounted in Hodgkinson and Wright (2002). However, revealing one’s role in such experiences can be a risky proposition that can leave one open to unexpected critique. Many practitioners would no doubt prefer that the learning from their less successful experiences remain confidential. Learning from experience is, of course, the stock in trade of professional consultants. However, they often have other more commercial reasons for retaining information that might be critical in helping others replicate their approach, while exaggerating its successes. Overall, when researchers are also actors in the scenes they are reporting, issues of validity, completeness and trustworthiness may be more than usually challenging to address well. In addition to this limitation, one may also ask whether work that does involve first person involvement in practice is then truly able to communicate it formally in ways that may be effectively mobilized by others. My own feeling has always been in reading books like that by Eden and Ackermann (1998) – as excellent as it is in its genre – that somehow, the magic that makes their

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approach work is not really there on the written page. This is not because they have tried to hide it. On the contrary, particularly in the case of the Eden and Ackermann book, I sense a genuine desire to assist others in replicating their approach. And yet, I know that if I spent the time needed to learn by heart the details of their techniques and practices by reading the book (including the many vignettes, and the extensive practical wisdom embedded in the 507-page tome), and if I got myself a contract with a firm to use it to help them develop a strategy, the results might well be dismal. To learn to do what they do, I would have to – yes – maybe read the book, but also join them on a consulting assignment or two. There might then be some hope that I would pick up some of that magic that makes their approach work. I also suspect that as I learned, I would begin to improvise with the tools and perhaps invent some of my own, that I might then pass on through a similar process to others. Thus cumulative knowledge development from this perspective would merge research, professional development and teaching into one continuous process – something that would demand a radical and rather unlikely change in the way academia is currently organized.

Discussion and conclusion: prospects for developing cumulative knowledge In the last three sections, I have presented three distinct models of progress and knowledge accumulation that might be relevant to Strategy as Practice. These should be seen as ideal types. None of them reflects a fully realistic perspective. However, I believe that between them they delineate the range of possibility. I suspect that most Strategy as Practice scholars would tend to explicitly espouse the second approach. And yet, the normal science perspective remains dominant in the major journals and acts as a powerful attractor that tends to draw empirical work in that direction. Thus, many contributions relevant to the practice of strategy are formulated using propositional logic or conform in other ways to the normal science model in which prediction and generalization are emphasized (Maitlis and Lawrence 2003; Regnér

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2003; Stensaker and Falkenberg 2007; Johnson et al. 2006). At the same time, the pragmatic perspective I presented last has been somewhat under-emphasized despite the seemingly obvious implications of a practice-based understanding of the nature of knowledge (but see the work of the Imagination Lab team cited earlier). Having elaborated these various orientations, their foundations, their strengths and their limitations, I return to the questions that stimulated this reflection. Where is the Strategy as Practice sub-field heading? Are its proponents’ ambitions to improve and transform the practices of strategy desirable or realistic? What might be done to achieve them? I believe that Strategy as Practice is not currently heading strongly in the direction of developing knowledge that will improve practice through concrete instrumental use of research findings. To achieve this, more researchers would have to invest in action research adopting what I have called the pragmatic perspective. Moreover, for those that do invest in this way, the rewards of consulting and the localized benefits that this brings may divert attention from any kind of formalization of the resulting practical knowledge. The result is that while individual organizations may benefit from the learning, the wider community may not. I do see more potential for Strategy as Practice scholarship to offer knowledge of conceptual value to practice. The frameworks that Strategy as Practice scholars draw on combined with in-depth empirical studies in situated contexts provide modes of thinking that can illuminate strategizing and strategic issues. Since multiple theories have the potential to offer multiple insights, I believe that it is important to nurture pluralism and to maintain a Strategy as Practice area that is open to diversity. And yet, within this pluralism, I also see a need to deepen and strengthen the strands of work that are being accomplished. There are at least two possible ways of achieving this. A first way involves focusing on a specific empirical phenomenon. The current work on strategy workshops and meetings is an interesting case where this is happening, although it is unlikely that the diverse contributions will add up to a

clear picture unless there is a concerted effort to bring the findings together. While the normal science model of standardized indicators and variance relationships I described earlier looks out of place, there may be scope for various forms of qualitative meta-analysis. A second way of improving integration involves developing longterm research programmes within a distinct theoretical tradition, and expanding the focus gradually to different empirical dimensions of strategy. This idea generalizes from the model suggested by Gherardi’s work (2006). Of course, no one can construct the future of a field or epistemic community by simply saying how they think it should develop. The future of the community will be enacted in the activities of those who associate themselves with it. This chapter has simply drawn attention to some issues underlying that development. In my presentation of alternate knowledge accumulation perspectives, I identified three books, each of which represented a different form of contribution symbolizing the progress of a field. There is of course another kind of volume that contributes to enacting an epistemic community and to establishing its identity, its past success and its future potential: the handbook, a collection of writings that report on the work achieved so far, and the options for development. At time of writing, no more than five years since the special issue of Journal of Management Studies that launched the ideas underlying Strategy as Practice, the appearance of a first Handbook of Strategy as Practice is surely progress enough! References Argyris, C., Putnam, R., and McLain Smith, D. 1985. Action science. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Astley, W. G. & Zammuto, R. F. 1992. Organization science, managers and language games. Organization Science, 3(4): 443–460. Balogun, J., Huff, A. S. & Johnson, P. 2003. Three responses to the methodological challenges of studying strategizing. Journal of Management Studies, 40(1): 197–224. Balogun, J. & Johnson, G. 2004. Organizational restructuring and middle manager sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 47(4): 523–549.

Developing cumulative knowledge about Strategy as Practice Blackler, F., Crump, N. & McDonald, S. 2000. Organizing processes in complex activity networks. Organization, 7(2): 277–300. Bowman, C. 1995. Strategy workshops and top team commitment to strategic change. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 10(8): 4–12. Boyd, B. K. 1991. Strategic-planning and financial performance – A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management Studies, 28(4): 353–374. Brown, J. S. & Duguid, P. 1991. Organizational learning and communities of practice. Toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation. Organization Science, 2: 40–57. 2001. Knowledge and organization: A social-practice perspective. Organization Science, 12(2): 198–213. Burgi, P. T., Jacobs, C. D. & Roos, J. 2005. From metaphor to practice – In the crafting of strategy. Journal of Management Inquiry, 14(1): 78–94. Calori, R. 2002. Real time/real space research: Connecting action and reflection in organization studies. Organization Studies, 23(6): 877–883. Carlile, P. R. 2002. A pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries: Boundary objects in new product development. Organization Science, 13(4): 442–455. 2004. Transferring, translating and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries. Organization Science, 15(5): 555–568. Carlile, P. R. & Christensen, C. 2005. The cycles of theory-building in management research, Harvard Business School Working Paper. Carlson, K. D. & Hatfield, D. E. 2004. Strategic management research and the cumulative knowledge perspective. Research Methodology in Strategy and Management, 1: 273–301. Carpenter, M. A., Geletkanycz, M. A. & Sanders, W. G. 2004. Upper echelons research revisited: Antecedents, elements and consequences of top management team composition. Journal of Management, 30(6): 749–778. Certo, S. T., Lester, R. H., Dalton, C. M. & Dalton, D. R. 2006. Top management teams, strategy and financial performance: A meta-analytic examination. Journal of Management Studies, 43(4): 813–839. Chia, R. & MacKay, B. 2007. Post-processual challenges for the emerging strategy-as-practice perspective: Discovering strategy in the logic of practice. Human Relations, 60(1): 217–242.

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104 Ann Langley workshops in strategy development processes. Long Range Planning, 39(5): 479–496. Hodgkinson, G. P. & Wright, G. 2002. Confronting strategic inertia in a top management team: Learning from failure. Organization Studies, 23(6): 949–977. Hodgkinson, G. P. & Wright, G. 2006. Neither completing the practice turn, nor enriching the process tradition: Secondary misinterpretations of a case analysis reconsidered. Organization Studies, 27(12): 1895–1901. Hoskisson, R. E., Hitt, M. A., Wan, W. P. & Yiu, D. 1999. Theory and research in strategic management: Swings of a pendulum. Journal of Management, 25(3): 417–456. Jarzabkowski, P. 2004. Strategy as practice: Recursiveness, adaptation and practices-in-use. Organization Studies, 25(4): 529–560. 2005. Strategy as practice: An activity-based view. London: Sage. 2008. Shaping strategy as a structuration process. Academy of Management Journal, 51(4): 621–650. Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. & Seidl, D. 2007. Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective. Human Relations, 60(1): 5–27. Jarzabkowski, P., Matthiesen, J. K. & Van de Ven, A. 2009. Doing which work? A practice approach to institutional pluralism. In T. Lawrence, B. Leca and R. Suddaby (eds), Institutional work: Actors and agency in institutional studies of organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 284–316. Jarzabkowski, P. and Seidl, D. 2008. The role of meetings in the social practice of strategy. Organization Studies, 29(11): 1391–1426. Jarzabkowski, P. & Sillince, J. 2007. A rhetoric-in-context approach to building commitment to multiple strategic goals. Organization Studies, 28(11): 1639–1665. Jarzabkowski, P. & Wilson, D. C. 2002. Top teams and strategy in a UK university. Journal of Management Studies, 39(3): 355–381. Johnson, G., Langley, A., Melin, L. & Whittington, R. 2007. Strategy as practice: Research directions and resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, G., Melin, L. & Whittington, R. 2003. Micro strategy and strategizing: Towards an activity-based view – Guest Editors’ Introduction. Journal of Management Studies, 40(1): 3–22.

Johnson, G., Prashantham, S. & Floyd, S. W. 2006. Towards a mid-range theory of strategy workshops, Advanced Institute of Management Research Working Paper 035. Kaplan, S. & Jarzabkowski, P. 2006. Using strategy tools in practice: How tools mediate strategizing and organizing, Advanced Institute of Management Research Working Paper 047. Kilduff, M. 2007. Celebrating thirty years of theory publishing in AMR: Award-winning articles from the first two decades revisited. Academy of Management Review, 32(2): 332–333. Laine, P. M. & Vaara, E. 2007. Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering group. Human Relations, 60(1): 29–58. Langley, A. 2007. Process thinking in strategic organization. Strategic Organization, 5(3): 271–282. Laudan, L. 1977. Progress and its problems: Towards a theory of scientific growth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, K., Golden-Biddle, K. and Feldman, M. S. (2008). Making doubt generative: Rethinking the role of doubt in the research process. Organization Science, 19(6): 907–918. MacIntosh, R. & MacLean, D. 1999. Conditioned emergence: A dissipative structures approach to transformation. Strategic Management Journal, 20(4): 297–316. MacIntosh, R., MacLean, D. & Seidl, D. 2007. Do strategy workshops produce strategic change? Paper presented at the Strategic Management Society Conference, San Diego. Maitlis, S. & Lawrence, T. B. 2003. Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: Understanding failure in organizational strategizing. Journal of Management Studies, 40(1): 109–139. McKinley, W. 2007. Managing knowledge in organization studies through instrumentation. Organization, 14(1): 123–146. Mezias, S. J. & Regnier, M. O. 2007. Walking the walk as well as talking the talk: Replication and the normal science paradigm in strategic management research. Strategic Organization, 5(3): 283–296.

Developing cumulative knowledge about Strategy as Practice Miller, C. C. & Cardinal, L. B. 1994. Strategic-planning and firm performance – A synthesis of more than 2 decades of research. Academy of Management Journal, 37(6): 1649–1665. Oliver, D. & Roos, J. 2007. Beyond text: Constructing organizational identity multimodally. British Journal of Management, 18(4): 342–358. Orr, J. 1996. Talking about machines: An ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Osterlund, C. & Carlile, P. 2005. Relations in practice: Sorting through practice theories on knowledge sharing in complex organizations. Information Society, 21(2): 91–107. Pelz, D. C. 1978. Some expanded perspectives on use of social science in public policy. In J. Milton Yinger & Stephen J. Cutler (eds), Major social issues: A multidisciplinary view.. New York: Free Press, 346–357. Pfeffer, J. 1993. Barriers to the advance of organizational science – Paradigm development as a dependent variable. Academy of Management Review, 18(4): 599–620. 1995. Mortality, reproducibility and the persistence of styles of theory. Organization Science, 6(6): 681–686. 2007. A modest proposal: How we might change the process and product of managerial research. Academy of Management Journal, 50(6): 1334–1345. Polanyi, M. 1966. The tacit dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Pozzebon, M. 2004. The influence of a structurationist view on strategic management research. Journal of Management Studies, 41(2): 247–272. Reckwitz, A. 2002. Toward a theory of social practices: A development in cultural theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2): 243–263. Regnér, P. 2003. Strategy creation in the periphery: Inductive versus deductive strategy making. Journal of Management Studies, 40(1): 57–82. Rorty, R. 1980. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Oxford: Blackwell. Rouleau, L. 2005. Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every

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106 Ann Langley Volberda, H. W. 2004. Crisis in strategy: Fragmentation, integration or synthesis. European Management Review, 1: 35–42. Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whittington, R. 2006. Completing the practice turn in strategy research. Organization Studies, 27(5): 613–634.

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PA RT II

Theoretical Directions

CHAPTER

7

Giddens, structuration theory and Strategy as Practice R I C H A R D WH IT T IN G TO N

Introduction Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory has an obvious appeal for Strategy as Practice researchers. Of course, Giddens is a practice theorist himself; for him, understanding people’s activity is the central purpose of social analysis. But more than this, he has developed concepts of agency, structure and structuration that have intrinsic importance to practice research. His conception of human agency affirms that people’s activity matters – practice needs studying because it makes a difference to outcomes. At the same time, his notion of social structure allows for both constraint and enablement – to understand activity, we must attend to institutional embeddedness. Finally, the processual concept of structuration brings together structure and agency to give them flow – continuity but also the possibility of structural change In this chapter I will develop the case for the relevance of Giddens’ structuration theory to Strategy as Practice research. This case will not be monomaniac: structuration theory is not easy to apply empirically and there are alternative approaches that can do more or less similar kinds of job. Accordingly, I shall investigate how management researchers have already tried to apply structuration theory in empirical research, including within the Strategy as Practice tradition. I shall also compare structuration theory with two quite close alternatives, both similarly concerned for the relationship between structure and agency: the practice theoretic approach of Pierre Bourdieu and the Critical Realist approach associated with Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer. I shall argue that, while each has its merits, those Strategy as Practice researchers already using structuration theory are at risk of conceding too much ground to these rival theoretical traditions. While for followers

of Bourdieu and Bhaskar constraints loom large, structurationist-inspired researchers have tended to neglect social structural context, both underestimating its influence and ignoring structuration theory’s insights into the possibility of structural change. An opportunity for Strategy as Practice researchers is to exploit structuration theory more completely in order to understand the larger social structures, or institutions, in which strategy takes place and of which strategy is itself a part. Structuration theory mandates full-spectrum research: the wide-angled analysis of institutions, as well as the microscopic study of praxis. My approach in this chapter will be mostly practical. By and large, I shall leave aside the theoretical debate about the fundamental rights and wrongs of structuration theory (see, for example, Parker 2000). This chapter is more in the spirit of a users’ guide. Accordingly, the next section introduces structuration theory’s key concepts, notably social practice, social systems, agency, structures, rules, resources, duality, structuration, institutions, and both institutional analysis and analysis of strategic conduct. The chapter goes on to consider structuration theory’s advantages and disadvantages by comparison with the rival theoretical approaches of Bourdieu and Bhaskar, indicating circumstances where structuration theory may be more applicable. It continues by reviewing some key empirical operationalizations of structuration theory both generally in the management literature and specifically in the Strategy as Practice tradition. This review brings out some common themes, many with considerable ongoing potential, but also raises the striking neglect of the strategy field as an institution in and of itself. For a structurationist approach to practice, the institution of strategy is just as much natural territory as the analysis of conduct. The chapter concludes by reaffirming the 109

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continuing and part-exploited value of structuration theory to researchers of strategy practice.

An outline of structuration theory Anthony Giddens developed structuration theory as a sociology lecturer and later professor at the University of Cambridge. He was also co-founder of the successful social sciences publisher Polity Press, Director of the London School of Economics between 1997 and 2003, and, during the 1990s and the first decade of this century, an influential political thinker, pioneer of the ‘third way’ associated with reformist politicians Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. These practical involvements are relevant because – a point that I shall return to – Giddens is not just an armchair theorist, but somebody who actively intervenes in the world, engaging in issues of major change (Stones 2005). Structuration theory specifically was developed in a series of books which began with Giddens’ New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), continued through his Central Problems of Social Theory (1979) and culminated in the most extended and systematic statement, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (1984). The leitmotif of these books was an endeavour to overcome the traditional dualisms of social theory. In place of such divides as between voluntarism and determinism, individualism and structuralism, and micro and macro, structuration theory offers a bridge, consistent with Giddens’ conciliatory ‘third way’ thinking in politics. The central span of this structurationist bridge is ‘practice’. Giddens begins The Constitution of Society (1984, p. 2) by placing practice right at the heart of his concerns: ‘The basic domain of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor any form of societal totality, but social practices ordered through time and space.’ Contemporary commentators on practice theory (e.g. Schatztki 2001; Reckwitz 2002; Denis et al. 2007) accordingly nominate Giddens as a leading practice theorist, alongside Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. But for structuration theory, the social practice concept is particularly useful for

its bridging role. Thus practice is obviously about activity, but through this lens such activity is neither merely individual nor simply voluntary. For example, religious practices are typically shared rather than idiosyncratic, and they constrain as much as they inspire. The practice concept bridges the micro and the macro likewise. A snatch of play on the football pitch is both a local moment of practice and the expression of institutionalized sporting rules, formal and informal, which are more or less accepted worldwide. Giddens (1976, p. 81) himself defines social practice as ‘ongoing series of practical activities’. This definition carries with it both the sense of regularity and continuity, and a respect for the day-to-day work involved in getting ordinary but necessary things done. Regular activities bring together people into social systems, which are reproduced over time through continued interaction. These social systems exist at various levels – a particular national society, an industry, an organization or a strategy project team, for example. For Giddens (1984), it is important that these systems do not bind their members into some kind of deterministic homeostatic loop. Rather, systems are typically somewhat overlapping, contradictory and precarious. As employees, family members and citizens, most of us participate in several kinds of social system – work, home and polity. We are constantly struggling between the divergent demands of these social systems, and we are rarely as good as we would like to be at managing any of them. Although somehow our interactions are usually enough to keep them going, these systems suffer plenty of local failures and none is likely to have sufficient empire over us to enforce complete obedience. One day work gets priority over family; the next day, the other way round. Indeed, it is this participation in plural social systems that underwrites the human potential for agency. System contradictions pose sometimes awkward, sometimes opportune, choices for our conduct: work late or just go home? For Giddens (1984, pp. 9–10), it is important to recognize the potential for agency in just about everyone, by virtue of their participation in multiple social systems (domestic, economic, political and so on). Agency here is the capacity to do otherwise, to follow one

Giddens, structuration theory and Strategy as Practice

system of practices and to refuse another: thus to work late is to prioritize the economic system over the domestic one. Such agency makes a difference to the world, in small ways or large, as it contributes to the reproduction or negation of each particular system. Choosing to go home may not only protect one’s own family life; in some tiny way it contributes to the preservation of the family as a general system within society at large. In this sense, everybody has some sort of social power. With this recognition of distributed power, Giddens expresses a fundamental respect for human potential. There is a dignity to Giddens’ characterization of the person. Certainly, people may have unconscious motivations; yes, they may not be able to account fully for their actions; and of course such actions are liable to have unintended consequences. Nevertheless, Giddens (1984) insists that people typically have high levels of ‘practical consciousness’. Practical consciousness exceeds discursive consciousness, the ability actually to articulate the motives for activity. Thus, though they may be unclear and they often make mistakes, people are more knowledgeable about their practice than they can actually tell, and they constantly monitor and adjust this practice in order to achieve their purposes. It is this semi-conscious practicality that allows actors to make choices that may finally be effective. The potential effectiveness of human agency is what makes people’s activity worth close and penetrating observation: not wholly predictable, and variably skilled, people make a difference to the world through their choices, refusals or failures. From a Giddensian point of view, simple social position is an unreliable predictor of actions and outcomes. To return to the organizational domain, the analyst should not assume that managers are exhaustively defined by their class position in society or their hierarchical position in the organization; family, moral or political concerns may be implicated as well. The family business patriarch (or matriarch) has more at stake than just profit. Nor should they expect smooth translation of managerial tasks into action: managers can be more or less skilful – or dedicated – in carrying out their roles. Managers may be distracted, half-hearted, self-interested or simply not fully competent. As

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such, their activities need to be understood in their particularity, and it is important to study motives and interpretations intimately from the inside, not just remotely from without. Agency is more than a matter of individual will and skill, of course. For Giddens, agency is enhanced by control over resources; it is exercised through the following, or rejection, of rules. These rules and resources are the structural properties of social systems, where structures are relatively enduring and general principles of system ordering. In structuration theory, rules have a wide meaning, to include not just those that are legislated in some sense (‘the strategic plan must be approved by November’), but also less formal routines, habits, procedures or conventions (‘we usually do a SWOT analysis; SWOT analysis means looking at strengths and weaknesses; of course we put it on a flip chart’). Resources, on the other hand, are of two types, allocative and authoritative. Allocative resources involve command over objects and other material phenomena; authoritative resources concern command over people. Strategy, of course, is all about resources – both the material resources that are the subject of strategy and the authoritative resources that grant decision-making power over these resources. For Giddens (1984), people have more capacity for agency the more structural resources they hold and the more plural the rules they are able to negotiate. Resources give power; plurality affords discretion. Thus Giddens is able at once to resist individualism and to reject the ‘hard’ or deterministic notions of social structure previously prominent in the social sciences: structures are not inimical to agency, but essential to it. Giddens (1984) highlights three characteristic forms of interaction in which this agency is performed: communication, the exercise of power and sanction (see Figure 7.1). These three forms of interaction are analytically associated with three corresponding structural dimensions of social systems – signification, domination and legitimation. Signification refers to a system’s discursive and symbolic order, i.e. rules governing the types of talk, jargon and image that predominate (see also Vaara in this handbook). Legitimation refers to the regime of normatively sanctioned institutions: these rules extend from formal legal constraints

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structure

signification

domination

legitimation

(modality)

interpretative scheme

facility

norm

interaction

communication

power

sanction

Figure 7.1 Forms of interaction in structuration theory (Giddens, 1984, Figure 2, p. 29)

and obligations, to the kinds of unwritten codes that are embodied in an organization’s particular culture. Finally, the dimension of domination concerns material and allocative resources: these concern political and economic institutions, most obviously the state or the firm. It can readily be seen that these three dimensions connect structuration theory directly with issues of discourse, power and institutional legitimacy that are prominent throughout organization and management theory. The middle part of Figure 7.1 refers to ‘modalities’, the means by which structural dimensions are expressed in action. Thus, in communicating, people draw on interpretive schemes that are linked to structures of signification; in exercising power, they draw on what Giddens calls facilities, for example rights defined by the structure of domination such as those pertaining to organizational position or ownership; and in sanctioning, they draw on norms of appropriate behaviour embedded in the structures of legitimation. To illustrate, a manager’s action may be shaped by the strong norm of improving organizational performance; it may simultaneously be guided by an interpretive scheme that trusts in the efficacy of ‘strategy’ as a means to achieve that objective; finally it will be empowered by facilities such as a sufficiently senior position within the organizational hierarchy. However, as the horizontal double-headed arrows in Figure 7.1 imply, the three dimensions are analytic distinctions that do not deny interweaving in practice. A theme that is very important for Giddens is reciprocity: for example, norms that analytically belong to the dimension of legitimation can also, by the very giving of legitimacy, reinforce the

facilities that originate in the dimension of domination. Thus managerial powers gain from the fact of their legitimacy. This regard for reciprocity takes us to Giddens’ (1984) key notion of the ‘the duality of structure’. Through this duality he means to replace the traditional dualism (opposition) between structure and agency by an assertion of their mutual dependence: ‘the structural properties of a system are both the medium and the outcome of the practices they recursively organise’ (Giddens 1984, p. 25). In other words, these structural properties are essential to action, at the same time as being produced or reproduced by this action. Structure does not have just the sense of constraint implied by social theories that emphasize ideological hegemony and the unequal distribution of resources. Structure is also enabling, as it furnishes both the resources that make action possible and the rules that guide it. Managers are powerful agents by virtue of their control over allocative and authoritative resources and their command of the rules by which to apply them effectively. Their power is both enhanced and inhibited by norms of appropriate conduct, as more or less shared by colleagues and subordinates within their system. The concept of structuration embodies this mutual dependence of structure and agency. The neologism adds to the static word ‘structure’ a sense of action over time: structuration implies an active historical process. Structuration happens as agents draw on the various rules and resources of their systems; as they do so, they either reproduce or amend the structural principles that organized their activities in the first place. Thus structuration theory admits structural continuity while allowing

Giddens, structuration theory and Strategy as Practice

for deliberate innovation and change. Structures typically work like language – at the core, sufficient stability to allow the effective storing of knowledge over time; at the margins, the creation of new words and usages to accommodate changing needs and circumstances. Managers, then, can be seen as constantly drawing on past arrangements as they repeat, tinker with, bend or challenge what worked for them before. Returning to Figure 7.1, the vertical double-headed arrows reflect both the ‘downward’ influences of structure on action, and the ‘upward’ influences of action on structure. An important implication of structuration, therefore, is that structures are not fixed or given. Of course, there is typically a good deal of continuity in the arrangement of structural rules and resources within society. Giddens (1984) describes the relatively enduring structural properties of systems as institutions, which tend to confront each individual as solid and apart (see Gerry Johnson et al. in this handbook). At the highest level, the capitalist system is an institution, its structural properties stretching over time and space in a way far beyond isolated efforts at change. Ultimately, however, Giddens insists that structures only exist as they are instantiated in action or as people retain them in their memories. In the eyes of critics and rivals (e.g. Archer 1995), this formulation seems to give structures an ephemeral and immaterial character: the past has only weak influence over the present and resources are somewhat virtual. But Giddens’ formulation also points to important truths. Rules that are forgotten have no purchase; there is little value to resources unless rights over them are recognized; left unused, rules and resources soon fall into desuetude. The structural properties of a system are ultimately only reproduced, therefore, to the extent that its members continue to draw on them in action. The methodological implications of duality and structuration may seem dauntingly holistic. Strictly, duality implies equal attention to both structure and agency, while structuration charges us to understand the past at the same time as engaging intimately with the present. However, despite his theoretical orientation, Giddens (1984, pp. 281– 354) is sensitive enough to structuration theory’s scope to provide a thorough and realistic discussion

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of its implications for practical empirical research. Most important here is his concept of ‘methodological bracketing’, whereby the researcher can concentrate on one theme while putting the rest on hold. In particular, Giddens (1979, 1984) proposes a distinction between the analysis of strategic conduct, the means by which actors draw on their structural rules and resources in their social activities, and institutional analysis, which suspends interest in conduct for the understanding of institutional context across space and time. Strategic conduct analysis typically calls on anthropological or ethnographic modes of ‘thick description’; it might apply, for instance, to the study of a group of strategists at work on the creation of strategy in a particular organization. Institutional analysis, with its larger horizon, is more likely to draw on a range of macro-sociological approaches including the historical and the quantitative; this would be relevant to understanding the spread of particular strategy practices, for example strategy consulting, over time and across different sectors or countries. In the interests of practicality, it is quite legitimate for the researcher to focus on one or the other, rather than risk being overwhelmed in the attempt to grasp the whole. But critical is that the researcher should explicitly recognize this bracketing, and acknowledge the place of what is being left out. In summarizing the separation of the analysis of conduct and the analysis of institutions, Giddens (1979, p. 80) insists: ‘It is quite essential to see that this is only a methodological bracketing: these are not two sides of a dualism, they express a duality, the duality of structure.’

Attractions and alternatives Structuration theory offers Strategy as Practice researchers several attractive elements. I shall stress three: attention to micro-sociological detail; a sensitivity to institutional context; and openness to change. Nonetheless, as this section will explore, there are some powerful rival perspectives available as well. To start with, Giddens endorses a fascination with the details of everyday life. Practice is at the centre of his theory and he respects the skills – the

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practical consciousness – that people need simply to go on. A favourite reference for Giddens (1984) is Erving Goffman, whose micro-sociology reveals the wonderful accomplishment involved in takenfor-granted social encounters. From a structuration point of view, how managers simply get through apparently ordinary and routine encounters is a perfectly legitimate object of study, and their successes and failures can make a difference, small or large, to what follows. In Giddens’ (1984) methodological terms, this micro-sociological detail is all rich stuff for the analysis of strategic conduct. Structuration theory is ready to appreciate the minute skills with which a strategist performs their job – even down to the artful manipulation of a flip chart or the apt choice of words in a strategic conversation (Hodgkinson and Wright 2002; SamraFredericks 2003). At the same time, of course, the duality of structure opposes a wholly micro perspective. Giddens (1979, p. 81) is explicitly critical of Goffman for his neglect of institutions, of history and of structural transformation. For structuration theory, ordinary activities are not fascinating just in themselves, but also for how they express larger structural principles. Structuration theory’s second attractive feature, therefore, is its intimate connection of the micro and the macro, conduct and institutions. Everyday decisions about the inclusion or exclusion of different employees in the strategy process either reinforce or amend established social and organizational hierarchies. Even the minutest instance of strategizing expresses, in its aspiration to shape the future, the power of the firm in contemporary oligopolistic capitalism. A complete understanding of micro instances of practice requires, therefore, acknowledgement of the structural principles that enable and constrain that practice; equally, the full significance of such instances may stretch far beyond the micro moment. In short, Giddens will not let us forget that activity is institutionally situated. Structuration theory constantly asks: What made that possible; Why did that not happen; and How does that reproduce or change what is possible in the future? From this point of view, the triumph in strategy debate of one particular manager may be due not simply to the technical appropriateness

of their proposal, but to their mastery of legitimate strategy discourse, their hierarchical position, their relationship to capital or their social status in terms, for example, of gender or ethnicity (see Rouleau 2005; Whittington 1990). At some point, institutional analysis is necessary to complete the understanding of strategic conduct. While insisting on the power of larger structural principles, structuration theory always admits their ultimate pliability. Giddens is on the side of the political reformers, after all. The third attractive feature that I wish to highlight here, therefore, is that structuration theory allows for innovation and change. Structural principles are only relatively enduring; they are continuously subject to the struggles of the everyday. In the classic Chandlerian firm of the mid-twentieth century, strategy was the preserve of top management: formulation was separate from implementation (Chandler 1962). Today, in many large Western organizations at least, middle managers appear to be winning greater inclusion in the strategy process, as their command over legitimate strategy discourse increases, new electronic technologies facilitate participation and they accept for themselves greater performance responsibilities (Knights and Morgan 1991; Floyd and Lane 2000; Palmisano 2004). This structural change was not legislated for at a single stroke. From a structuration theory perspective, the emerging principle of middle management inclusion is the outcome of countless individual endeavours to learn new skills, to respond to new technological opportunities and to accept new forms of accountability. Every engagement by middle managers in the strategy process of their organizations is at once an expression of this structural change and, insofar as they are effective, an extension of it. Hard work, multiplied many times over, can make structural change happen. Some see this structural pliability as going too far (Parker 2000; Reed 2005). For the critics, alternative theoretical approaches such as the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu or the Realist theory of Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer are more persuasive. Both these approaches share structuration theory’s recognition of the production of structure by human actors, but they give greater weight to continuity or constraint. It is worth drawing the

Giddens, structuration theory and Strategy as Practice

contrasts in order to understand the sphere in which structuration theory is particularly apt. As described in chapter 9 in this handbook, Bourdieu (1990) too advances a theoretical account of constrained human agency. For him, the role of structural rules and resources are played first by habitus, the ingrained dispositions that guide dayto-day activity, and second by notions of capital (social and symbolic, as well as material). While capital defines the sphere of possibility, and habitus shapes its understanding, they do not constrain outcomes absolutely. Capital and habitus may be relatively set, but these structural conditions are only determinant in the sense of a hand of cards: once the hand is dealt, the cards are fixed, yet the outcomes of the game are still finally shaped by the skill of the players as the game unfolds. The prior distribution of the cards sets limits, but a good player can squeeze out extra tricks from quite unpromising hands. In this Bourdieusian view, then, people are like card-players, seizing chances in the flow of the game, often through intuition as much as reason. For Bourdieu, agency is largely opportunistic. The Critical Realist tradition also proposes a ‘pivotal’ role for practice (Bhaskar 1989; Archer 2000, pp. 154–190; see also Vaara in this handbook). However, although ultimately derived from human action, structures are ‘harder’ in Critical Realism because – it is claimed – they go both deeper and further back. Structural depth refers to structures’ foundational role for action, something that is not directly accessible to scientific observation, but which can be retrospectively inferred from outcomes. For example, career success may owe something to the skills of individuals, largely visible, but it also relies on underlying structures (class, patriarchy or whatever) that are less immediately open to view: these structures reveal themselves by the fact that, in many societies, so many successful managers turn out to be male and wellborn. To understand causality in careers, the analyst has to dig deeper than just skilful individuals. Structures go further back in the sense that they are preconditions for action, instead of instantiated in that action. Structures come first: the career successes of today derive from the distribution of resources in the past. This harder sense of structure

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encourages Archer (1995) in particular to assert a stark dualism between action and structure, as against the conciliatory ‘duality’ of Giddens. For her, the sharp separation of action and structure, and the placing of structure first, helps to appreciate the hierarchical distribution of opportunities for action, the delay and costs involved in structural transformation, and the likely need for collective rather than individual struggle to win change that is against the interests of those starting higher up the hierarchy. In Critical Realism, agency is not easy. Both the practice theory of Bourdieu and the Critical Realism of Bhaskar and Archer have their attractions, and indeed have been applied empirically in strategy research (e.g., respectively, by Oakes et al. 1998 and Whittington 1989). Here my object is to consider their practical value for research rather than their fundamental theoretical merits and demerits. Bourdieu, an anthropologist of traditional societies and analyst of the société bloquée that was post-war France, is conservative in his expectations. Distributions of capital are so fixed, and habitus so engrained, that by and large the most one can expect of agents is improvisatory skill within tight margins of discretion. A Bourdieusian perspective would likely be particularly illuminating, therefore, in the study of strategy episodes where structural change is both unsought and unlikely, but opportune interventions can still make a difference within certain boundaries. Such episodes might be a tough strategic negotiation, or the competitive ‘selling’ of a strategic issue to top management, where success or failure would depend in part on how well the actors played the hands they were dealt. On the other hand, a Critical Realist approach, with its origins in radical politics, might be better for the analysis of structural obduracy in the face of repeated endeavours at change. As radicals have found often enough, structures can be pretty deep-rooted. Critical Realism’s hard understanding of structures, and its appreciation of hierarchical power and interests, might be particularly insightful in a case where, for example, middle managers were trying but failing to influence change in an organization’s strategy or processes. This is not to say that structuration theory is oblivious either to deep-rooted constraints or to deft opportunism: Giddens is certainly alive to the skill

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of the agent and his structures are a good deal more substantial than Critical Realists give him credit for (Stones 2005, pp. 54–55; Whittington 1992). It is merely to allow that there are circumstances where Bourdieusian conservativism, or hard Realism, may have special things to offer. Nonetheless, in contemporary organizations, structuration theory will be relevant widely enough: today, most organizations are undergoing constant change and for many ‘empowerment’ is at least a rhetoric, and often enough a (qualified) reality. Structuration theory has real purchase where circumstances are plural and fluid, where firms enjoy oligopolistic powers of discretion or where middle managers – or others – are confident and knowledgeable enough to exploit their powers. The world offers plenty of scope for Giddensian agency. The task of the next section, then, will be to explore some existing applications of structuration theory, both within organization studies generally and within the domain of Strategy as Practice in particular.

Structuration theory in practice To some extent the basic idea of structuration has become a conventional wisdom of organization studies, as it is now of sociology more widely (Parker 2000). The early use of structuration theory in management studies to challenge traditional representations of organizational structure as objective and somehow ‘real’ (e.g. Ransom et al. 1980) hardly seems radical now. As some of Giddens’ key insights have become absorbed into the taken-for-granted, structuration theory might easily have faded from the literature’s bibliographies. Novelty or exoticism would no longer be sufficient to justify the trouble of citation. In fact, his work continues to be widely cited, and on an upwards trend. Thus a Google Scholar search in Business, Administration, Finance and Economics combining ‘Giddens’ and ‘Structuration’ produces 5 cites in 1991, 50 in 1996, 113 in 2001 and 265 in 2009. It might be that the application of structuration theory is often somewhat lop-sided, as I shall argue later, tending to focus at the micro-level of strategic conduct rather than institutional analysis (Whittington 1992; Pozzebon 2004). Nonetheless,

it is clear that Giddens remains a continuing source of inspiration for management scholars – indeed, never stronger. This continued use of Giddens has been particularly reinforced by the turn to practice in management studies (Chia and MacKay 2007; Whittington 2006). This section, therefore, will examine in some depth two particularly exemplary applications of structuration theory within the practice-orientated organization literature in general, before reviewing some significant pieces within the Strategy as Practice literature in particular. There are several prominent and influential users of Giddens in organization theory generally (e.g. Barley 1986; DeSanctis and Poole 1994; Heracleous and Barrett 2001; Sydow and Windeler 1998), but we shall focus in this review on the articles of Orlikowski (2000) and Feldman (2004), both because they exemplify relevant themes and because they have made particularly effective use of diagrams to highlight key features of structuration theory. These two articles deserve closer study than presented here, but nonetheless we can bring out significant issues of structure, agency and method. In her article ‘Using Technology and Constituting Structures’, Orlikowski (2000) draws on structuration theory to examine the usage of information technology in organizations. Her focus is particularly on Lotus Notes – a software package purporting to promote collaborative working and knowledge sharing – in a consultancy and a software house. Orlikowski (2000, p. 408) takes a ‘practice-lens’ in order to emphasize how ‘we often conflate two aspects of technology: the technology as artefact (the bundle of material and symbolic properties packaged in some socially recognizable form, e.g. hardware, software, technique) and the use of technology, or what people actually do with the technological artefact in their recurrent, situated practices’. Drawing on ethnographic, shadowing and interview methods, she reveals a mixture of limited, personal and sometimes improvisatory usage of this purportedly collaborative technology. For her, structuration theory helps to understand the improvisatory nature of ‘technology-inpractice’ because of its insistence that structural

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Learning Orientation

Structure

Cooperative Culture Team Incentive Structure Improvisation Technology-in-Practice

Facilities, e.g.,

Norms, e.g., • deliver high quality and timely service • act professionally • be a team player • collaborate with others • learn through doing

Interpretive Schemes, e.g., • technology can improve ways of working • some understanding of how Notes and ITSS can improve ways of working

Agency

• text entry and edit • database searching and browsing • electronic mail • document management • data analysis

Support specialists use Notes and the ITSS application to experiment with new ways of working

Figure 7.2 A structurationist view on technology-in-practice (Orlikowski, 2000, Figure 9, p. 420) principles are not fixed and objective, but only instantiated in practice. In this case, the structures of Lotus Notes technology are emergent in action rather than being inherent and somehow determinant. For example, the customer support specialists in Orlikowski’s software house made improvisatory use of Lotus Notes for their Incident Tracking Support System (ITSS). As in Figure 7.2, within a structural context of a cooperative culture, a team incentive structure and a departmental learning orientation, the support specialists were able to express their agency to experiment with new ways of working. In this they were assisted by Lotus Notes’ technological facilities, the departments’ norms of team play and quality, and a shared interpretive scheme that was optimistic about technology in general and the potential of Lotus Notes in particular. Instead of just using Lotus Notes as prescribed, the support specialists developed new practices such as entering calls into the ITSS database retrospectively rather than simultaneously or browsing through colleagues’ call records in order to build up practical knowledge. Thus structuration theory’s respect for human agency alerts

the analyst to the possibility of discovering in use technological capacities that were not originally designed. A second empirical study making very explicit empirical use of Giddens is Feldman’s (2004) article on organizational processes in a university’s halls of residence. Feldman spent four years engaged in 1,750 hours of observation, participation and conversation, as well as gathering 10,000 emails. Her theme in the article is ‘how changes in the internal processes of an organization can take one kind of resource and recreate it as a different resource’ (p. 295). She writes that taking a social practice theory perspective helped her to understand how these internal processes connect the earlier resources with the later ones, in other words, to understand change over time. The key change here was the centralization of the hiring and training of hall staff, with implications for the Building Directors in charge of each residential hall. Feldman (2004) takes specifically a structurationist perspective on the relationships between resources, rules (which she calls schemas) and actions, with each tending to reproduce the others.

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Diagram of Empirical Relationships Diagram of Theoretical Relationships

Bulimia as an individual event

Bulimia as a community event Ways of dealing with bulimia

Schema Actions

Resident staff as interconnected unit with BD as central Hiring and training actions

Resource Schema Actions Resource

Resident staff as individual specialists with BD as one of many

Network

Network

Authority

Authority

Trust

Trust

Complementarity

Complementarity

Information

Information

Figure 7.3 A structurationist view on organizational practices in a student hall (Feldman, 2004, Figure 2, p. 300). She demonstrates these relationships by comparing the responses to incidents of student bulimia before and after the centralization of the recruitment and training processes of hall staff. Her Figure 2 (reproduced here as Figure 7.3) has effectively three columns: the first, on the left-hand side, shows the theoretical relationship, with the typical structurationist cycle of reproduction; the second is the empirical relationship before the change in process; the third, on the right-hand side, shows the empirical relationship after the centralization. Comparing columns two and three, the introduction of the new hiring and training practices changes the nature of resources even though the basic resource categories – networks, authority, trust and so on, indicated in the bottom boxes – remain the same. With the new practices, hall staff networks become more fragmented and the Building Directors (BDs) lose their earlier central authority. The result is that the schemas for dealing with bulimia, and the actual responses (actions), become less communitarian, more individual. The circular loops in Figure 7.3 convey the sense that resources reinforce schemas, schemas shape actions and actions call forth more of the original resources. For example, acceptance

of the new more specialized responsibilities reinforced hiring preferences for more ‘professional’ staff, who in turn naturally tended to favour more individualistic responses. This circularity tends towards embedding patterns of response, despite the university’s Building Directors’ increasing frustration with the situation. These two Giddensian studies offer an interesting contrast as well as some shared themes. First of all, the two studies show how the structurationist framework can accommodate very different empirical patterns of behaviour: Orlikowski (2000) stresses improvisation, while Feldman (2004) chooses – in this article – to highlight reinforcement. Thus the structurationist framework can handle both creativity and circularity, agency and structure. Important similarities, however, lie in these authors’ recognition of structural context and the intensity of the research method. Orlikowski and Feldman alike emphasize the structure of the prevailing resources, schemas, norms and facilities. These are set up before the analysis of action, recognized as preconditions for what actually happens. Both authors are also impressive in terms of their empirical commitment. Orlikowski conducts work shadowing;

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Table 7.1 Giddens in the study of strategy practice Subject

Key methods

Structuration theory use

Additional theories

Balogun and Johnson (2005), Organization Studies

Unintended outcomes and middle manager interpretation of change strategies

Case study: diaries and review meetings

Agency, meanings and the dialectic of control

Sensemaking

Howard-Grenville (2007) Organization Science

Middle manager issue-selling over time

Ethnographic participant observation

Norms, routines and schemas reproduced through practice

Organizational politics and resourcing

Jarzabkowski (2008), Academy of Management Journal

Types of strategizing behaviour and their effects

Comparative case studies: interviews and observation

Structure and agency; recursivity and change

Institutional theory

Kaplan (2008) Organization Science

Middle mangers’ framing contests round rival projects

Observation, interviews and documents

Power as indeterminate Goffmanesque and enacted by skilful frame theory actors

Mantere (2008), Journal of Management Studies.

Middle managers’ expectations regarding strategy

Large interview data set across twelve organizations

Agency and knowledgeability

Middle manager roles

Paroutis and Pettigrew (2007), Human Rels.

Strategy teams’ activity in centre and periphery

Case study: interviews

Routinized nature of practice and the knowledgeability of agents

Strategy process

Rouleau (2005), Journal of Management Studies

Middle managers interpreting and selling change

Case study: ethnography

Discursive and practical consciousness; social structures

Sensemaking and sensegiving

Salvato (2003), Journal of Management Studies

Micro-strategies in firm evolution

Comparative case studies: interviews

Agency in using and adapting firm routines

Dynamic capabilities

Authors

Feldman engages in four years of observation. These authors take seriously the structurationist mandate to study practice from the inside. It is easy to imagine extensions of these two structurationist studies into the domain of Strategy as Practice. Orlikowski’s (2000) sensitivity to the improvisatory way in which people use Lotus Notes could be translated into a study of how strategists actually use standard strategy tools, such as Porter’s five forces or even simple SWOT analysis. Orlikowski’s insights suggest that usage is unlikely to be precisely by-the-book, but that actors will nonetheless find new and creative applications for them, for instance perhaps in internal communications or organizational politics. Feldman’s (2004) emphasis on circular reinforcement is suggestive too. Her broad framework might, for example, be applied to studying the introduction of a new strategic planning system, opening up its various

effects, functional and dysfunctional, intended and unintended. The emerging Strategy as Practice literature has in fact already taken up aspects of Giddens and structuration theory (Campbell-Hunt 2007; Whittington 2006). On the theoretical side, the increasingly conventional distinction between praxis and practices, and their interlinkage over time, derives originally from a Giddensian framework (Whittington 2002, 2006; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007). Our concentration here, though, will be empirical. Table 7.1 summarizes eight empirical studies in leading American and European journals that have made use of Giddensian notions in fairly substantive fashion, while relating themselves broadly to the Strategy as Practice tradition. These are chosen as representative rather than absolutely comprehensive and some of these authors have used Giddens elsewhere as well (for

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example, Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002; Mantere and Vaara, 2008). Reviewing these reveals at least three common themes. The most striking theme that emerges from the articles summarized in Table 7.1 is the strong emphasis on middle manager activity: thus Balogun and Johnson (2005) insist on middle manager interpretation and resistance; Howard-Grenville (2007), Kaplan (2008) and Rouleau (2005) concern themselves with middle managers’ activity around particular strategy projects or initiatives; Mantere (2008) and Paroutis and Pettigrew (2007) focus on the roles of middle managers in the strategy process. Of course, middle managerial activity is rich ground for Strategy as Practice, interested as it is in uncovering the significance of the day-to-day in strategy. But structuration theory reinforces this tendency to look beyond top management because of its emphasis on agency, the capacity of nearly everybody to make a difference. From a structuration theory point of view, middle managers can be expected to exercise a crucial shaping role in strategy not only through their creative improvisation in the implementation of strategy, but also through their deliberate and potentially skilful attempts at upwards influence. As in Balogun and Johnson (2005) and Kaplan (2008), top managers – the conventional guardians of strategy – cannot expect to exert effective control because of the diffusion of power and the indeterminateness of structural rules and resources. A second theme is the commitment to intense and intimate research engagement, in line with the endeavours of Orlikowski (2000) and Feldman (2004). Ethnographic or observational methods are used by Howard-Grenville (2007), Jarzabkowski (2008), Kaplan (2008) and Rouleau (2005). Balogun and Johnson (2005) are innovative in also using a diary method, their research subjects recording regularly their own thoughts and impressions as their organization changed over time. The remainder relied more on interviewing, but in all cases involved many participants and avoided simple closed questions. The commitment to local understanding is underscored by the typical focus on a very limited number of organizations, typically just one: Mantere (2008) is exceptional in spanning twelve

organizations, but his concern is with managers in general, rather than the fate or characteristics of particular organizations. In Giddens’ (1984) methodological terms, all these methods belong to the analysis of strategic conduct, attempting to grasp actors’ activities, their own understandings, their achievements and their skills. The final column of Table 7.1 points to a third theme, the reliance on additional sources of theory. For Giddens (1984), structuration theory is more of a broad orientation or sensitizing device than a precise theory in itself. Structuration theory points the researcher towards certain types of phenomena, for example agency, as seen in many of these eight papers. But structuration theory rarely has much to say about how these phenomena are likely to behave in particular circumstances; nor, as a theory of society in general, does it offer many concepts for organizations in particular. Accordingly, all these eight articles draw upon other kinds of theory, mostly widely employed in organizational studies already: thus both Balogun and Johnson (2005) and Rouleau (2005) resort to the sensemaking tradition of Weick (1995), while Jarzabkowski (2008) uses institutional theory. Typically, these theories provide additional conceptual language, for example sensemaking or framing, or point to strategy-specific phenomena, such as issue-selling or dynamic capabilities. Generally these eight articles do not use these additional theories to develop propositions about phenomena in different circumstances – though, as I shall argue in a moment, structuration theory would not exclude this option. So far, then, structuration theory has been predominantly useful to Strategy as Practice researchers in directing attention towards middle managers rather than top managers in strategy. It has also inspired a commitment to the intimate research methodologies characteristic of the analysis of strategic conduct. At the same time, these researchers have not relied upon structuration theory alone: they have anchored themselves theoretically in the mainstream by drawing upon theoretical traditions that are well recognized already within organization studies in general. There are, then, common threads across the eight articles in Table 7.1: this commonality also points to opportunities.

Giddens, structuration theory and Strategy as Practice

Opportunities for structurationist research We can treat structuration theory fairly pragmatically, as just one resource for Strategy as Practice researchers and its value determined according to the task in hand (Johnson et al. 2007). So far, Strategy as Practice researchers have clearly found it useful for the analysis of strategic conduct, especially for understanding the agency of middle management. This is a rich seam for research, and there is both scope and need for more. Middle managers are a large population, and their skills and futures are fundamental to the mission of the business schools in which most Strategy as Practice researchers are employed. We have only begun to understand their predicament with regard to strategy, and in our MBA classes and executive education courses we have an audience eager to learn more. But here I shall point to three more kinds of research opportunity, two of which are logical extensions, while the third is a more radical departure from prevailing streams of Strategy as Practice research. The first extension builds on the existing Strategy as Practice strength with regard to middle managers. Just as structuration theory has helped to appreciate the role of those outside the top management team, so could it help to uncover other relatively neglected groups of actors in strategy work. Obvious examples of under-researched groups include strategy consultants, strategy gurus and strategic planners (for some suggestive exceptions, see Sturdy et al. 2006; Greatbatch and Clark 2002). Such consultants, gurus and planners are typically in advisory roles, rather than decisionmaking ones, but the structurationist respect for agency would predict an influence for them considerably greater than formally allowed, and likely exercised in subtle ways. Another neglected group, often frustrated consumers of strategy, are lowerlevel employees (Mantere 2005). An agencysensitive perspective would propose for such employees a degree of discretion that required their practical understanding of strategy for effective implementation, at the same time as predicting considerable scope for resistance and reinterpretation. A structurationist approach to the practice of strategy

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would highlight the likely importance of communications, buy-in and unexpected initiatives and contradictions right down the organizational hierarchy. A second extension of existing tendencies is to exploit more fully the mid-range theoretical resources (such as sensemaking, contingency theory and the like) that are already being used in Strategy as Practice work in order to develop more propositional forms of research. A good deal of Strategy as Practice research so far has been revelatory in nature, uncovering the significance of the previously unremarked: for example, the gendered use of language in strategy (Rouleau 2005) or the crafting of PowerPoint slides (Giraudeau 2008). This is often fascinating, and utterly consistent with practice theory’s ambition to ‘exoticise the domestic’ (Bourdieu 1988, p. xi). However, now that the practice perspective has exposed such phenomena, there is increasing scope for deriving from these mid-range theories formal research propositions about variation in these phenomena or their effects. Such propositional research might take, for example, the form of investigating the theoretically indicated conditions under which some kinds of conduct or outcome are more likely than others. As a simple illustration, some kind of contingency theoretic framework could motivate propositions about the conditions under which strategy tools are more relied upon in strategy-making activity or less. The methodological implication of this kind of approach is typically careful theoretical sampling aiming for structured comparison: e.g. one set of cases or episodes where the conditions are present, compared with another set where the conditions are absent. This kind of move beyond revelatory research towards propositional research promises big pay-offs both in terms of practical guidance and academic publication. Propositions can provide the basis for practical guidelines (e.g. this practice is more effective under these conditions than those) and they are the favoured approach of many North American journals. A more radical departure would be to go beyond the analysis of strategic conduct that has prevailed so far and seize the area of substantial but neglected opportunity highlighted by Giddens’ (1984) methodological dichotomy, i.e. institutional analysis. Here structuration theory’s commitment to duality

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clearly indicates unfinished business and certainly there is a large empirical gap to fill. Strategy is an institution in itself: it has its own tools and language (SWOT, core competence and so on), its professional societies (the Association of Strategic Planning, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, the Strategic Planning Society), its learned society (the Strategic Management Society), its authorities and gurus (Porter, Hamel and so on), its specialized journals (the Harvard Business Review, the Strategic Management Journal and so on), its recognized educational and career tracks (business schools and leading strategic consultancies), and both full-time professional practitioners (strategic planners, consultants, analysts) and part-timers, the ordinary managers who get sucked in at various levels to make, communicate or implement strategy. Strategy thus constitutes a field, or social system, with its own structural rules (norms of practice) and resources (authority) upon which its members draw in their day-to-day activities. The strategic conduct that has been so richly observed by previous Strategy as Practice researchers relies in part on strategy’s rules and resources, and this same conduct contributes to their reproduction, sometimes their transformation. To work on strategy is typically to know the right tools and language, to have gone through appropriate educational and career tracks, and to borrow the authority of legitimate strategic practice. In general, analysts of conduct only notice these rules and resources locally and fleetingly as they are instantiated, alongside all the other kinds of rule and resource, in particular moments of strategizing. The opportunity for Strategy as Practice researchers now is to analyse the institution of strategy more systematically as an institutional field in its own right (Knights and Morgan 1991; Hendry 2000). Such institutional analysis would not only inform research into strategic conduct; it would support the regulation and reform of the strategy field itself. The strategy field is prolific of ideas (‘stick-to-the-knitting’, ‘network effects’ and so on): these ideas sometimes sweep around the world, penetrating new sectors, such as the public sector, and new countries, such as reform economies, with little product testing (Ghemawat 2002).

It is not clear that the strategy field’s leading bodies (its professional organizations, its learned society and its educational institutions) are adequate yet to the task of critique and regulation (Whittington et al. 2003). The ‘new economy’ strategies of the dotcom and Enron era around the turn of the century proved fatally flawed, yet by and large the strategy field applauded them uncritically at the time; unlike the accounting profession and the financial markets, the strategy field left its economic, professional and educational apparatus largely untouched when these new strategies’ enormous failings were finally revealed. Similarly, the banking sector’s diversification and innovation strategies over the last two decades received little critical scrutiny from the strategy discipline, despite the huge amounts at stake. For Anthony Giddens, both as theorist of duality and as political reformer, this reluctance to reflect on and modify strategy as an institution would seem strangely half-hearted, not to say irresponsible. There are two clear routes forward for the institutional analysis of strategy. The first is to develop a macro-understanding of the field as a whole, and its evolution over time. Strategy deserves the same kind of historical and sociological analysis that for the other professions – such as medicine, law or social work – have long been routine (e.g. Abbott 1988). Here, key questions would include how the boundaries of strategy have been defined and managed, the kinds of language that have been used to describe it (from long-range planning to business model engineering), the ways in which knowledge and technologies have been produced and disseminated, and the nature and the extent of its membership (both full-time and part-time). Particularly important for informing the analysis of strategic conduct would be understanding the variety and force of strategy’s rules and resources in different kinds of contexts. For example, conventional strategy does not have the same grip in the public sector as in the commercial sector, so that there its rules may be more loosely interpreted and its authority less certain (Maitlis and Lawrence 2003). Important for institutional regulation and reform, on the other hand, would be understanding of how the field of strategy, and its effects, evolve over time. For example, the formalization of strategy

Giddens, structuration theory and Strategy as Practice

attributed to the 1960s and 1970s may have played a large part in undermining American competitiveness (Hayes and Abernathy 1980); by their own accounts at least, it took the combined efforts of iconic managers such as Jack Welch and rhetorical gurus such as Mintzberg and Pascale finally to relax it (Mintzberg 1994; Pascale 1990; Welch 2001). Ghemawat (2002) highlights similarly damaging consequences from the ‘new economy’ strategies of the dotcom boom, with its over-excited talk of disruption, network effects and increasing returns. By scrutinizing the ways in which strategy as a field may have had dysfunctional consequences in the past, and how the field has previously corrected itself, we can become both more alert to the field’s dangers today and more sophisticated in dealing with them. The second route forward is to understand better the particular products of the strategy field, both its practices and its practitioners. There is an important shift implied here, from the focus on the particular and local common in the analysis of strategic conduct, to the more general patterns and trends of institutional analysis. With regard to strategy practices, the analysis of strategic conduct will tend to show that they are typically improvised and reinterpreted in particular moments of praxis, so that their core characteristics are only unreliably deduced from particular instances of use. Strategy practices need, therefore, to be approached also from ‘above’, to understand them generically as well as locally. For example, the analytical tools of strategy, such as the Boston Consulting Group matrix, are usually well understood conceptually, but not very well in terms of what they tend to mean as practice (particular kinds of data gathering, representation and political negotiation, for example), how widely they are used, under what conditions, and the kinds of practical outcome they typically generate (a bias to one strategy or another). It is as if pharmacists knew only the chemistry of a particular pill, but not its practical usage and effects. In terms of practitioners, the need is for a better grasp of the kinds of people who typically engage in strategy in particular kinds of decisions, organizations, sectors and even countries. Given the heavy focus on middle managers in the analysis of strategic conduct, an important contextual

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question is the extent to which middle managers are now involved in strategy generally and under what conditions. To fully appreciate a middle manager’s success or failure in an episode of strategic conduct, it is necessary to understand how routine and legitimate that middle manager’s intervention was in that particular type of context. These kinds of institutional analysis of practices and practitioners lend themselves to the survey and statistical approaches common within the new institutional theory tradition within organization studies (Scott 2000; Lawrence and Suddaby 2006). This institutional analysis is not, of course, fundamentally separate from the analysis of strategic conduct: as in Gidden’s (1984) duality, to focus on the institutional level is merely an expedient but ultimately provisional bracketing. In the end, the goal is to bring conduct and institutions together so that they can be more completely understood as the mutually constitutive phenomena they are. Institutional analysis is necessary to appreciate the potentialities and constraints, skill and clumsiness, involved in particular moments of strategic conduct. In turn, strategic conduct analysis can help us understand how strategy’s institutions can themselves be changed, by professional bodies and educational providers especially, but also by the sheer effort of managers in general.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced structuration theory, emphasizing the power of its focus on agency, structure and structuration over time. It has also highlighted several possible implications for Strategy as Practice researchers. In particular, the chapter has identified the work of Orlikowski (2000) and Feldman (2004) as offering inspiring models from outside the strategy discipline in terms of their careful focus on people’s activity, studied intimately through ethnographic methods. The chapter has also reviewed eight early structurationist studies in the Strategy as Practice field, where the theory has particularly supported the close examination of middle manager conduct, revealing the scope for constrained agency deep within organizations and the potential limits to the power of those at the

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top. Given the audiences for Strategy as Practice researchers, this stream of work has strong potential, especially as it develops more propositional forms of knowledge and extends its reach to others outside the very top of organizations, such as consultants and other employees. However, I have also underlined the opportunity that lies in the neglected topic of strategy as an institution in and of itself. So far, Strategy as Practice research has focused largely on conduct or praxis; there has been little on the general characteristics of strategy as an institutionalized set of rules and resources which, alongside others, enable and constrain this conduct. This is anomalous theoretically, for Giddens insists that focus on either one of conduct or institution should be merely a matter of methodological bracketing, provisional and self-conscious. His duality of structure implies that the analysis of strategy activity is incomplete without a thorough understanding of institutional context, of which strategy as a field must necessarily be an important part. Neglect of strategy as institution falls short also in policy terms, for the strategy field is an influential and inventive one, constantly spinning out new ideas, sometimes (as perhaps during the high tide of formal planning during the 1960s and 1970s, or the dotcom and banking excesses more recently) with widely damaging consequences. Giddens the reformer would be concerned that the strategy field is not very good at regulating itself; indeed, that it lacks sufficient systematic knowledge of its own internal workings even to try to do so more effectively. It is worthwhile investing in an institutional analysis of strategy. After all, the merit of structuration theory, vis-à-vis more fatalistic theoretical rivals such as those of Bourdieu and Bhaskar, is its confidence in our human capacity to change institutions for the better. With the ‘practical’ so strongly implied in our field’s title, making practice better should surely be a central part of our research endeavour. References Abbott A. (1988), The System of the Professions: An Essay on the Expert Division of Labour. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Archer M. S. (1995), Realist Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer M. S. (2000), Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balogun J. and Johnson G. (2005), From Intended Strategies to Unintended Outcomes: The Impact of Change Recipient Sensemaking, Organization Studies, 26, 11: 1573–160. Barley S.R. (1986), Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments, Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, 1: 78–108. Bhaskar R. (1989), Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Realist Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. London: Verso. Bourdieu P. (1988), Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (1990), The Logic of Practice. Oxford: Polity Press. Campbell-Hunt C. (2007), Complexity in Practice, Human Relations, 60, 5: 793–823. Chandler A. D. (1962), Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of American Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press Chia R. and MacKay B. (2007), Post-Processual Challenges for the Emerging Strategy-asPractice Perspective: Discovering Strategy in the Logic of Practice, Human Relations, 60, 1: 217–242. Denis J.-L., Langley A. and Rouleau L. (2007), Strategizing in Pluralistic Contexts: Rethinking Theoretical Frames, Human Relations, 60, 1: 179–215. DeSanctis G. and Poole M. S. (1994), Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory, Organization Science, 5, 2: 121–47. Feldman M. (2004), Resources in Emerging Structures and Processes of Change, Organization Science, 15, 3: 295–309. Floyd S. W. and Lane P. (2000), Strategizing Throughout the Organization: Management Role Conflict and Strategic Renewal, Academy of Management Review, 25, 1: 154–177. Ghemawat P. (2002), Competition and Business Strategy in Historical Perspective, Business History Review, 76, 1: 37–74. Giddens A. (1976), New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson.

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Lawrence T. and Suddaby R. (2006), Institutions and Institutional Work, in S. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence and W. Nord (eds), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage, 215–254. Maitlis S. and Lawrence T. B. 2003. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Understanding Failure in Organizational Strategizing, Journal of Management Studies, 40, 1: 109–140. Mantere S. (2005), Strategic Practices as Enablers and Disablers of Championing Activity, Strategic Organization, 32: 157–184. (2008), Role Expectations and Middle Manager Strategic Agency, Journal of Management Studies, 45, 2: 294–316. Mantere S. and Vaara E. (2008), On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective, Organization Science, 19, 2: 341–358. Mintzberg H. (1994), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Oakes L. S., Townley B. and Cooper D. J. (1998), Business Planning as Pedagogy: Language and Control in a Changing Institutional Field, Administrative Science Quarterly, 43, 2: 257–292. Orlikowski W. (2000), Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations, Organization Science, 12, 4: 404–428. Palmisano S. (2004), Leading Change When Business is Good, Harvard Business Review, December: 128–134. Parker J. (2000), Structuration. Buckingham: Open University Press. Paroutis S. and Pettigrew A. (2007), Strategizing in the Multi-Business Firm: Strategy Teams at Multiple Levels and Over Time, Human Relations, 60, 1: 99–135. Pascale R. (1990), Managing on the Edge. New York: Simon and Schuster. Pozzebon M. (2004), The Influence of a Structurationist View on Strategic Management Research, Journal of Management Studies, 41, 2: 247–272. Ranson S., Hinings B., and Greenwood R. (1980), The Structuring of Organizational Structures, Administrative Science Quarterly, 15, 1: 1–17. Reckwitz A. (2002), Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Cultural Theorizing, European Journal of Social Theory, 5, 2: 243–263.

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Reed M. (2005), Reflections on the Realist ‘Turn’ in Organization and Management Studies, Journal of Management Studies, 42, 8: 1621–1644. Rouleau L. (2005), Micro-Practices of Strategic Sensemaking and Sensegiving: How Middle Managers Interpret and Sell Change Everyday, Journal of Management Studies, 42, 7: 1413–1442. Salvato C. (2003), The Role of Micro-Strategies in the Engineering of Firm Evolution, Journal of Management Studies, 40, 1: 83–108. Samra-Fredericks D. (2003), Strategizing as Lived Experience and Strategists’ Everyday Efforts to Shape Strategic Direction, Journal of Management Studies, 40, 1: 141–174. Schatzki T. R. (2001), Introduction: Practice Theory, in T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge, 1–14. Scott, W. R. (2000), Institutions and Organizations, London: Sage. Stones R. (2005), Structuration Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Sturdy A., Schwarz M. and Spicer A. (2006), Guess who’s Coming to Dinner? Structures and the Use of Liminality in Strategic Management Consultancy, Human Relations, 59, 7: 929–960. Sydow J. and Windeler A. (1998), Organizing and Evaluating Interfirm Networks: A

Structurationist Perspective on Network Processes and Effectiveness, Organization Science, 9, 3: 265–284. Weick K. (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Welch J. (2001), Jack: What I’ve Learned Leading a Great Company and Great People. London: Headline. Whittington R. (1989), Corporate Strategies in Recession and Recovery: Social Structures and Strategic Choice. London: Unwin Hyman. (1990), Social Structures and Resistance to Strategic Change: British Manufacturers in the 1980s, British Journal of Management, 1, 4: 201–213. (1992), Putting Giddens into Action: Social Systems and Managerial Agency, Journal of Management Studies, 29, 6: 693–712. (2002), Practice Perspectives on Strategy: Unifying and Developing a Field, Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, Denver. (2006), Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research, Organization Studies, 27, 5: 613–634. Whittington R., Jarzabkowski P., Mayer M., Mounoud E., Nahapiet J. and Rouleau L. (2003), Taking Strategy Seriously: Responsibility and Reform for an Important Social Practice, Journal of Management Inquiry, 12, 4: 396–409.

CHAPTER

8

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice PAU L A JA R Z A B KOWSK I

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice This chapter introduces activity theory as an approach for studying Strategy as Practice. Activity theory conceptualizes the ongoing construction of activity as a product of activity systems, comprising the actor, the community with which that actor interacts and those symbolic and material tools that mediate between actors, their community and their pursuit of activity. Activity theory has its roots in Russian social psychology. Russian cultural historical activity theory, as developed by Vygotsky (1978), initially conceptualized early childhood development through children’s interaction in activities with their community. His followers, particularly Leontiev (1978), developed this theory more widely to encompass the interaction between the individual and the collective in the pursuit of activity. Activity theory has been widely adopted within the fields of education and human–computer interaction (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006), as well as being developed in a particular way by Engeström (1990) for examining work practices in a range of contexts. More recently it has been used within organization theory to examine organizational and strategy practice (e.g. Blackler 1993, 1995; Blackler et al. 2000; Groleau 2006; Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005). Activity theory provides a resource for analysing the interaction between practitioners, practices and praxis through the study of activity systems. In this chapter, I shall explain some specific concepts associated with activity theory and indicate its value for studying Strategy as Practice as it is socially accomplished by individuals in interaction with their wider social group and the artefacts of interaction. In particular, the activity theory’s focus on actors as social individuals is explained as a conceptual basis for studying the core question in

Strategy as Practice research; what strategy practitioners do. The structure of the chapter is in four parts. First, activity theory is introduced through an overview of its historical background and application in different fields. Second, an activity system conceptual framework is developed. Third, the elements of the activity system are explained in more detail and explicitly linked to each of the core Strategy as Practice concepts, practitioners, practices and praxis. In doing so, links are made to existing Strategy as Practice research and brief empirical examples are provided of Strategy as Practice topics that might be addressed using activity theory. Fourth, the chapter concludes with a brief comparison of the theoretical resources provided by activity theory and some other potential theories of practice. Throughout the chapter, a number of key authors who have founded and developed activity theory or used it in various disciplinary fields are introduced, which may also offer valuable resources and further reading for those wishing to make greater use of activity theory.

Background to activity theory In this section I provide a brief overview of the foundations of activity theory before discussing some specific elements of this complex theory which are particularly applicable to the Strategy as Practice agenda. Activity theory was initially developed by Russian social psychologist, Vygotsky, in the era following the Russian revolution. Vygotsky (1978) was concerned with the development of human consciousness. In particular, he wanted to avoid representations of the mind as separate from the social context in which consciousness develops. Hence, he derived a theory that accounted for human consciousness as it develops in interaction 127

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with a collectively evolving cultural and historical context. His theory of the individual and of human cognition is thus inherently social. Vygotsky’s students and colleagues, particularly Leontiev (1978), further developed this theory by proposing that the unit of analysis in which to examine human consciousness was activity. In activity, individuals interact with the wider cultural and historical context in which they are engaged, so developing consciousness in an overtly social way that is both conditioned by and responsive to the wider collective of which they are part. While individuals are shaped by the collective with which they interact, this is not deterministic, as individuals both learn how to act from and also contribute to the evolving cultural and historical context. Activity theory thus premises that psychological development is a social process arising from an individual’s interactions within particular historical and cultural contexts (Vygotsky 1978). Interaction provides an interpretative basis from which individuals attribute meaning to their own and others’ actions (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1985). This interaction is profoundly located within practical activity, being the daily work in which actors engage (Kozulin 1999; Leontiev 1978). In this activity, we may study how, through what means, individuals interact with others and are enabled to partake in the collective activity of a community. In activity theory, practical activity is mediated through the technical and psychological tools that individuals draw upon to interact with each other (Wertsch 1985). Vygotsky (1978) was concerned with psychological tools, such as algebraic symbols, schemes, diagrams, maps and mechanical drawings, as well as the acquisition and use of language, through which actors invoke meaning and which mediate between their own subjective consciousness and the activity they perform in a community. The point of such tools is that they are oriented towards activity. They come into use to mediate the practical activity that is constructed between actors (Kozulin 1999). These concepts of practical activity and mediation will be further explained in following sections of the chapter. While Vygotsky and his colleagues developed many of the basic premises in activity theory, the theory has been elaborated as it was adopted

in adjacent fields of study. Activity theory has been drawn on in the field of human and computer interaction in two ways. First, activity theory underpins much of the literature on the situated interactions between technology and humans (e.g. Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006; Nardi 1996). Second, the distributed and parallel processing functions of computing systems, particularly as they enable collaborative working, have been analysed using activity theory concepts of cognition as social activity that is distributed across multiple actors in interaction. Thus activity theory has been used to aid the design of technologies to better account for the human operator’s activity, as well as to understand how distributed technological systems work in human situations (e.g. Frawley 1997). Activity theory is particularly helpful for understanding how technologies mediate human interactions in distributed systems (e.g. Rabardel and Beguin 2005). For example, activity theory analyses contribute to knowledge about the subjective experiences of actors using a technology and also how that technology mediates their interaction with others who may be distributed across time and space (e.g. virtual communities or parallel processing) and how it enables or constrains their collective activity (Omicini and Ossowski, 2004; Walker 2004). These aspects of activity theory have also informed a vein of work on distributed cognition (e.g. Hutchins 1995) that has, in its turn, informed practice-based studies of coordination and collaboration in organizations (e.g. Orlikowski 2002). As a theory of social and cognitive development, activity theory has also been drawn upon in psychology-related fields such as education. It informs Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of learning, which illustrates the way that newcomers learn through participation how to construct themselves as members of a community, even as their participation reconstructs that community. Engeström (1987 1990) has been a key figure in the development of activity theory within the education and learning field, as well as taking it more widely into the study of organizations. One of Engeström’s main contributions has been defining the unit of analysis as the activity system, so shifting the analytic focus from individual activity to the whole activity system in which an activity occurs (see Kaptelinin and Nardi

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice

2006, pp. 137–143). The activity system concept provides an integrative framework, encompassing the interactions that take place between individuals, the cultural and historical context of their activity, and the various tools and technologies that mediate that activity. Engeström’s (1993) approach elaborates activity theory by identifying specific elements of the activity system, such as the social structuring mechanisms of role, division of labour, tools, and implicit and explicit rules through which individuals interact as they construct activity. While Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006) critique Engeström’s activity system approach for shifting the focus of activity theory from individual activity to collective activity, this approach has been found useful in organization studies, where there is often an interest in studying how individuals coordinate their actions within the collective activity of a group, unit, division or organization. For example, aspects of Engeström’s activity system model have been used by those organization theory scholars who examine organizational learning, contradictions and paradoxes associated with organizational and strategic change (e.g. Adler 2005; Blackler 1993, 1995; Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Balogun 2009; Prenkert 2006). While an activity system approach does focus attention on the activity arising from the system, it need not exclude individual activity (e.g. Malopinsky 2008) but rather is a matter of foreground and background. That is, a focus on the individual is always sensitive to the collective practices and social interactions of the system in which the individual acts. The activity system approach is particularly apposite to the study of Strategy as Practice because it enables a study of strategy practitioners that also pays attention to the strategy practices that they draw upon and the strategy praxis in which they are engaged.

An activity system framework for studying practitioners, practices and praxis Before discussing the various concepts of activity theory that can inform Strategy as Practice, I will present an activity system model that draws these concepts together. Figure 8.1 represents the

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elements of the activity system explained in this chapter. Other diagrammatic representations of activity systems, which model similar concepts but also interpret some different elements may be found in other studies (e.g. Blackler et al. 2000; Engeström 1993; Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006). For the purposes of this chapter, Figure 8.1 introduces those aspects of activity theory that can illuminate the interrelated study of strategy practitioners, strategy praxis and strategy practices. The subject is the individual or group of actors who form the focal point for analysis. Any group of actors might be positioned as the subject, depending upon whether their contributions to activity are central to the research. In Figure 8.1 (A), strategy practitioners are conceptualized as the subject, those actors who do strategy and through whose eyes Strategy as Practice researchers wish to understand and interpret strategy. Activity theory does not predispose any particular actor to be a strategy practitioner, but rather provides a way of analysing activity from the perspective of an actor that has been designated as a strategy practitioner in any particular study. For example, strategy practitioner subjects have variously been identified as strategy development groups (Blackler et al. 1999, 2000), top managers (Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005), and different middle and top managers (Jarzabkowski and Balogun 2009). The subject nature of the practitioner is important, as it emphasizes the Strategy as Practice concern to understand strategy work by analysing the way that a particular actor or group of actors do that work. However, activity theory avoids the reductionism and marginalization of the social that can arise from an excessive focus on the individual (Dawe 1970; Lockwood 1964; Archer 1982). The subject’s ‘doing’ of strategy is always understood in relation to the collective (Figure 8.1, B), comprising those other actors with whom they interact in the pursuit of goal-directed activity. In activity theory, activity is both goal-oriented, in that it is directed towards a practical outcome (Kozulin 1999) and also shared (Leontiev 1978). Different subjects input their individual actions into the ongoing activity of the activity system. Subjects (Figure 8.1, A) thus associate with a collective (Figure 8.1, B) in constructing goaloriented activity (Figure 8.1, C). Activity is a

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Paula Jarzabkowski Culturally and historically situated and evolving A: Subject strategy practitioners

E: Stream of praxis: evolving activity system over time

D: Mediation: strategy practices

B: Collective: focal community with which the subject interacts

C: Goal-oriented activity (praxis)

Figure 8.1 An activity framework for studying Strategy as Practice questions long-duration concept; a flow of activity over time (Figure 8.1, E), as indicated by the curved arrows in Figure 8.1, which imply that the system is not static but is in a constant state of becoming. While activity may be studied at any point in time, it is continuously being constructed in and also constructing the interactions between subjects and their community. Hence, activity is best thought of in dynamic terms as a stream or a flow of activity. In this chapter, I propose that this concept of continuously flowing, goal-oriented activity is valuable for understanding strategy praxis and how it evolves over time. In particular, activity is a useful level of analysis because it separates the tightly interwoven interactions between actors and their community, directing attention to the strategy praxis that is accomplished in these interactions (see also Blackler 1993; Jarzabkowski 2005). As illustrated in Figure 8.1 (D), an activity system framework also explains the mediation of interactions between subjects, the collective and their shared activity. Mediation is a distinctive concept in activity theory that explains how individual actors, the community and their shared endeavours are integrated in the pursuit of activity. Mediation occurs through various practices, such as strategy

artefacts (e.g. spreadsheets, PowerPoint, whiteboards), strategy processes (e.g. planning and budgeting processes) and strategy language (e.g. competitive advantage, value creation) that enable interaction between actors and their community (Engeström 1993). Such practices are situated, meaning that they reflect both the cultural and historical properties of the wider society in which they are embedded and also the local interpretations of those practices as artefacts for action. Practices of mediation both lend meaning to and are imbued with meaning by the situation in which they are used. They enable interaction between the participants in the activity system and mediate shifting dynamics of influence in the construction of goaldirected activity. Mediation thus provides a means of understanding how diverse actors’ actions are rendered mutually intelligible and collective, to the extent that shared activity can take place (Leontiev 1978; Suchman 1987; Turner 1994). An activity system is not particular to one type of analytic unit, such as an organization or a group. Rather, it provides a conceptual framework for placing boundaries around the focal subject, collective and activity in any particular set of interactions in order to study their dynamics as a system.

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice

Existing studies have identified whole organizations (Blackler 1993, 1995; Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Balogun 2009; Spender 1995), strategy development groups (Blackler et al. 2000), virtual learning communities (Walker 2004) and doctor–patient interactions (Engeström 1993) as activity systems. The activity system depicted in Figure 8.1 may thus be used to study Strategy as Practice phenomena and research questions at varying levels (see Jarzabkowski and Spee 2009). Conceptualizing Strategy as Practice within an activity system enables us to generate an interdependent view, understanding how the actions in one part of the system affect actions in another part, with these interdependencies mediated by the practices. As an integrative conceptual framework, activity theory is insightful because of its theoretical premise that the study of one part of an activity system necessarily incorporates other parts of the activity system. The next sections of the chapter locate each element of Figure 8.1 within the theoretical resources provided by activity theory and explain how these resources can inform the study of practitioners, practices and praxis.

Strategy practitioners: a subject in interaction with the collective Strategy as Practice is focused primarily upon strategy as something that people do (Jarzabkowski 2004). Furthermore, the Strategy as Practice research agenda aims to take existing strategy research beyond its dominant focus on top managers by bringing a wide range of actors to centre-stage (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Johnson et al. 2003, 2007; Mantere 2005, 2008; Mantere and Vaara 2008; Whittington 2006). This has led to broad definitions of who might be considered a strategy practitioner: ‘Strategy’s practitioners are defined widely, to include both those directly involved in making strategy – most prominently managers and consultants – and those with indirect influence – the policy-makers, the media, the gurus and the business schools who shape legitimate praxis and practices’ (Jarzabkowski and Whittington 2008). Such broad definitions indicate research methodologies that enable the study and comparison of what different types of strategy

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practitioner do. Studying what people do is not only an empirical question but also an ontological question, based on whether individual doing is conceptualized as a solo, primarily cognitive, activity or as an interactive, primarily social, activity (Turner 1994). Activity theory brings three important features to the study of what people do. First, activity theory conceptualizes individual doing as engaging in activities with a wider social group (Vygotsky 1978), also known as the collective or the community (Engeström 1993; Leontiev 1978). ‘Doing’ as an individual in isolation is not possible. Even when individuals act alone, they do so with consideration of the social group, drawing upon the social practices of that group. As illustrated in Figure 8.1, in activity theory the social nature of doing is captured by conceptualizing the individual as the subject. It is through this subject’s intentions and actions that activity may be understood. However, activity is always collective, inasmuch as, even in acting alone, an individual relates to the collective and draws upon the tools and symbols of that collective. For example, when strategy practitioners work alone to develop a spreadsheet or think about strategy in the car while driving home, it is impossible to do these actions without drawing upon collective cultural and historical precepts. Through culturally and historically embedded practices – the strategy language of competitive advantage and barriers to entry, strategy concepts such as growth and market value added, and strategy tools such as planning cycles and spreadsheets – practitioners bring into being their solo strategizing actions. These strategizing actions draw upon and contribute to the cultural and historical practices of the wider social group, even if the spreadsheet or strategy thoughts are constructed in isolation. Conceptualizing the strategy practitioner as a subject interacting within an activity system (see Figure 8.1) provides a social basis for analysing what strategists do within a particular group, division or organization. That is, it conceptualizes doing as located within a specific context, known as an activity system, in which particular types of doing may be better understood. For example, Jarzabkowski (2005, 2008) found that top managers in three universities were each pursuing

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four similar streams of strategic activity; research, teaching, commercial income and size and scope. However, their ways of doing these similar streams of activity varied in accordance with the different cultural and historical practices of the activity systems that comprised the universities. The strategy practitioner is thus always a subject interacting with a wider collective and this situatedness is important in studying what strategists do. Second, activity theory incorporates intentionality into the subject (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006). While individuals act by drawing upon and contributing to cultural and historical practices, they are not simply pawns of the collective. Rather, when people act, they have motives and desires that they impute to their own actions. Intention is thus inherent in action, even where such intentions may be latent rather than immediately apparent to the actor. Activity theory instantiates the actor as an intentful agent. Intent is particularly important for understanding what comprises a strategist as a competent practitioner, as it goes beyond what strategists do to how they interpret their doings and their aspirations in doing, whether these are ultimately realized or not. Additionally, intent allows us to examine and compare different actors, consultants, middle managers, top managers, non-executive directors and others as strategy practitioners with different motives and desires, even when they interact with the same collective in pursuing strategy. For example, Blackler et al. (2000) studied three different strategy development groups within the same high-tech company, comparing their interactions with the organizational activity system about the same strategy. Different subject groups had varied intentions and attributed different motives to their actions, with tensions emerging from the subjects’ varying perspectives on the success of their own actions and the organization’s strategic activity. These differences in subject intentions provide a basis for identifying variation in engagement and outcomes for the participants within an activity system, even when they are engaged in the same activity. Third, an activity theory perspective on the actor as a social subject provides an ontological basis for studying what strategists do; that is, it goes beyond the empirical cataloguing of their actions into a

social analysis of these actions. Studying what strategy practitioners do might well result in a long list of things ‘done’, such as making a telephone call, writing, typing, talking to an associate, going to a meeting, examining a report, drinking coffee, putting numbers in a spreadsheet and so forth. The amount of time allocated to each of these actions could also be analysed, deriving a categorization of things that strategy practitioners do and for how long. This list will indeed describe what strategy practitioners do but will not be very insightful about doing strategy work or about being a strategist. It will become much more insightful if we know who the focal community is that the practitioner telephones, writes to, talks with, meets, examines a report from, develops a spreadsheet for and why these particular actions are important in this context. Furthermore, we may study variations in the intentions attributed to those same actions when the practitioner interacts with a different focal community, such as shareholders, board members, subordinates, consultants or peers. Simply, it is not enough to know that practitioners prepare spreadsheets as part of what they do but rather to know the purpose of the spreadsheet in this activity system, at whom it is directed and what motivations the strategist attributes to his/her actions. When an activity theory lens is applied, analysing what the strategy practitioner does becomes an ontological question about the social nature of doing. Such analysis allows us to understand how what people do constructs them as strategic actors.

Strategy practices as mediators The Strategy as Practice research agenda has also expressed a concern with the practices of strategy making (e.g. Jarzabkowski 2003, 2004; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Whittington 2003, 2006). There is, however, little consistency in the definitions of practices that have been employed by scholars within the Strategy as Practice field (Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2009). This is perhaps not surprising, given the various philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of practices (Schatzki et al. 2001). Activity theory provides some valuable concepts for analysing the role of strategy practices in the social

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice

accomplishment of strategy. In particular, as illustrated in Figure 8.1, activity theory may be used to conceptualize strategy practices as mediators within an activity system. They mediate between any given subject group, their focal community and the strategic activity in which the community is engaged. Mediation is an aspect of activity theory that increasingly has been drawn upon to look at problems of coordination and shared activity in organizations and in strategy processes (e.g. Adler 2005; Blackler 1993, 1995, Blackler and McDonald 2000; Blackler et al. 2000; Foot 2002; Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Balogun 2009; Miettinen and Virkkunen 2005; Spender 1995). In these studies, the organization, or one of its parts, is conceptualized as an activity system in which common activity is accomplished through mediation. This section explains the principles of mediation and how it may be drawn upon to conceptualize and understand the role of strategy practices in doing strategy. Human actions and interactions are mediated: ‘Activity theory casts the relationship between people and tools as one of mediation; tools mediate between people and the world’ (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006, p. 10). Mediating tools or mechanisms can take social, physical and cognitive forms, such as operating procedures, heuristics, scripts, routines and languages (Omicini and Ossowski 2004). Mediation suggests that, despite their potentially different perspectives and interests, actors are able to integrate their actions in the pursuit of shared activity (Engeström 1993; Kozulin 1999). However, activity theory does not conceptualize these mechanisms as primarily the instruments of any particular constituent, such as senior managers. Rather, the same mechanisms may be appropriated by different constituents in order to mediate between their varied purposes and interests (Rabardel and Beguin 2005). Furthermore, mediators are not neutral but have historical and cultural baggage that can both constrain and enable action and interaction. Mediating mechanisms thus incorporate longer duration aspects of interaction between actors, so that mediation is not simply part of the moment, but also is part of the wider collective activity. I shall now explain how the concept of mediation supports analysis of three aspects of strategy practices: their role in socially

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accomplishing strategic activity; how practices are themselves altered as part of the evolving activity of the activity system; and how they mediate between different subjects within an activity system. Mediation is a valuable concept for examining how particular practices that coordinate strategic activity, such as planning procedures and resource allocation mechanisms, shape the evolving strategic activity of an organization (Blackler 1993, 1995; Blackler et al. 2000; Jarzabkowski 2005; Jarzabkowski and Balogun 2009; Miettinen and Virkkunen 2005). Classical strategy process studies, such as that of Burgelman (1983, 1996), have shown that such mechanisms may be established by senior managers to guide and control the actions of others in the organization towards specific strategies. However, these mechanisms, far from being the property of senior managers, or indeed having an inherent meaning that exists outside any particular group of actors, may be appropriated by different actors to shape strategy according to their own intentions (Jarzabkowski 2005). Indeed, Burgelman found that Intel’s shift from a memory chip company in a failing market to a leading microprocessor company was attributable to the way that middle managers appropriated the resource allocation rule of ‘maximize margin-perwafer’ to reallocate manufacturing line capacity. This use of the resource allocation mechanism shifted the company strategy towards microprocessors, even as senior managers continued to invest in memory chips as the core Intel strategy. While the resource allocation rule remained constant over time because of the cultural and historical premises of it as a strategic control mechanism at Intel, the meanings attributed to it and the actions taken by different players as they drew upon it, changed the activity of the organization. Hence, as Jarzabkowski (2005) suggests, strategy practices, such as resource allocation models, do not simply coordinate and control strategic activity but rather mediate between different actors in accomplishing an evolving stream of strategic activity over time. In accommodating different actors, the mediating mechanism may itself come to adopt new cultural and historical meanings: ‘Tools evolve during the development of an activity, and they carry the cultural and social knowledge and experiences

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of the people who invented and modified them in order to solve certain problems’ (Malopinsky 2008, p. 60). While strategy practices are culturally and historically located, such that they tend to have long duration, the activity theoretic premise is that they are also continually evolving as they are drawn upon and modified to accommodate different actors’ positions. For example, Jarzabkowski and Balogun (2009) show how strategic planning templates and associated brand campaigns in a multinational, Brandco, evolved from a uniform campaign designed by top managers to a more flexible campaign that could accommodate the different interests and strategic activities of operating companies in small and large markets. These modifications to the planning procedure arose from efforts by actors in different operating companies to socially accomplish the planning procedure within the situated demands of their own market-places. While strategic planning has a ‘general’ or crosscontextual character when it is introduced, these institutionalized properties come into tension with the locally situated actions of different subjects (Miettinen and Virkkunen 2005). Thus, different subjects must, from their local perspectives, continuously interact with the planning mechanism, fashioning it to their ends, even as they are fashioned by it: ‘Accordingly, the activity-theoretical approach regards retooling, the shared creation of artefacts used as means of reflecting and practical transformation of activity, as a key to changing practices’ (Miettinen and Virkkunen 2005, p. 443). Jarzabkowski and Balogun (2009) draw on activity theory to explain how and why strategic planning retained a generalized set of steps that characterized it as a planning mechanism, even as it was modified to account for large and small markets as different subjects. The study of how strategy practices are modified or retooled may also be used to examine how strategy practices mediate between different actors as subjects within an activity system. While activity theory has commonly underplayed the power dynamics of mediation, Blackler and McDonald (2000) suggest that scholars examine power as an ongoing product and medium of the retooling process, as new ways of relating and new activities emerge around the reactions to and modifications

of the mediating mechanism. Jarzabkowski and Balogun’s (2009) study illustrates how the evolution of the planning procedure over time also enabled evolving relationships between the key subjects involved in planning. Actors in the different operating companies evolved from being disengaged with a common multinational strategy to being interdependent subjects comprising strategy formulators (top managers), strategy implementers (actors in small markets) and strategy translators (actors in large markets). These evolving relationships were mediated through the social accomplishment and modification of the planning procedure, until each subject group could understand their own activity in relation to others and to the common strategic activity of Brandco. Much organizational research that draws on activity theory has examined the process of mediation but has paid less attention to its implications for how and why subjects come to accommodate each other in pursuing common activity. The evolution and modification of mediating practices to account for the intentions of different subjects (Malopinsky 2007; Miettinen and Virkkunen 2005) is also associated with the evolution and modification of social relationships and power dynamics between these subjects; the practices mediate between subjects within an activity system, even as they mediate the activity in which the system engages. This section has explained the concept of mediation as it relates to strategy practices and the way that they shape the evolving strategic activity of an activity system; the relationships between subjects in an activity system; and how activity itself shapes the strategy practices. Much literature in the strategy and organization field has used activity theory to look at mechanisms that coordinate strategic activity, such as planning procedures and administrative systems (e.g. Blackler 1993, 1995; Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Balogun 2009). However, activity theory provides a richer repertoire of possibilities for identifying strategy practices, which may take social, physical and cognitive forms (Kozulin 1999; Vygotsky 1978), such as operating procedures, heuristics, scripts, routines and languages (Omicini and Ossowski 2004). Future research that draws upon activity theory could undertake more detailed

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice

examinations of how various strategy practices, such as meetings, spreadsheets, decision rules and even particular forms of speech mediate the interactions between actors in an activity system and how this mediation socially accomplishes an evolving stream of strategic activity.

Strategy praxis: object and collective activity Praxis refers to the stream of activity in which strategy is accomplished over time, which might be explored at different levels depending upon the specific research focus. For example, praxis might be studied at the institutional level as a particular type of widely diffused activity, such as merger and acquisition behaviour within an industry, or at the micro-level of a particular individual or group of individuals engaged in decision-making activity about a merger or acquisition. Various theoretical and research agenda papers in Strategy as Practice have conceptualized praxis at three different levels, micro, meso and macro (e.g. Jarzabkowski 2004; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2009; Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington 2006). Activity theory lends itself well to the study of praxis at different levels through two key concepts, goal-directed and collective activity. First, activity theory focuses upon practical or goal-directed activity. Practical activity provides a focus for interactions; people interact in order to do something (Kozulin 1999; Leontiev 1978), meaning that their activity is oriented towards an outcome or object. The object is a distinctive concept in activity theory; it refers to the higher order motive or desire at which practical activity is directed (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006; Engeström and Blackler 2005). It is a more comprehensive concept than an objective, which implies a shorter-term, attainable accomplishment that motivates a specific task. Object is a more visionary concept, which might be thought of as a broad goal-orientation that motivates a stream of practical activity comprising of many smaller actions. For example, a university may have a strategic object of being an elite research institution at which its various actors direct their activity. That activity is made up of a complex of actions, such

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as writing papers, submitting grant applications, supervising doctoral students, conducting experiments, running conferences and so forth. Each of these actions has an objective that is important to the goal but is not the goal and, at times, may bear little apparent relationship to the goal. For example, attending a colleague’s research seminar or reading a doctoral student’s chapter are actions with immediate objectives that are no longer directly related to the goal. Rather, these actions are part of a complex of actions undertaken within the activity system as part of the goal-oriented activity that is directed at the object of becoming an elite research institution. Second, activity is collective (Leontiev 1978). It is accomplished through the input of multiple actors, each of whom may conceptualize the object somewhat differently. A stream of activity is invested with meaning and purpose through the historically and culturally situated understandings of the different actors who contribute to that activity over time (Jarzabkowski 2005; Spender 1995). In the above example, different subjects’ perspectives on and interests in the same object of elite research institution may be similar but not the same. Academics may want international recognition from their peers and their subjective interests can be facilitated by the object of an elite research institution, as opportunities to do top research and attain recognition are enabled by the institutional context. Vice-chancellors or rectors want to run institutions that have access to the best financial and human resources, which is enabled by the object of an elite research institution. Students want to be taught by leading academics and attain degrees that have high status in the labour market, which is enabled by the object of an elite research institution. While all subjects share the same broad object, an elite research institution, the goaloriented activity of each and their cultural and historical expectations about the object may be quite different and even in contradiction with each other (Jarzabkowski 2005; Jarzabkowski and Sillince 2007). For example, academics may want to publish more papers, while vice-chancellors may want more large research grants and students may want more teaching time with top professors. All of these motives that can be attributed to the object are part

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of its collective pursuit, so that the object itself is not stable. Rather, the goal-directedness of activity is continuously being accomplished through the interactions and contests between actors. This is a key feature of activity system analysis; examining how a collective output is accomplished through interactions and contests between actors, which modify both the orientation of the activity and of the actors engaged in it (Engeström and Blackler 2005; Foot 2002). Collective activity is thus purposive or objectoriented activity accomplished through a complex of actions over time. Object-oriented activity is of long duration, being historically and culturally situated, albeit that it is not immutable and evolves over time as the complex of actions are reproduced and reconstructed according to the motives and desires of different parties. As Engeström and Blackler (2005, p. 310) note: ‘objects are constructed by actors as they make sense, name, stabilize, represent and enact foci for their actions and activities. Second, at the same time it would also be a mistake to assume that objects are constructed arbitrarily on the spot; objects have histories and built-in affordances, they resist and “bite back” ’. These concepts are valuable for understanding strategy praxis at different levels. For example, it is possible to study the strategic object of an organization and analyse how the objects of different strategy groups reconstruct that organizational object, even as they interpret and contribute to it (e.g. Blackler et al. 2000), or how the object of one group of actors, such as top managers, is constructed and reconstructed in response to the evolving organizational object (e.g. Jarzabkowski 2005; Jarzabkowski and Balogun 2009). If an organization is to achieve some collective strategic activity, this will comprise partly given intentions and partly emergent features of each subject’s own activities, motives and intents. Furthermore, activity theory may be used to examine contradictions between objects. While most strategy literature deals with strategy as a single construct, examining how organizations pursue or fail to pursue a single strategy, organizations are complex and likely to be pursuing multiple objects. In activity theory, this complexity arises from the multiple cultural and historical layers in which the organization is embedded, which give rise to

contradictions between objects (Engeström 1987, 1990). For example, Jarzabkowski (2005, 2008) found that universities were pursuing four contradictory strategies, research, teaching, commercial income and size and scope. The conflict between these strategies was different in each university, according to their historical and cultural basis, so that universities with a strong foundation as research institutions had significant contradictions between their research and teaching or research and commercial income strategies, whereas those historically founded on a teaching orientation developed contradictions as they faced new requirements to develop a stream of research activity. Other studies (e.g. Blackler and Regan 2009) show how changes in the institutional environment create conflicts within an object, showing the reorganization within family and child support services during changes in policy. Hence, the activity system is always embedded in multiple and contradictory cultural and historical events that both shape and are shaped by what occurs within the system. However, there have been few studies of contradictions between different objects within an activity system or conflicts within any specific object as it undergoes change. Activity theory offers an opportunity for more complex analysis of the conflicts between strategies in organizations. In particular, it provides opportunities to study strategizing within pluralistic contexts that are beset by complex and contradictory goals, which has become an increasingly relevant area for Strategy as Practice research (e.g. Denis et al. 2007; Jarzabkowski and Fenton 2006; Jarzabkowski et al. 2009). While these concepts of object and collective activity have only been used in Strategy as Practice research to look at organization-level strategy praxis, other studies have examined quite micro phenomena, such as the object of a doctor–patient interaction (Engeström 1993). Future Strategy as Practice studies might also adopt these concepts to examine the strategy praxis of more micro-activity systems, such as a particular strategy workshop or meeting. The activity system framework (Figure 8.1) would also be valuable to study strategy praxis at the industry level. For example, strategic alliances could be conceptualized as an object comprising a complex interplay of competitive and collaborative interactions by different state, regulatory and

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice

organizational actors, each of whom have different objects in achieving alliance as an industry standard (e.g. de Rond and Bouchiki 2004; Vaara et al. 2004). Importantly, the framework provided in this chapter enables a focus upon strategy as a stream of praxis accomplished over time through the interactions between participants in an activity system. Strategy evolves over time as it is contested and differently interpreted by participants, rather than being a single event or objective to be measured for its returns to one party or at one point in time.

Activity theory in the wider landscape of practice theories This chapter has presented an activity theory approach to the study of Strategy as Practice. In doing so, it has developed an activity theory framework for analysis and explained how specific activity theory concepts can illuminate existing questions and topics for Strategy as Practice research. Particular attributes of activity theory that contribute to the Strategy as Practice agenda are its understanding of the practitioner as a subject in social interaction with a wider activity system. This social understanding of the practitioner is an important contribution to the Strategy as Practice focus on strategy as what people do. However, as this section of the handbook illustrates, activity theory is not the only theory that conceptualizes the individual as a social actor in interaction with social structures of longer duration than any individual actor. Hence, the chapter concludes by locating activity theory within the wider landscape of practice theories. While it is not possible within a single chapter to provide a thorough comparison of activity theory and other theories that might be used to study Strategy as Practice, useful comparisons of activity theory with structuration, situated action, distributed cognition, co-orientation, and other theories may be found in Blackler (1993, 1995; et al. 2000), Chaiklin et al. (1999), Groleau (2006), Jarzabkowski (2000) and Nardi (1996). However, some key comparative points may be made within this chapter. Many practice theories are based on a duality of action and structure that aims to go beyond earlier dualisms (e.g. Bourdieu 1990;

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Giddens 1979, 1984; see also Ortner 1984). The premise of such theories is the reciprocity between action and structure, in which the two are mutually constitutive. However, other authors note that attempts at duality can tend towards either the structural (Bohman 1999) or the agentic (Barnes 2000) or, alternatively obscure interaction between the two such that analysis is difficult (Archer 1982). In part this is because of the recursiveness of reciprocal models of interaction between agency and structure, in which it is difficult to trace how social order evolves over time (Barley and Tolbert 1997; Jarzabkowski 2004, 2008). Activity theory is helpful because it provides a flatter ontology of action and structure than some existing practice theories (Blackler et al. 2000; Jarzabkowski 2005). While the subject is definitely an agent in activity theory, structure appears less permanent or reified in the notion of the collective, even as the collective does bring the longer duration concepts of culture and history that are important to understanding how practice is situated in context. In particular, the focus on activity provides a unit of analysis in which to observe neither agency nor structure but the way that such concepts continuously unfold and are re-accomplished in a stream of practical activity over time. While other theories, such as actor-network theory (Latour 2005), also provide a flatter ontology that goes beyond action and structure, they do so by privileging non-human actors with an equal status to human actors. While actor-network theory represents one viable approach for studying how non-human artefacts are engaged in Strategy as Practice, activity theory is different. It conceptualizes non-human artefacts as mediators between actors but not as actors in their own right. They may have properties that mean they are not neutral but they lack the intentionality that is central to the concept of subject in activity theory. This is an important point of distinction in two theories that aim to better understand the interaction of people and ‘things’ without resorting to action and structure dualities. As Kaptelinin and Nardi (2006, p. 10) note: ‘In acting with technology, people deliberately commit certain acts with certain technologies. Such a mild statement, seemingly devoid of theoretical freight, is in fact at odds with theories such as actor-network theory […] Activity

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theory distinguishes between people and things, allowing for a discussion of human intentionality.’ While human intentionality does not underpin all theories of practice (see also, for example, Chia and Holt 2007; Chia and Mackay 2007), the language of strategy is, at its heart, a language of choice, agency and intentionality. In particular, if we wish to study how practitioners purposively construct themselves as strategic actors, activity theory has value in enabling the study of agency and intentionality in the use of artefacts. Activity theory offers a range of theoretical concepts that are pertinent to the Strategy as Practice agenda. This chapter explains four main concepts, the subject, the collective, object-oriented activity and mediation. It integrates them into a framework that provides a set of resources in the continual endeavour to better explain strategy practice as it happens. While activity theory has been widely used in other fields, particularly education, social psychology and technology, it has had few applications in the strategy and organization field, with some exceptions noted in this chapter. This may be because its theoretical origins or some of its terminology, such as subject, object-oriented activity and mediation have not been clear to strategy and organization scholars. In providing some preliminary links between specific Strategy as Practice concepts and some core principles of activity theory, this chapter has endeavoured to make activity theory more accessible to Strategy as Practice scholars. Strategy as Practice aims to provide insights into how streams of strategic activity are socially constructed over time; by whom, with what intentions, drawing on which practices and with what implications. Activity theory provides a powerful resource for analysing these core Strategy as Practice questions. References Adler, P. 2005. The Evolving Object of Software Development. Organization, 12.3: 401–435. Archer, M. S. 1982. Morphogenesis Versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action. British Journal of Sociology 33.4: 455–483. Barley, S. and Tolbert, P. 1997. Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between

Action and Institution. Organization Studies, 18.1: 93–117. Barnes, B. 2000. Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action. London: Sage. Blackler, F. 1993. Knowledge and the Theory of Organizations: Organizations as Activity Systems and the Reframing of Management. Journal of Management Studies, 30.6: 863–84. 1995. Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation. Organization Studies, 16.6: 1021–1046. 1999. Managing Experts and Competing Through Collaboration: An Activity Theoretical Analysis. Organization, 6.1: 5–31. Blackler, F., Crump, N., and McDonald, S. 2000. Organizing Processes in Complex Activity Networks. Organization, 7.2: 277–300. Blackler, F. and Regan, S. 2009. Intentionality, Agency, Change: Practice Theory and Management. Management Learning, 40.2: 161–176. Bohman, J. 1999. Practical Reason and Cultural Constraint: Agency in Bourdieu’s Theory of practice. In R. Shusterman (ed.), Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 128–152. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burgelman, R. A. 1983. Corporate Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management: Insights From a Process Study. Management Science, 29.12: 1349–1364. 1996. A Process Model of Strategic Business Exit: Implications for an Evolutionary Perspective on Strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 17/Summer Special Issue: 193–214. Chaiklin, S., Hedegaard, M. and Jensen, U. J. (eds), 1999. Activity Theory and Social Practice. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Chia, R. and Holt, R. 2007. Strategy as Practical Coping: A Heideggerian Perspective. Organization Studies, 27.5: 635–655. Chia, R. and MacKay, B. 2007. Post-Processual Challenges for the Emerging Strategy as Practice perspective: Discovering Strategy in the Logic of Practice. Human Relations, 60.1: 217–242. Dawe, E. 1970. The Two Sociologies. British Journal of Sociology, 21.2: 207–218. Denis, J.-L., Langley, A. and Rouleau, L. 2007. Strategizing in Pluralistic Contexts: Rethinking Theoretical Frames. Human Relations, 60.1: 179–215.

An activity-theory approach to Strategy as Practice de Rond, M. and Bouchiki, H. 2004. On the Dialectics of Strategic Alliances. Organization Science, 15, 1: 56–69. Engeström, Y. 1987. Learning by Expanding: An Activity-theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit. 1990. Learning, Working and Imagining: Twelve Studies in Activity Theory. Helsinki: OrientaKonsultit. 1993. Developmental Studies of Work as a Testbench of Activity Theory: The Case of Primary Care Medical Practice. In S. Chaiklin and J. Lave (eds), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 64–103. Engeström, Y. and Blackler, F. 2005. On the Life of the Object. Organization, 12: 307–330. Foot, K. A. 2002. Pursuing an Evolving Object: A Case Study in Object Formation and Identification. Mind, Culture and Activity, 9.2: 56–83. Frawley, W. 1997. Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Groleau, C. 2006. One Phenomenon, Two Lenses: Understanding Collective Action from the Perspective of Coorientation and Activity Theories. In F. Cooren, J. R. Taylor and E. J. Van Every (eds), Communication as Organizing. New Jersey : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 157–180. Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jarzabkowski, P. 2000. Putting Strategy into Practice: Top Management Teams in Action in Three UK Universities. PhD thesis, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. 2003. Strategic Practices: An Activity Theory Perspective on Continuity and Change. Journal of Management Studies, 40.1: 23–55. 2004. Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation and Practices-in-se. Organization Studies, 25.4: 529–560. 2005. Strategy as Practice: An Activity-Based View. London: Sage.

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2008. Shaping Strategy as a Structuration Process. Academy of Management Journal, 51.4: 621–650. Jarzabkowski, P. and Balogun J. 2009. The Practice and Process of Delivering Integration through Strategic Planning. Journal of Management Studies, 46.8: 1255–1288. Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. and Seidl, D. 2007. Strategizing: The Challenges of a Practice Perspective. Human Relations, 60.1: 5–27. Jarzabkowski, P. and Fenton, E. 2006. Strategizing and Organizing in Pluralistic Contexts. Long Range Planning, 39.6: 631–648. Jarzabkowski, P., Matthiesen, J. K. and Van de Ven, A. 2009. Doing Which Work? A Practice Approach to Institutional Pluralism. In T. Lawrence, B. Leca and R. Suddaby (eds), Institutional Work: Actors and Agency in Institutional Studies of Organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 284–316. Jarzabkowski, P. and Sillince, J. 2007. A Rhetoric-in-Context Approach to Building Commitment to Multiple Strategic Goals. Organization Studies, 28.11: 1639–1665. Jarzabkowski, P. and Spee, A. P. 2009. Strategy as Practice: A Review and Future Directions for the Field. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11.1: 69–95. Jarzabkowski, P. and Whittington, R. 2008. Hard to Disagree, Mostly. Strategic Organization, 6.1: 101–106. Johnson, G., Langley A., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. 2007. Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, G., Melin, L. and Whittington. R. 2003. Micro Strategy and Strategizing: Towards an Activity-Based View? Journal of Management Studies, 40.1: 3–22. Kaptelinin, V. and Nardi, B. 2006. Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kozulin, A. 1999. Vygotsky’s Psychology: A Biography of Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Lave, J., and Wenger, E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Leontiev, A. N. 1978. Activity, Consciousness and Personality. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Lockwood, D. 1964. Social Integration and System Integration. In G. K. Zollschan and H. W. Hirsch (eds.). Explorations in Social Change. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 244–257. Malopinsky, L. 2008. Facilitating Organizational Change: The Use of Activity Theory as a Framework for Social Construction of Strategy Knowledge. Unpublished PhD thesis, Indiana University. Mantere, S. 2005. Strategic Practices as Enablers and Disablers of Championing Activity. Strategic Organization, 3.2: 157–184. 2008. Role Expectations and Middle Managers Strategic Agency. Journal of Management Studies, 45.2: 294–316. Mantere, S. and Vaara, E. 2008. On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective. Organization Science, 19: 341–358. Miettinen, R. and Virkkunen, J. 2005. Epistemic Objects, Artifacts and Organizational Change. Organization, 12.3: 437–456. Nardi, B. A. 1996. Studying Context: A Comparison of Activity Theory, Situated Action Models, and Distributed Cognition. In B. A. Nardi (ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 69–102. Omicini, A. and Ossowski, S. 2004. Coordination and Collaboration Activities in Cooperative Information Systems. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 13.1: 1–7. Orlikowski W. 2002. Knowing in Practice: Enacting a Collective Capability in Distributive Organizing, Organization Science, 13.3: 249–273. Ortner, S. 1984. Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26.1 126–166.

Prenkert, F. 2006. A Theory of Organizing Informed by Activity Theory: The Locus of Paradox, Sources of Change, and Challenge to Management. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 19.4: 471–490. Rabardel, P. and Beguinz, P. 2005. Instrument Mediated Activity: From Subject Development to Anthropocentric Design. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 6.5: 429–461. Schatzki, T., Knorr Cetina, K. and von Savigny, E. (eds.) 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Spender, J.-C. 1995. Organizations are Activity Systems, not Merely Systems of Thought. Advances in Strategic Management, 11: 151–172. Suchman, L. 1987. Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, S. 1994. The Social Theory of Practices. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vaara, E., Kleymann, B. and Seristö, H. 2004. Strategies as Discursive Constructions: The Case of Airline Alliances. Journal of Management Studies, 41.1: 1–35. Vygotsky, L. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walker, K. 2004. Activity Systems and Conflict Resolution in an Online Professional Communication Course. Business Communication Quarterly, 67.2: 182–197 Wertsch, J. 1985. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whittington, R. 2003. The Work of Strategizing and Organizing: For a Practice Perspective. Strategic Organization, 1.1: 119–127. 2006. Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research. Organization Studies, 27.5: 613–634.

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A Bourdieusian perspective on strategizing MA R I E -L É A N D R E G O ME Z

The firm is not a homogeneous entity that can be treated as a rational subject – the ‘entrepreneur’ or the ‘management’ – oriented towards a single, unified objective. It is determined (or guided) in its ‘choice’ not only by its position in the structure of the field of production, but also by its internal structure which, as a product of all its earlier history, still orients its present […] Its strategies are determined through innumerable decisions, small and large, ordinary and extraordinary, which are, in every case, the product of the relationship between, on the one hand, interests and dispositions associated with positions in relations of force within the firm and, on the other, capacities to make those interests or dispositions count, capacities which also depend on the weight of the different agents concerned in the structure, and hence on the volume and structure of their capital. (Bourdieu 2005, p. 69)

Introduction The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930– 2002) was one of the most influential thinkers in the social sciences (Calhoun 2003). In particular, his work on practice represents a major contribution to the field. It has been used by Brown and Duguid (2001) and Lave and Wenger (1991) to define communities of practice; by Chia and MacKay (2007), Jarzabkowski (2005) and Whittington (2002) to position strategy as a practice; and by Cook and Brown (1999) and Nicolini et al. (2003) to build dynamic links between knowing and practice. However, Golsorkhi and Huault (2006) noted that Bourdieu’s work has been quoted rather than applied in detail in strategic management and organization studies. In my view, the full potential of Bourdieu’s approach has not been realized so far: the authors

cited have only used definitions of practice, and sometimes habitus (Jarzabkowski 2004). In fact, they scarcely use the complete framework, which was conceived as a system whose elements cannot be taken in isolation. In the practice-based approach to strategy and strategizing, Bourdieu’s work deserves greater attention. As asserted by Chia (2004, p. 30), ‘advocates of practice-based approaches to strategy research may have underestimated the radical implications of the work of practice social theorists such as Bourdieu […] who they rely upon to justify this turn to practice’. In particular, Bourdieu’s work calls for a systemic view of practice that highlights the importance of relations between agents and with the field, and dispositions to action. Practice is the doing by social agents (Bourdieu 1990b, p. 14); it takes meaning and value in a particular field. It is reflected in the personal trajectory of agents through their position in a field, and is related to the capital possessed and their habitus, dispositions to act, predispositions and beliefs that were constituted during past experience in a particular field. The concepts of field, capital, habitus and practice form a system (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 96) that accounts for practice with its individual and social dimensions in its intentionality and its structural constraints and in its rationality and non-cognitive elements. Research on strategy would benefit from Bourdieu’s praxeology. Current research on Strategy as Practice remains overly descriptive. It hardly accounts for practice and its underlying and fundamental principles. Despite the calls to link micro and macro dimensions of practice, the relation between the individual, the collective 141

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and the institutional aspects of strategizing have yet to be established. Moreover, research on Strategy as Practice lacks a clear understanding of what practice means (Carter et al. 2008). For instance, for Johnson et al. (2003), Jarzabkowski and Wilson (2006) and Samra-Fredericks (2003), practice represents more micro-level analysis than typically conducted in research on strategy process. This leads to assimilation of practice in collective work that can be detailed in terms of activities (Orlikowski 2002), episodes (Hendry and Seidl 2003; Maitlis and Lawrence 2003) or core micro-strategies (Salvato 2003). Whittington (2006) differentiates praxis as actual activity and practices, the routines and rules that serve as guidelines. Practice is thus practitioners’ movements between praxis and practices. In a rather similar perspective, Jarzabkowski (2004, 2005) sees practice as the activity centred on individuals and practices, routines and artefacts. In fact, the notions proposed for practice lack theoretical foundations that would precisely identify them and establish clear links between them. Thus, Bourdieu’s praxeology could also advance our understanding of strategizing as a practice. The aim of this chapter is to expose how Bourdieu’s praxeology contributes to a better understanding of strategizing as a practice and can advance research on strategy. In the first section, I present the core elements of Bourdieu’s praxeology: the concepts of field, capital and habitus used to describe what practice is in Bourdieu’s relational and dispositional concept of social life. In the second section, I identify how this framework could contribute to advancing the Strategy as Practice research agenda by overcoming the dichotomies that shape but constrain research in strategy: the micro/macro antagonism, the opposition between structure and agency, and the dilemma between rationality and emerging strategy. In the third section, I examine how Bourdieu’s praxeology broadens our view of strategy by enlarging the vision of strategizing as a practice performed by a great number of agents engaged in struggles over domination. Furthermore, I argue that more attention should be placed on the role of academics in these struggles.

Bourdieu’s praxeology: a relational and dispositional system Practice as human activity Practice is a central theme in Bourdieu’s work. It is the concept he uses to account for social life. However, Bourdieu hardly uses the word ‘practice’ itself nor does he formally define it. By practice, he means ‘concrete human activity’ (Bourdieu 1990b, p. 13). In his structural constructivist epistemology (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 11), concrete human activity always takes place in the social world, even for very basic activities: what people eat and most of all the way they eat; the sport they like and the way they practise it: or their political opinions and the way they express them (Bourdieu 1998). Human beings are always part of their social world and this conditions their activities. In particular, the social context gives meaning and value to practice. According to their position in the social world, their past experiences, their beliefs and their dispositions, people adopt different practices. Practices can be considered as agents’ position-taking (Bourdieu 1998, p. 6). They express the tension between the internalization of external determinism and the singularity of the self, based on personal dispositions, previous experiences and beliefs. However, these personal aspects are also developed and thus embedded in a social context. The permanent dialectic between social structures and personal elements grounds Bourdieu’s social theory. In his words, human beings are agents who both act and are acted upon, neither rational actors nor completely constrained by social structures. To account for practice and its logic, Bourdieu focuses on relationships – independent from individuals’ will or voluntary choices and distinct from interactions – and dispositions, which are conditioned by the context of the field and its structure. Bourdieu (1984, p. 101) proposed this ‘formula’: Practice = [(Habitus) × (Capital)] + Field. These notions form a dynamic system (Golsorkhi and Huault 2006) in which they are completely interrelated. Their combination is necessary to attain an equilibrium and offers an exhaustive understanding of social life: ‘habitus, field, and capital, can be defined, but only within the theoretical system they

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constitute, not in isolation [… They] are designed to be put to work empirically in systematic fashion’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 96). Therefore, practice cannot be understood outside the social context where it takes place (the field), the capital owned by agents, defining their positions and stakes in the field, and the habitus, or dispositions for action. These three concepts are now described in detail.

Field: a structured space for struggle Bourdieu defines social worlds in terms of fields, microcosms in the macrocosm of society at large. Organizations constitute fields and are themselves included in larger fields such as industries, competitive markets, economies and society (Bourdieu 2005, pp. 205, 217). Any field can be positioned according to its relation to the field of power (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 110) and in particular its autonomy vis-à-vis the field of power. Even if fields refer to very different social worlds, such as politics, economy, arts, science and academia, Bourdieu (2002, p. 113) insists on common properties and general laws in relation to the way they work. Fields are historically built and evolve through time. Pictured at a given moment, they are structured spaces of positions, ruled by their own stakes and specific interests (Bourdieu 1990a). Agents participating in a field generally take for granted inherent rules and develop a habitus adapted to the field (Bourdieu 2002, p. 114). Social fields work as fields of forces, spaces for struggles between agents in order to dominate the field. Bourdieu highlights the weight and forces exerted on agents through the structure of the field, but at the same time he insists on their conditioning and the fact that they do not determine agents’ conduct (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 135–138). Moreover, regardless of agents’ positions, all agents share a common and core interest in preserving the field: ‘Struggles presuppose an agreement on what is worth fighting’ (Bourdieu 2002, p. 115). Agents’ positions in the field depend on the capital they possess, as detailed below. Agents can be in a dominating or dominated position, which conditions their possibilities for action and their trajectory within the

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field. Dominant agents fight to maintain and even increase their domination over the field, whereas dominated agents try to improve their position and newcomers try to overcome the entry cost protecting the field. Agents’ practices comprise these fights without being the product of a ‘cynical calculation, the conscious search for profit maximization’ (p. 119), but the ‘automatic effect of being part of the field’ (p. 119). Capital plays a key role in accounting for practice, being both a resource and a stake in struggles, and explaining agents’ positions in the field.

Capital as both resource and stake The volume and distribution of the various forms of capital between agents explain their positions and their possibilities for action. Through a competitive relationship, agents try to preserve their capital, acquire additional capital or increase the value of their capital (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 108–109). The possession of capital not only ensures a dominant position in the field, but also provides more opportunities for action and creates the conditions for increasing future capital. Each field favours different sorts of capital. ‘Just as the relative value of cards changes with each game, the hierarchy of the different species of capital […] varies across the various fields’ (p. 98). Bourdieu stresses the importance of considering all forms of capital, and not just economic capital (financial resources and material resources). Cultural capital includes cultural goods (paintings, books), cultural knowledge, qualifications and elements embodied through habitus, such as mastering language, cultural and social codes (Bourdieu 1979). Social capital comprises networks and social relations (Bourdieu 2002, p. 56). Within a company as a field (Bourdieu 2005), the capital of individuals as agents can be analysed in terms of bureaucratic capital (linked to responsibilities, action domain, hierarchical level and seniority); financial capital (the control of direct and indirect financial resources that agents can mobilize through their budget); technological capital (possessing expertise or a specific skill); organizational capital (the capacity to master procedures and formal rules); social capital (involvement in

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networks); and informational capital (privileged access to knowledge). For an organization, we can analyse forms of corporate capital (p. 194) that contribute to the building of success factors for the company. Social recognition of capital leads to symbolic effects that are forms of symbolic capital. All sorts of capital are potentially symbolic capital, according to the meaning bestowed within a specific field (Bourdieu 2000, p. 240). The prestige and hierarchy in social order resulting from the distribution of symbolic capital appears natural and taken for granted by most agents in the field because it has been integrated into their habitus. As the ‘social embodied’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 128), habitus reflects the social order of the field including capital structure and it drives the conduct of agents.

Habitus: a generative system of dispositions for practice Habitus is the system of durable dispositions and beliefs mobilized to generate practice. The construction of habitus is a long-lasting process and is the product of social trajectory. Being involved in a field, agents develop perceptions, appreciation and beliefs of what to do and what not to do (Bourdieu 1977, p. 95). They assimilate the structure of the field, its rules, its stakes and its common assumptions. Yet there is a common ground, a homology in the habitus among agents who are exposed to the same social world. However, habitus is also personal, developed through an agent’s initial disposition, position in the field and particular experience. Habitus is a ‘socialized subjectivity’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 211), a ‘structured structure’ (Bourdieu 1990a, p. 52). At the same time, habitus is also a ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu 1990a, p. 52). While stating that environment, experience and history condition habitus, Bourdieu insists on the creative, active, and inventive capacity of agents (pp. 53–56). Habitus ‘makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks’ (Bourdieu 1977, p. 95). It is an ‘art of inventing’ (Bourdieu 1990a, p. 55) that allows improvisation in the particular context of

a new practice. In a permanent interaction, habitus shapes practice and in turn is restructured and transformed through practice. Bourdieu insists on the embodied dimension of habitus. Agents have an immediate relationship with the world. It is a ‘relation of presence in the world, of being in the world, in the sense of belonging to the world […] We learn bodily’ (Bourdieu 2000, p. 141). As a consequence, ‘the world is comprehensible, immediately endowed with meaning’ (p. 135) and agents develop a practical sense. Overall, habitus is the driver for practice. Agents mobilize their dispositions and schemes of perceptions to act, and this can occur in a rather automatic manner, without having a clear or logical rationale about what is at stake. Habitus ‘is the source of these series of moves which are […] organized as strategies without being the product of a genuine strategic intention’ (Bourdieu 1977, p. 73). In this dynamic system, practice, field, capital and habitus make sense together. The system accounts for practice as ‘the product of a habitus that is itself the product of the embodiment of the immanent regularities and tendencies of the world’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 138). This permanent dialectic between individuals as agents and the social world as the field opens global perspectives. It challenges some of the major dichotomies we face in social science and that are relevant in the literature on strategic management. As such, Bourdieu’s work on practice can advance our view on strategy and strategizing.

Bourdieu’s praxeology: overcoming false dichotomies In this section, I discuss how the field–capital– habitus–practice system contributes to overcoming some dichotomies in strategic management. As stated by Wacquant: Bourdieu refuses to establish sharp demarcations between the external and the internal, the conscious and the unconscious, the bodily and the discursive. [He] seeks to capture the intentionality without intention, the knowledge without

A Bourdieusian perspective on strategizing cognitive intent, the prereflective, infraconscious mastery that agents acquire of their social world by way of durable immersion within it […] and which defines properly human social practice. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 19–20)

Bourdieu’s praxeology can help in advancing Strategy as Practice research to go beyond false dichotomies (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Whittington 1996).

Linking the micro- and macro-levels of strategy Strategy research has developed around the opposition between micro- and macro-levels, where micro refers to individual or intra-organizational aspects and macro to the external environment, with researchers adopting either a micro- or macro-perspective on strategy. For instance, Barney (1991, p. 100) justifies the importance of the resource-based view in terms of the overdominant research on the external environment, which has ‘tended to focus primarily on analyzing a firm’s opportunities and threats in its competitive environment’. In parallel, institutional entrepreneurship researchers deplore the overly macro-perspective of institutional studies investigating how new practices become established via legitimacy and diffusion without considering their origins. For this reason, Boxenbaum and Batilana (2005), Czarniawska-Joerges and Sevon (1996) and Lounsbury and Crumley (2007) call for a better understanding of who the initiators of new strategies are and how strategies emerge. As suggested by Lounsbury and Crumley (p. 1007), ‘there is an opportunity to expand intra-organizational practice research in a way that better appreciates the relationship between organizational and institutional dynamics’. However, the practice-based approach to strategizing neglected this opportunity to link organizational and field levels and overemphasized the micro-perspective. Pioneers in Strategy as Practice called for more ‘micro-activity-based approaches’ (Wilson and Jarzabkowski 2004, p. 14), as outlined in the Journal of Management Studies 2003

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Special Issue on micro-strategy. Some researchers (Johnson et al., 2003; Maitlis and Lawrence, 2003) proclaim an affiliation with strategy process research, which first considered the role of individual actions in strategizing (van de Ven 1992) and change (Mintzberg and Westley 1992) by focusing on ‘the sequences of incidents, activities, and actions unfolding over time’ (Pettigrew 1992, p. 7). Practice is then considered as a sub-unit used to describe what people do: activities (Orlikowski 2002), episodes (Hendry and Seidl 2003; Maitlis and Lawrence 2003); or core micro-strategies (Salvato 2003). As a consequence, practice has lost its explanatory and analytical strengths, particularly its powerful characteristic of describing the individual within the collective. A growing number of authors now call for better bridging between the micro- and macro-levels of practices, especially in strategy research (Carter et al. 2008; Golsorkhi 2006; Nicolini 2007; Whittington 2007). However, such attempts by practice-based scholars have not yet been completed. Mobilizing the complete system of practice incorporating field, habitus and capital can advance the Strategy as Practice perspective by intertwining the individual and the social context, which are co-dependent. The focal point is ‘neither the individual […] nor groups […] but the relation between two realizations of historical actions, in bodies and things’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 126). This ontological complicity between the agent and the field solves the micro–macro opposition, treating agents as social individuals. Their practice relies on both their position in the field and their personal experience, thoughts and dispositions, also built in the social world. A promising avenue is to study change. Strategic change can be understood through evolution of the structure, stakes and rules of the field; evolution of the domination structure; the position of specific agents, and the change in their habitus. It can offer an opportunity to ‘zoom in’ on specific agents to account for their practices through their position in the field and their habitus, as suggested by Nicolini (2006), while at the same time ‘zooming out’ (Nicolini 2006) to reveal changes at the field level.

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Overcoming the dichotomy between agency and structure The second dichotomy that has shaped the literature on strategy opposes the freedom of agency and the determinism of structures. On the one hand, strategy appears to be a voluntarist approach in which the freedom of firms and managers is overemphasized (Mintzberg and Lampel 1999). On the other hand, strategy can be viewed as overly conditioned by the structures of the industry. The population approach considers the strength of the environment’s inertial structures (Hannan and Freeman 1984) and concludes that companies can survive only if they possess characteristics that match the environment (Carroll 1988). Even the competitive groups approach considers the weight of the environment, stating that strategy success depends on the strategic group in which a company is located (Reger and Huff 1993). Bourdieu’s work on practice offers an opportunity to overcome this opposition between agency and structure. Habitus, as both a structuring and structured set of dispositions and beliefs, plays a key role. As Bourdieu puts it: The principle of action is therefore neither a subject confronting the world as an object […] nor a ‘milieu’ exerting a form of mechanical causality on the agent. […] It lies in the complicity between two states of the social […] It is in the relationship between habitus and the field.’ (Bourdieu 2000, pp. 150–151)

This characteristic of Bourdieu’s work has been largely denied, with accusations of strong social determinism (Fowler 2006; Jenkins 1982). However, Bourdieu explicitly rejects such determinism (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 135–136) and insists on the generative capacity of habitus given the constraints of the field. The structures of the field condition the habitus. However, this is not inexorable (Bourdieu 2000, p. 64). Bourdieu stresses the creative and inventive capacity dimension of habitus (Bourdieu 1990a, p. 55; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 122). As such, Bourdieu’s praxeology proposes fruitful perspectives: the structures of the field are projected on agents through their relative habitus and capital developed in the field. At the same time, agents

keep trying to avoid the determinants of the structure through their habitus and increase in capital. As highlighted by Özbilgin and Tatti (2005, pp. 867–868), Bourdieu’s praxeology ‘allows for a reading of the interplay among individual choices, capacity and strategies with structural conditions in a way that is true to organizations reality’s relational and dynamic properties’.

Escaping rational choice vs. emergence dilemma Rational choice vs. emergence represents the third opposition that characterizes strategy research. Research on strategic management has overemphasized the intentionality of strategy and the reflexive ability of decision-makers, for example in studies of strategic planning (Ansoff, 1965) or core competence (Prahalad and Hamel, 1994). In contrast, for instance, complexity approaches based on chaotic and self-organizing behaviours (Stacey, 1995) are positioned against the rational choice paradigm. Bourdieu’s praxeology proposes a different understanding of strategy that accounts for the performance of strategy while escaping this dilemma. Owing to the complicity between habitus and field that drives practice, ‘the most effective strategies are those which, being the product of dispositions shaped by the immediate necessity of the field, tend to adjust themselves spontaneously to that necessity, without express intention or calculation’ (Bourdieu 2000, p. 138). In the double relation of habitus and field, agents produce reasonable strategies and not rational ones. Bourdieu uses the word ‘strategy’, but advises that in his perspective this is not rational reasoning. The principle of strategy is not a calculation, a conscious search for specific profit maximization (Bourdieu 1984). It is based on the practical sense, which largely bypasses cognitive structures, is registered in one’s body and enables one to act ‘as one should’ (Bourdieu 2000, p. 139). Being involved in the field, agents develop both thoughts and perceptions that help them to immediately distinguish between the feasible and the unfeasible: ‘Far from being posited in an explicit, conscious project, the strategies suggested by habitus [function] as a “feel for the game” aim’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 128).

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Overcoming the classical dichotomies that have shaped research on strategic management can thus greatly contribute to research on Strategy as Practice, especially in terms of moving beyond the juxtaposition of macro and micro, the dilemma of agency and structures, and the preoccupation with rational choice (Jarzabkowski, 2005). Moreover, transcending the traditional boundaries opens new avenues on strategising. In the next section, I explain how Bourdieu’s perspective can widen our current vision on strategizing as a practice.

Strategizing as a practice: widening our perspectives According to Bourdieu’s praxeology, strategizing is the practice of agents positioned in a field and endowed with a habitus developed within that field. Here, we examine how this reframes our concept of strategy by stressing what strategy comprises, who is involved and what is really at stake. This perspective broadens our view on strategy. This is in line with most of the Strategy as Practice perspective, as addressed by Jarzabkowski et al. (2007) and Whittington (2006), whose major aim is to broaden our concept of strategy (Jarzabkowski 2005; Johnson et al. 2003; Mounoud and de La Ville 2006), distinguishing the Strategy as Practice approach from others, such as the resource-based view of the firm (Ambrosini et al. 2007), strategy process (Chia and MacKay 2007) or cognitive approaches (Hodgkinson and Clarke 2007). Nonetheless, a Bourdieusian perspective can advance this analysis much further.

A wider spectrum of activities First, strategizing goes further than something a company has, such as strategic intentions, goals, plans, etc. It is best described as something done, or, more precisely, the practice of the people within an organization, taken as agents. It regards ‘conduct, thoughts, feelings and judgments’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 7). Strategizing encompasses more than the activities officially devoted to the explicit forming of strategy, such as strategic planning, annual reviews,

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strategy workshops and associated discourses. In this view, strategizing comprises innumerable decisions and actions that modify the position of the organization (Bourdieu 2005). Second, strategizing concerns explicit processes and formal actions, but it also encompasses unmediated and unreflexive practice. This is due to the embodied aspects of habitus that drive the practice of strategizing. Agents know what to do and what not to do thanks to the habitus developed through their education their knowledge of the organization and their past experience. A large part of this habitus relies on tacit and embodied dispositions, such as how to choose participants, how to organize the agenda, which tools to propose and how to deal with conflicts for managers involved in strategic planning (Gomez 2002). As a consequence, agents can respond to their environment within the field with actions that are directly in line with the context of the situation. As asserted by Chia and MacKay (2007, p. 228), ‘deliberate intentionality is not a prerequisite for the articulation of a strategy’. However, Bourdieu’s praxeology goes further: it cannot only describe, but can also explain and account for practice and thus advance our current understanding of Strategy as Practice. Consider the example of a study of strategizing by managers in a Canadian clothing company carried out by Rouleau (2005). She states that ‘it is not only through consciously selecting and manipulating from a defined menu that [strategies] are produced. Sense-making and sense-giving are more than just clear patterns constructed by top managers’ (p. 1437). Her conclusions are based on the premise of what could be conceptualized as habitus. A further analysis of analysis could help in going further than her description to better understand practice. Habitus could explain how and why unconscious elements appear and otherwise explain sense-making patterns in this field.

A multiplicity of agents The organization is not a homogeneous entity. Strategy as Practice research helps in identifying the agents involved in strategizing: top managers (Jarzabkowski 2003) and strategic planning

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champions (Nordqvist and Melin 2008), but also middle managers, whose roles are also important (Belmondo 2006; Besson and Mahieu 2006; de La Ville and Mounoud 2003; Laine and Vaara 2007; Rouleau 2005; Samra-Fredericks 2003; Vogler and Rouziès 2006; Westley 1990). As claimed by Mounoud and de La Ville (2006, p. 99), ‘all the members of the firm contribute to draw the trajectory of the organization’. The role of external agents is also a challenging issue. The role of senior consultants has been highlighted (Babeau and Golsorkhi 2006; Johnson et al. 2003; McKenna 2006). However, the study of external agents could be developed and Strategy as Practice studies could find inspiration in sociological studies that showed the role of finance analysts (Lorrain 2007), of bankers and owners (Fligstein and Brantley 1992) or of institutional entrepreneurship in the role of newcomers (Dejean et al. 2004). However, the aim here is not merely to identify the great variety of agents involved in strategizing. Most of all, capital and habitus give the opportunity to further analyse their relative position in the field, which evidences the power of agents and accounts for their possibilities or impossibilities for action (Bourdieu 2000, p. 216). This means that if all agents play a role in strategizing, their possibilities and margins for action will depend on their positions in the field, i.e. the amount and structure of capital they possess. As such, possession of capital is the key to understanding the role of agents. Consequently, the role of CEOs and key managers is of particular interest (Lahire 2001) because they have more possibilities and opportunities in strategizing. Nevertheless, other agents must also be considered, even if their capital limitations explain how and why their possibilities are constrained. In particular, habitus and its associated dynamics also lead to powerful analysis of strategizing and can explain differences between agents according to their position in the field. As a consequence, such analysis can both complement and contradict previous assumptions on the learning of strategizing through practice. In agreement with Denis et al. (2007, p. 209), ‘some strategists are more skilful than others in using routines, interactions and the other tools available to them to move events

in directions they seek to promote’. However, this vision of learning to strategize is limited. For instance, these authors note that ‘strategizing is a skill that can be acquired both individually and organizationally through active participation in its routines’ (p. 209), whereas habitus suggests that agents have initial predispositions to strategizing owing to their personal background, and their possibilities to learn strategizing are conditioned by their practice, and thus their position in the field. No one enters a strategizing role with the same background or the same possibilities: top managers have greater possibilities due to their position through their capital (Bourdieu 2005), but they also enter the strategizing game with more assets through their habitus. Owing to their operational responsibilities, they are more acquainted with strategic concerns and more familiar with the strategic vocabulary through business school curricula and the management literature. The structure of the field in which agents take a position highlights the inequality among agents. As a consequence of this inequality, agents fight to preserve or improve their position and the field is thus a field of forces, a space for struggles. Similar to any practice, strategizing comprises such struggles, which are thus a major characteristic of strategizing.

Strategizing as a practice of struggling Struggles among companies or among agents within a company are inherent to strategizing. Through their actions, discourse and decisions, agents compete to reinforce their position. Yet strategizing is particular in the sense that it provides agents with a unique opportunity to match their own interests with the interests of the organization (Bourdieu 2005). Agents are in conflict over the power to decide on the direction the firm will take. Strategy is thus a stake for struggles between agents, because the orientations of the organization will determine their own trajectory. Through strategizing, dominating agents try to maintain their pre-eminence over the field. Thus, changes initiated by leading agents often represent a superficial change in practice in order to preserve the structural state of the field (Bourdieu 2005).

A Bourdieusian perspective on strategizing

However, most of the research and literature on management generally ignore or deny these struggles. Rather, they propose an idyllic view of strategizing in which agents involved in strategizing always benefit from this participation through the concepts of empowerment and intrapreneurship as freedom for managers to initiate creative strategies (Lombriser and Ansoff, 1995). The Strategy as Practice perspective has contributed to a better understanding of the struggles in strategizing, but this needs to be further explored, mostly because we lack a comprehensive understanding of the nature of these struggles. Some studies highlight dominating practices: Lozeau et al. (2002) showed how medical doctors use strategic planning in hospitals to reinforce their domination over administrative staff and nurses. Holman et al. (2004) explained how major tools are used to exert domination among employees. Vogler and Rouziès (2006) identified various forms of control in strategizing. Other studies focused on the resistance of middle managers. Stensaker and Falkenberg (2007) identify five responses middle managers give to corporate change. Mantere (2005) explored managers’ reactions to strategic change. However, few studies have investigated the interplay between dominating and dominated agents. Among them, Laine and Vaara (2007, p. 30) showed that strategic discourses are a space for struggles, ‘a dialectical battle between competing groups’, between corporate management and more dominated agents such as middle managers or project managers. These studies confirm that middle managers more or less consciously perceive the domination exerted on them despite discourses on autonomy and empowerment. As a consequence, involving middle managers in strategic workshops can place them in difficult situations with their colleagues, which can be a way to legitimize decisions or reinforce the power of top managers. These forms of struggles inherent to strategizing need further elicitation to reveal the forms of symbolic violence between dominating and dominated agents (Bourdieu 2000, p. 172). Symbolic violence is a mode of domination, ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ to ensure and enforce dominating practices

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(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 167). Symbolic domination imposes and inculcates a means of understanding and structuring the world. It contributes to the reproduction of social order by presenting things as legitimate and taken for granted. It is a form of violence because it is a force imposed on people. It is symbolic because it imposes meanings. As such, symbolic violence is not a simple doctrine. ‘Symbolic violence accomplishes itself through an act of cognition and of miscognition that lies beyond – or beneath – the controls of consciousness and will, in the obscurities of the schemata of habitus’ (pp. 171–172). In this context, future research on Strategy as Practice could draw from studies that have made use of Bourdieu in institutional analysis. In the context of the privatization of a water services company, Rahaman et al. (2007) examined how managers use management accounting tools as a means for domination. In the context of Canadian museums, Oakes et al. (1998) showed that the use of discourse, the elaboration of plans and the choice of tools increased tensions. They analysed the struggles to develop and legitimate practices in the business planning process, and the effects of these struggles on agents and the field. Their study also evidences that through the use of symbolic violence, these practices lead to changes in the position of agents and different forms of capital. The agents’ situation is affected by strategizing, and this modifies their future possibilities in the practice of strategizing. The struggle dimension of strategizing and the nature of symbolic violence raises questions on our role as academics. As creators and transmitters, academics are part of the field of strategy, and thus we need to engage in a reflective analysis of our role and question our practices.

The role of academics In strategizing, the analytical tools, frameworks, books, manuals and concepts taught play a key role (Knights and Morgan 1991; Whittington 2007). The field of strategy in business is composed of organizations such as strategy consulting firms and business schools, and by individual agents such as corporate managers, academics

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in the field of strategy and strategy book editors (Clark 2004). As creators, users and transmitters of these artefacts, academics occupy an important position in the field. Classical studies on strategy focus on improving knowledge for the practice of strategy: the outcomes are new tools and new concepts that would serve those involved in strategizing who want to perform better. As such, they are part of the game played in the field of strategy and contribute to reinforce the existing structure of the field. Research plays a completely different role in a Bourdieusian perspective, where the aim of research is to make explicit the stakes of a given field and the strategies pursued to reproduce the dominant social order (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Studying strategy as a practice within a Bourdieusian framework thus leads researchers to pursue different objectives, with improvement in knowledge of the practice of strategy, with its agents, stakes and the paramount role of capital analysis within the field. With this research goal, managers are still, perhaps even more so, the final recipients of research (Dezalay and Garth 2006). This main objective to reveal the foundations of domination and reproduction mechanisms is directed towards dominated agents, with the aim of providing more opportunities to escape this domination, and inventing and successfully implementing strategies that could overcome domination. This was an explicit and major concern for Bourdieu, who postulated that knowing the mechanisms of the field would contribute to the liberation of dominated agents (Bourdieu 2002). This work within the Strategy as Practice stream has still to be carried out (Golsorkhi and Huault 2006). Carter, Clegg and Kornberger (2008) consider that Strategy as Practice scholars remain too conservative in such attempts. Ezzamel and Willmott (2004) deplored the lack of critical power of the Strategy as Practice stream, which is contradictory to a practice perspective (Gherardi 2009). A major challenge here is to adopt a reflexive approach. The involvement of researchers and their relationship to the field they are investigating require a specific position based on the pursuit of reflexivity (Bourdieu’s so-called ‘participant objectivization’) and of critical approaches, as analysed by Golsorkhi and Huault (2006). These

authors remind organization theorists that they are part of their own academic and scientific field – which is far from being disinterested – driven by scientific capital (based on publications) and temporal capital (linked to access to financial resources and institutional positions). This scientific game interferes with their scientific practice, which is not neutral. To overcome these scholastic biases, researchers need to adopt a reflexive approach regarding their own scientific practice, their habitus and the impact of their position in the academic field, exercising ‘participant objectivization’ (Bourdieu 2005). However, Golsorkhi and Huault (2006) emphasized how difficult such a position is, which would necessitate more methodological insights adapted to strategic and management research.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to identify how Bourdieu’s praxeology contributes to a better understanding of strategizing. Current use of Bourdieu’s work largely neglects the implications of field, capital and habitus. This is conceptually problematic and undermines the power of this approach to account for strategizing. As suggested by Golsorkhi and Huault (2006) and Golsorkhi et al. (2009), Bourdieu’s praxeology must be taken as a complete system, with agents positioned and involved in the field through the capital they possess and the habitus they develop. These concepts are mutually dependent: habitus is a set of dispositions and thoughts that is structured through the experience of agents and their position in the field, and is the driver for practice (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 139). In fact, the Bourdieusian perspective allows us to overcome some of the traditional dichotomies in the strategy literature yet advances the Strategy as Practice approach. It challenges the micro/macro opposition, and highlights the subtle relation between agents and the field embedded in practice; it removes the dilemma between an agent’s freedom and the pressure of environmental structures with the habitus as both a structuring and structured set of dispositions and thoughts; and it overpasses the alternative between rationale choice and

A Bourdieusian perspective on strategizing

emergence in strategy through the practical sense that agents develop. Bourdieu’s work extends our view on strategizing. It stresses the aspects of struggle inherent in strategizing as a practice, and highlights what is really at stake in strategizing, namely, the reproduction of dominant situations. Consequently, this opens avenues of research and exploration, particularly in terms of the creation of new strategies and the role of strategic change. However, this calls for more reflexivity from researchers to question their own position in the field of strategy academia. Last, empirical studies mobilizing Bourdieu’s praxeology remain scarce, whereas Bourdieu frequently insisted on the importance of empirical work and its interdependence with theoretical work in research (Bourdieu 2000, p. 58; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 220). This is a particularly challenging task for Strategy as Practice researchers who would here answer a claim of pioneers in this approach (Johnson et al. 2003) and could also deploy the full power of Bourdieu’s praxeology.

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A Bourdieusian perspective on strategizing Lombriser, R. and Ansoff, I. (1995), ‘How successful intrapreneurs pilot firms through the turbulent 1990s’, Journal of Strategic Change, 4/2: 5–108. Lorrain, D. (2007), ‘Le marché a dit. Intermédiaires financiers et managers dans le secteur électrique’, Sociologie du Travail, 49: 65–83. Lounsbury, M. and Crumley, E. T. (2007), ‘New practice creation: An institutional perspective on innovation’, Organization Studies, 28/7: 993–1012. Lozeau, D., Langley, A. and Denis, J.-L. (2002), ‘The corruption of managerial techniques by organizations’, Human Relations, 55: 537–564. Maitlis, S. and Lawrence, T. B. (2003), ‘Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: Understanding failure in organizational strategizing’, Journal of Management Studies, 40: 109–139. Mantere, S. (2005), ‘Strategic practices as enablers and disablers of championing activity’, Strategic Organization, 3/2: 157–184. McKenna, C. D. (2006), The world’s newest profession. Management consulting in the twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mintzberg, H. and Lampel, J. (1999), ‘Reflecting on the strategy process’, Sloan Management Review, Spring: 21–30. Mintzberg, H. and Westley, F. (1992), ‘Cycles of organizational change’, Strategic Management Journal, 13 [Special Winter Issue]: 39–59. Mounoud, E. and de La Ville, V.-I. (2006), ‘La créativité de l’agir ordinaire: Elements pour une approche “enactive” de la stratégie’, in D. Golsorkhi (ed.), La fabrique de la stratégie; une perspective multidimensionnelle. Paris: Vuibert, Collection Institut Vital Roux, 91–108. Nicolini, D. (2006), ‘How to study organisational and work practices’, in Proceedings of the 2nd Organization Studies Summer Workshop: ‘Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization. As It Happens’, Mykonos, Greece, 15–16 June 2006. (2007), ‘Stretching out and expanding work practices in time and space: The case of telemedicine’, Human Relations, 60/6: 889–920. Nicolini, D., Gherardi, S. and Yanow, D. (2003), Knowing in organizations: A practice-based approach. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. Nordqvist, M. and Melin, L. (2008), ‘Strategic planning champions: Social craftspersons, artful interpreters and known strangers’, Long Range Planning, 41/3: 326–344.

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Oakes, L. S., Townley, B. and Cooper, D. J. (1998), ‘Business planning as pedagogy: Language and control in a changing institutional field’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 43: 257–292. Orlikowski, W. (2002), ‘Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing’, Organization Science, 13/3: 249–273. Özbilgin, M. and Tatti, A. (2005), ‘Book review essay: Understanding Bourdieu’s contribution to organization and management studies’, Academy of Management Review, 30/4: 855–877. Pettigrew, A. M. (1992), ‘The character and significance of strategy process research’, Strategic Management Journal, 13: 5–16. Prahalad, C. K. and Hamel, G. (1994), Competing for the future. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press Books. Rahaman, A. S., Everett, J. and Neu, D. (2007), ‘Accounting and the move to privatize water services in Africa’, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 20/5: 637–670. Reger, R. K. and Huff, A. S. (1993), ‘Strategic groups: A cognitive perspective’, Strategic Management Journal, 14/2: 103–123. Rouleau, L. (2005), ‘Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day’, Journal of Management Studies, 42: 1413–1443. Salvato, C. (2003), ‘The role of micro-strategies in the engineering of firm evolution’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 83–108. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003), ‘Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 141–174. Stacey, R. D. (1995), ‘The science of complexity: An alternative perspective for strategic change processes’, Strategic Management Journal, 16/6: 477–495. Stensaker, I. and Falkenberg, J. (2007), ‘Making sense of different responses to corporate change’, Human Relations, 60/1: 137–177. van de Ven, A. H. (1992), ‘Suggestions for studying strategy process: A research note’, Strategic Management Journal, 13 [Special Summer Issue]: 169–188. Vogler, E. and Rouziès, A. (2006), ‘Les cadres intermédiaires fabriquent aussi la stratégie’, in D. Golsorkhi (ed.), La fabrique de la stratégie: Une perspective multidimensionnelle.

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Paris: Vuibert, Collection Institut Vital Roux, 109–128. Westley, F. R. (1990), ‘Middle-managers and strategy: Microdynamics of inclusion’, Strategic Management Journal, 11/5: 337–351. Whittington, R. (1996), ‘Strategy as practice’, Long Range Planning, 29/5: 731–735. (2002), ‘The work of strategizing and organizing: For a practice perspective’, Strategic Organization, 1/1: 119–127.

(2006), ‘Completing the practice turn in strategy research’, Organization Studies, 27/5: 613–634. (2007), ‘Strategy practice and strategy process: Family differences and the sociological eye’, Organization Studies, 28/10: 1575–1586. Wilson, D. C. and Jarzabkowski, P. (2004), ‘Thinking and acting strategically: New challenges for interrogating strategy’, European Management Review, 1/1: 14–20.

CHAPTER

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A Wittgensteinian perspective on strategizing S A K U MA N T E R E

Introduction In this chapter, I explore the potential contribution of Ludwig Wittgenstein to Strategy as Practice scholarship. Wittgenstein is probably the best-known philosopher of the twentieth century. His realization that the only satisfactory way to understanding language was to understand the social contexts in which it was used provided a basis for what was to become the practice turn in social sciences. His work informs a diverse set of social theorists from Giddens (1984) to Bourdieu (1977) and Lyotard (1986), all of whom build on Wittgenstein’s elaborate inquiry into the ontology of language as a social phenomenon that is rooted in practice. Like these theorists, I shall focus on the concept language game, which is perhaps the core concept in what are known as the ‘late and middle periods’ in Wittgenstein’s thought. I will argue that the language game is a useful concept in making sense of strategy practice in both a theoretical and a methodological sense. While Wittgenstein’s work has not been utilized to a great extent within the extant body of work on Strategy as Practice, at least two groups of scholars have used his concepts in their work within management and strategic management scholarship. The first group has found Wittgenstein’s work on language games useful in studying the methodology, philosophy and ideology of the management sciences. A particular area of interest is the relationship between management scholars and practitioners (Astley and Zammuto 1992; Beyer 1992; Donaldson 1995). The scholars from the first group characteristically use the language game concept to examine the knowledge interest in management scholarship: in other words, the issue of whether the task of management scholarship is to explain or understand phenomena, help

managers or emancipate the oppressed (Rao and Pasmore 1989). Hassard (1988) used language games to seek a solution to the challenge of paradigm incommensurability in the management sciences. Seidl (2007) examined the processes through which strategy labels give rise to a variety of organization-specific strategy concepts within organizational discourses. The second group of scholars has applied the concept of language game to advance the work done within various theoretical programmes within our field. Topics studied by the second group of scholars include, for instance, organizational knowledge (Chia and Holt 2008; Tsoukas and Vladimirou 2001), competitive advantage (Powell 2001; Rindova et al. 2004) and dialogue (Beech 2008; Shotter 2008). In this chapter, I will argue that language games have the potential to help us make sense of a number of issues within the Strategy as Practice agenda. First, language games shed more light on the discursive struggles endemic to the practice of strategy (Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008). Language games are understandable against what Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life’, a non-linguistic foundation. Strategy work, both in academic and practical domains, is characterized by pursuits of defining ‘rules for the game’ built on collective agreement. Nevertheless, the forging of such agreement is an inherently political affair. Strategy language is built on various non-linguistic foundations and as such has profound implications for strategic organizations. As has been illustrated by authors who have studied strategy from a discursive angle (e.g. Barry and Elmes 1997a; Ezzamel and Willmott 2008; Hardy et al. 2000; Knights and Morgan 1991; Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008), the way we use the language of strategy – or, indeed, the way the language uses us – is also intimately tied to how we practise it. 155

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A prominent example of the tangled webs of the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects in strategy practice is Oakes et al.’s (1998) account of the radical transformation of values within the administration of the provincial museums and cultural heritage sites in Alberta, following the introduction of a strategic planning system. Even though other thinkers already prominent in organization studies, such as Foucault, have built on the view that discourse is connected to a non-linguistic reality (see e.g. Ezzamel and Willmott 2008), Wittgenstein’s use of the concept ‘game’ brings particular insight into this phenomenon. When we play a particular strategy language game, we are committing to a set of (discursive or non-discursive) activity patterns and dispositions. A game can only be played if players adhere to a particular set of rules. We are inclined to persuade, or even to force, others to agree to them so that our game may continue. Furthermore, Wittgenstein’s work sheds new light on the ways in which different strategy practices – and discursive practices in particular – are interlinked. Language games are connected to each other through intricate network relations, which Wittgenstein terms ‘family resemblance’. Second, the notion of ‘life’, used to characterize the non-linguistic background of social practice, can direct our attention on to a number of important yet often neglected aspects of strategy practice. Shotter (2005) has suggested that the tendency to focus on the ‘small, concrete and idiosyncratic details’ (p. 113) of organizational life is the most promising aspect for management studies in Wittgenstein’s method in his late period. Focusing on how language games are woven into action helps us attend to the ‘embodied, living meetings’ (p. 118) that characterize organizations instead of treating organizations as abstract, objectified systems. The recognition that strategy is a lived experience (Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2005) is embedded in the very notion of Strategy as Practice scholarship, which views strategy as something people do in organizations – not something that organizations have (Whittington 2006). Indeed, a few scholars have already worked on strategy practice as a lived experience within the Strategy as Practice community. Highly original results have been provided by Samra-Fredericks (2003, 2005), who has elucidated

the potential of strategy rhetoric to steer everyday life by concentrating on significant ‘strips’ of everyday interaction. A recent, parallel, development is the work of Chia and Holt (2006), who explore a view of strategy as ‘practical coping’. They (p. 365) use Heidegger’s phenomenological work to further our understanding of strategy as a lived experience consisting of human interaction, arguing that ‘the dominant “building” mode of strategizing that configures actors (whether individual or organizational) as distinct entities deliberately engaging in purposeful strategic activities derives from a more basic “dwelling” mode in which strategy emerges non-deliberately through everyday practical coping’. In this chapter, I do not intend to participate in the philosophical debates around Wittgenstein’s work, or to conduct an exegesis of what Wittgenstein ‘really meant’ in one text or the other. Indeed, the study of Wittgenstein constitutes a discourse of its own in the study of Western philosophy. I shall aim to tease out insights from Wittgenstein’s work, relevant to the study of Strategy as Practice.

Language, life and language games The Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein appears to have been a characteristically volatile thinker. He experienced a number of revolutions in his philosophy. The best known of these revolutions took place between his early period, realized in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1922), and the succeeding middle and late periods, which came to fruition in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which was published posthumously.

Language: from pictures to practice During his early period, Wittgenstein focused on building what he called the picture theory of language. In this view, language was conceived through its capacity to represent the world in meaningful ways. Concepts find correlates in classes of objects in the world, and through the use of logical syntax they are composed to propositions, which correspond to states of affairs in the real world, just as pictures depict specific

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situations. By studying language we study reality, as ‘the limits of language mean the limits of my world’ (Tractatus, §5.6). After having explicated the picture theory of language in his early masterpiece Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein felt he had solved the problems of philosophy, thus making the pursuit of philosophical problems unnecessary. He subsequently pursued the careers of elementary school teacher, architect and gardener (Monk 1990). Wittgenstein did return to philosophy, however. He reappeared in Cambridge in 1929; an event which inspired John Maynard Keynes to express the following sentiment: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train’ (Monk 1990). Wittgenstein had begun to realize that the picture theory of language may not have been a satisfactory account after all when one looked at how language was practised by language users. Although language was used to represent states of affairs, it was also used to do many other things. It appeared that if one was to make sense of the ontological nature of language, one would need to look at the many different varieties of linguistic practice. Instead of the view of language as a picture of reality dominant in his early writings, the middle and late period Wittgenstein roots language in social practice, in the variety of ways language is used by all sorts of communities. As such, Wittgenstein is one of the founding fathers of the practice turn in social science (Schatzki 1997, 2001). In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein demonstrates the limited scope of his early picture view of language by introducing a simple social context where language would serve such a function. He introduces us to a ‘tribe’ of bricklayers. Language supports the role structure between the tribe’s masters and apprentices in their building activity. §2 [ … ] Let us imagine a language […] The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A calls them out; – B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at

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such-and-such a call. – Conceive this as a complete primitive language. [ – ] § 6. We could imagine that the language of §2 was the whole language of A and B; even the whole language of a tribe. The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others. An important part of the training will consist in the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance, the word ‘slab’ as he points to that shape. [ – ] § 7. [ – ]We can also think of the whole process of using words in (2) as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games ‘language-games’ and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game. And the processes of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games. Think of much of the use words in games like ring-a-ring-a-roses. I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game’.

Wittgenstein’s example demonstrates, on the one hand, how language games are embedded in social practice, and on the other hand, how narrow is the conception of language based on pure representation. Language is ‘woven into action,’ and people do much more than merely denote things with language. In their various social settings, our natural languages serve a number of purposes. Instead of a picture of a world, language is, in Wittgenstein’s terminology: a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a ruler, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. – The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (Philosophical Investigations, §11)

For Wittgenstein, language games were a method of conducting philosophical inquiry as well as an ontological building block. He introduces and analyses simple language games such as the one in the bricklayer example to focus attention on what he regards as important aspects of language; he seeks to make sense of various fundamental

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philosophical questions, concerning for instance meaning, the mind and mathematics. Wittgenstein anticipated a critique about his choice to focus on simple language games. Some readers may argue that the analysis of simple language games does not really represent our language; the analysis does not deal with all its complexity. ‘But how would one define a “complete language”?’, Wittgenstein asks. Was language complete before the inclusion of the vocabulary of quantum physics, for instance? He (Philosophical Investigations, §18) offers a compelling metaphor of language as an ancient city: ask yourself whether our language is complete; whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

The example shows that for Wittgenstein, language is dynamic, evolving. As it is used in numerous aspects of life, language contains a dazzling variety of different arenas for human life and interaction. Some of its aspects are chaotic, some ordered. Consider, on the one hand, the language game played by a lover, wooing an object of desire; and on the other hand, the language game played by a chemist who uses the periodic system to work with a complex chemical equation. Language bends to both purposes, as we can imagine it will bend to numerous purposes yet undiscovered. That is the reason, Wittgenstein reminds us, why language is never ‘complete’.

Language, life and power Wittgenstein also argues that language games are always embedded in non-linguistic activity (Glock 1996). He calls this non-linguistic foundation of language ‘a form of life’ and notes that (Wittgenstein 1976, quoted in Glock 1996): it is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it grows consists in steady forms

of life, regular activity. Its function is determined above all by the action which it accompanies.

Language enables and regulates social activity and our words became meaningful against a form of life. Wittgenstein regards forms of life as a stable, non-linguistic foundation upon which language games are built. Indeed, forms of life can be defined as ‘the set of [behavioral] responses in which we agree and the way they interweave with our activities’ (Kripke 1982). In the context of organization studies, Hassard (1988) builds on Wittgenstein’s work to suggest that there exists a ‘language game of everyday life’, through which members of different scientific paradigms may interact. This would, however, seem to be a transcendental reading of language games (Glock 1996), which does not find support in Wittgenstein’s work. Even though Wittgenstein argues that language games are founded on forms of life, this does not mean that they can be reduced to some non-linguistic, ontological bedrock. The Wittgenstein of the middle and late periods emphasizes that language is built on social context, which is in no way universal to all human conduct. Different language games are built on a dazzling variety of social contexts. Wittgenstein regarded language games as ‘anthropological’ in nature, founded on specific, situated contexts instead of some fundamental ‘human nature’ (Glock 1996). Language games do not exist in isolation, however. As social contexts intertwine with each other, language games form networks. Wittgenstein presents language games as linked together in a complex set of interrelations which he calls family resemblance: Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, […] but that they are related to one another in many different ways. (Wittgenstein 1951, §65) I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. […] And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family. (Wittgenstein 1951, §67)

A Wittgensteinian perspective on strategizing

Family members resemble each other in a number of ways, yet rarely can it be argued that a single characteristic is definitive for a family. Instead of a single characteristic, family membership is characterized by a number of characteristics that are shared in a network-like fashion. Correspondingly, language games are not reducible to a single set of behaviours (e.g. Hassard’s notion of a shared ‘everyday’). Instead, language games form a virtually boundless network. The network view of language games has been used by organizational scholars to contest oversimplified demarcations between forms of life and language games. Importantly, Mauws and Phillips (1995) have suggested a network view in their account of the relationship between academic and practitioner language games. Astley and Zammuto (1992) caused a stir (see Beyer 1992; Donaldson 1992; Mauws and Phillips 1995) by arguing that managerial discourse and scholarly discourse on organizations are separate language games with different rules, objectives and underlying assumptions. Hence, Astley and Zammuto (1992) argue that ‘organizational scientists should be viewed not as engineers offering technical advice to managers but as providers of conceptual and symbolic language for use in organizational discourse’. Mauws and Phillips (1995) criticize Astley and Zammuto’s (1992) argument that practitioners and academics play according to different language games. They contest the existence of a non-problematic way of drawing the border where one language game ends and another begins. Instead, they argue, we should see both discourses – practical and academic – (however we might plot them out), as embedded in a network of interconnected language games. An issue of particular importance to organizational scientists is power. Does Wittgenstein leave room for contestation or contradiction between different language games? Games typically involve agreement over the rules that must be followed to be playable at all. Does the metaphor of a game imply a conflict-free view of social life? Wittgenstein does argue that ‘[language users] agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life’ (Philosophical Investigations, §241). One might draw a conclusion from the notion of ‘agreement’ that Wittgenstein regards language games as essentially non-contestable.

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Wittgenstein’s argument does not imply noncontestability, however. Consider the following passage (Wittgenstein 1969–1975): 608. Is it wrong for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions of physics? Am I to say I have no good ground for doing so? Isn’t precisely this what we call a ‘good ground’? 609. Supposing we met people who did not regard that as a telling reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it? – If we call this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs? 610. And are we right or wrong to combat it? Of course there are all sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings. 611. Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. 612. I said I would ‘combat’ the other man, – but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.)

Wittgenstein shows a contrast between two forms of life in terms of what is regarded as a ‘good ground’: one a modern form of life, based on natural science, the other a pre-modern one, based on the use of an oracle consulted in determining matters of course. When representatives of the two forms of life argue about matters of course, we see that each one supports a different rationality. In order to work, each rationality needs to rely on the rules of its own language game. When such rules conflict, we reach the end of rationality. Contesting the language game is to contest the form of life upon which it is founded. Contesting language games from the outside is a matter of persuasion, and not of reasoning. Indeed, it would appear that Wittgenstein’s work is fully compatible with the notion that language is sizzling with power. Language games can be – and are – contested. If one is careful in the application of one’s concepts, language games can be highly illuminating in opening up the discursive struggle between language games in organizational strategy discourses. The notion of ‘agreement’ is important, not because it suggests non-conflict, but because it reminds us that language use always involves some

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language game, which is founded on some form of life. Consider the following example: I recently hosted a strategy seminar for a group of corporate communications and HR officials at a large, multinational firm. At a certain point, a junior consultant stated that he wanted to ‘have a say in our strategy’. ‘Are you saying that you want to be empowered?’, asked a senior communications manager. ‘No, I don’t bloody wanna be empowered’, retorted the junior consultant, ‘I said I wanna have a say in our strategy!’ The junior consultant was clearly agitated.

I remember being puzzled at first. Was ‘empowerment’ not about ‘having a say’? However, it appeared that there was an implicit struggle about whether to play a specific language game. It appeared that in the organization in question, ‘empowerment’ was involved in a language game, which, while allowing non-senior individuals limited agency, also reaffirmed a form of life where managers decided who was to have agency and who was not. How does one go about analysing a language game such as this? One interpretation of the surprising reaction of the junior consultant when faced by the challenge of reinterpreting his need as ‘being empowered’ would be to read the question ‘are you saying that you want to be empowered’ as ‘would you like your superiors/me to empower you’. The rules of empowerment, applied like this in the ‘empowerment’ language game, may involve a number of conditions that limit the extent of agency for those empowered or of the reciprocal behaviours anticipated in gratitude for being empowered. The example should illustrate that language games, and seemingly innocent words that play a role in language games, are indeed ‘woven into action’ as Wittgenstein suggests, in everyday contexts. It also illustrates that language games are challenged. While at first glance ‘being empowered’ and ‘having a say’ might be regarded as synonyms according to the rules of some management science language games, there is a fundamental difference in subjectivity in the rules of the language games within the case corporation. ‘Having a say’ involves having agency or being a subject, whereas ‘being empowered’ implies

‘being empowered by X’, who in our case company is a senior manager.

Language games in strategic organizations Strategic management can be understood at very different levels of analysis. On the one hand, it is something that people do in organizations. This viewpoint regards strategic management as work. On the other hand, strategic management is an industry (Whittington 2006), a discipline (Knights and Morgan 1991) or an ideology (Shrivastava 1986) that has a life of its own at the institutional level of analysis, beyond the particular organizations where it is encountered. Indeed, the relation between institutional field practices, organizational actions and intra-organizational activities has been pointed out as a key part of the Strategy as Practice agenda (see Figure 1.1. in Johnson et al. 2007).

Institutional language games At the institutional level, the field of strategic management is characterized by the pursuit of agreement over what its key concepts mean. If ‘agreeing over language’ was not important, the history of the entire field of strategic management would not be filled with battles between different factions in strategic management. Consider, for instance, the following debates: 1. Ansoff’s (1991) and Mintzberg’s (1990, 1991) heated exchange on whether strategic management is about planning or learning. 2. Barry and Elmes’ (1997a, 1997b), and Ireland and Hitt’s (1997) debate on whether strategy is a form of fiction, in other words, whether narrativity is inherent to strategic management as a phenomenon (as Barry and Elmes suggest), or whether it is relevant only to ‘implementation’ (as Ireland and Hitt suggest). 3. Porter’s (1996) complaint that we have started to confuse strategic management with operational effectiveness Discussion across strategy schools is often difficult. This might well be the case because authors

A Wittgensteinian perspective on strategizing

across schools are playing different language games – as well as trying to persuade and bully each other to accept a particular rule set as a basis for accepted behaviour. To make matters more complicated, the institutional field of strategic management does not only consist of academics. Whittington et al. (2003) have shown us the multidisciplinary nature of strategy discourse, as various players such as consultants, practitioners, academics and politicians have a stake in how strategic management evolves as an institution. Language games can help make better sense of the dynamic between the institutional and microlevels of strategic management. The first account of the adoption of institutional strategy language by organizations was given by Seidl (2007), who explores how strategy concepts are transformed in their adoption across organizations. Marrying the notion of language games with Luhmann’s notion of organizations as systems, he argues (p. 197) that ‘no transfer of strategy concepts across different discourses is possible. Instead, every single strategy discourse can merely construct its own discourse-specific concepts. Different discourses, however, draw on the same strategy labels, which leads to “productive misunderstandings”.’ The key to Seidl’s argument is that strategy concepts are not adopted as such; they are reinvented within organizational language games where they are applied as playing new roles. That is, even if organizational practitioners might use a term such as ‘core competence’, which is the exact label used by Hamel and Prahalad (1994), the concept of core competence will have an organization-specific meaning. The Wittgensteinian explanation for this is that the concept meaning is regarded as rulefollowing behaviour with respect to the agreedupon rules within a specific language game. Hence, it is important to draw a clear distinction between the label used and the content of the concept as a set of rules within a particular language game. We often mistakenly take it for granted that the labels used in institutional discourse, such as ‘core competence’, ‘implementation’, ‘strategy process’, ‘strategy renewal’, ‘participation in strategy’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘industry’, retain their concept meaning when they play a part in different organizational language games. Instead of a

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concept being transferred across from an institutional domain into an organization, a new concept is recreated in each instance to fill the meaning of a label. When it is discovered that the new labels do not really fit the current dominant language games, and as contradictions are discovered, new meaning is constructed that enriches the language games through ‘productive misunderstanding’ (Seidl 2007).

Language games within the organization Seidl’s paper bridges the gap between the institutional and organizational levels of analysis in Strategy as Practice as it discusses how labels from the institutional level meet the organizational level. But can an organization itself be conceived as a single language game? My previous ‘being empowered’ example demonstrates that intra-organizational language games may be contested. Hence, one may suspect that multiple strategic management language games exist within an organization. Regnér’s (2003) case study in telecommunications firms shows how strategy work may be radically different between organizational centres and peripheries. This can be interpreted to cohere with the argument that organizations are not singular language games with respect to their strategy concepts. Even if Regnér does not talk of language per se, the activities that he discusses – planning, analysis, trial and error, experiments – mainly take place in language. He writes (p. 57): The findings show a twofold character of strategy creation, including fundamental different strategy activities in the periphery and centre, reflecting their diverse location and social embeddedness. Strategy making in the periphery was inductive, including externally oriented and exploratory strategy activities like trial and error, informal noticing, experiments and the use of heuristics. In contrast, strategy making in the centre was more deductive involving an industry and exploitation focus, and activities like planning, analysis, formal intelligence and the use of standard routines.

Regnér’s example should be enough to convince us that few organizations can be characterized as single language games. How then, do we deal with the

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dynamics of language games within organizations? How do language games interact? In a paper written with Eero Vaara (Mantere and Vaara 2008), we explored the interconnection between discursive and non-discursive strategy practices. We looked at connections between strategy language and participation, a phenomenon which cannot be reduced to discourse. We witnessed multiple struggles over participation, where discursive practices impeded and facilitated the agency of different players. I will briefly draw upon our analysis of one of our case organizations (p. 348): In Organization 2, a large telecommunications firm, strategy making was seen as a ‘serious business,’ open only to a selected group of people. Well-known international consultants were used to facilitate the top management team in its strategy work. Access to strategy documentation, even to those documents found in the company intranet, was limited to people at the top managerial echelons. In their discourse, strategy was typically envisioned as a ‘direction’ set by the top management team, aided by the consultants. A top management team member explained this as follows: This is the order of things in my mind: First top management defines a vision, a desired end state, which is then pursued […] Strategy is then formed into a kind of a set of operative activities leading to the desired end state. (TMT member) The organization consisted of a large workforce of expert personnel. While some of them had internalized the top-down approach to strategy, others were frustrated. Some of them openly questioned the non-participatory nature of strategy work. Our information policy [withholding information] is almost hysterical. I cannot say that I know these [strategy documents] very well. I got promoted recently and only then was I allowed access to these documents in the intranet. You don’t get much information if you don’t have sufficient rank and insignia […] This was the first time I got to know where we are going as an organization. (Marketing manager) To channel their frustration, some organizational members used cynicism to ridicule the organization’s strategy work:

I used to work in a smaller firm where people could participate in strategic planning. In my new role in this large firm, I have had to teach myself that planning is none of my business. They want to maintain a very small inner circle in this organization, and once a year, in a huge spectacle, to present it all in one spectacular slide. (Sales support manager)

The quotations from individual interviews already illustrate the contradictory language games played by top and middle managers. The top manager in the example refers to an ‘order of things’ for strategy work, making use of a religious metaphor which promotes the naturalization of followership and obedience. The quotations from the middle manager contain resistance to the order of things through the use of a similar metaphoric domain. ‘Inner circle’, another metaphor with a religious clang, is used to challenge the naturalization of the hegemonic practices of strategy making. The military metaphor ‘rank and insignia’ is used in a very similar way. The notion that language games are woven into action, that they are built on a non-linguistic foundation, is particularly evident in the accounts of the two middle managers. The ‘order of things’ is evident in a large array of social arrangements such as limited access below a specific organizational level to strategy documents in the company intranet and strategy workshops that are one-man ‘spectacles’.

Example: defining the rules of the game at Organization 2 Let’s take a further plunge into the everyday form of life in the strategy work within Organization 2. Language games are most evident in natural speech, as Samra-Fredericks’ (2003) study of strategy as a lived experience beautifully demonstrates. I have, therefore, transcribed a segment from a discussion within a group of middle managers in a strategy seminar in Organization 2. The segment appears to be a constructive debate between the middle managers about the rules of applying the label ‘strategy’. Middle managers experience something of a dualistic ‘form of life’ in an organization as they have access to the everyday lives of the operational personnel as

A Wittgensteinian perspective on strategizing

well as the top managers. Organizational strategy appears strikingly different from the standpoint of these two realities. Consequently, glimpses of at least two contrasted forms of life can be seen in the tension between two language games. The first, which I will call ‘the operational language game’, approaches strategy as a policy that guides everyday work. The second language game, which I shall call ‘the general management language game’, conceives strategy as a set of choices at the organizational level. These two correspond to the organizational realities perceived by the operative staff on the one hand, and the top management on the other. The staff experience the organization from the reality of operations whereas the everyday task of a general manager is to think about the organization as an integrated whole. I have chosen a sequence of seven lines of dialogue, which illustrate the tension between the two language games. I shall report and discuss each line of dialogue in the order that they were stated. The dialogue is launched when, faced with the challenge of defining what the label ‘strategy’ means for him, middle manager 1 (M1) responds [1] by stating a problem that he sees as endemic to Organization 2: [1] M1: I think that here at [Organization 2], we have a need, an absence, a problem: that there are plenty of fine strategies but they don’t seem linked to people’s work or departments. [ – ]

The dialogue starts with M1 implicitly stating the premise of the operational language game: strategy is something that has an impact in the lives of the operational staff. The problem he observes is that strategy does not play a role in everyday activities, as it is not ‘linked’ to them. M2 continues playing the same game. [2] M2: It is also dangerous when implementing strategies like these because the contradictions between the actual work to be done and the lofty thoughts behind these strategies become apparent when you examine them. We are still in the relatively satisfactory position that, whether we did things one way or another, we have always been able to explain how it was an appropriate ICT strategy of some kind.

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M2 notes [2] that the problem that M1 stated is dangerous. Organization 2 had experienced an affluent stage of growth in a rather benevolent market environment, which M2 refers to as a ‘relatively satisfactory position’. His worry is that if strategies do not affect operations, any operational activities can be justified as ‘strategic’ in post hoc rationalization. Instead, strategy has the normative role of guiding operations. This means that unsuccessful strategy work is characterized by ‘loftiness’ or not ‘being linked with work or departments’. Unsuccessful strategy appears tautological, alien or even absurd, as it is separated from the everyday work context. However, in the next comment [3], we witness a third middle manager adopt a wholly different stance towards strategy, offering a new set of rules. [3] M3: I feel that strategy is just like you said, making choices, and I think our strategies are of the kind that no clear choices have been made.

M3 offers a generic definition for the label ‘strategy’. Instead of discussing the effects that strategy should have at the operational level, M3 portrays strategy in abstract terms. Strategy is ‘making clear choices’. The choices she refers to as ‘our strategies’ would not appear to be operational level choices but choices that affect the organization at large. Indeed, this is what strategy means in the life of the general management – making choices for the organization. In response to M3’s definition, we see middle managers fluctuating between the operational and general management language games, trying to come to grips with the label ‘strategy’. M1 tries [4] to return the discussion to the rules of the operational language game, and attempts to reduce the notion of ‘choice’ to an operational, normative notion of ‘what to do’. [4] M1: At least none were made in which it was defined what not to do. The strategies embrace the whole world [ – ] but they don’t say anything about what we are not meant to do, what sorts of things we don’t want to get into.

M1 continues [4] to seek ‘strategy’ from the viewpoint of operations. Choices are characterized by their normative powers, in their ability to guide

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‘what to do’ or ‘what not to do’. Surprisingly, we next [5] see M3 backing away from the general management language game. [5] M3: So they are not pointing us in a certain direction, so what? I think strategy is in actuality born only when things get done.

M3 seems to begin a new argument in [5], exploring a new tentative definition for strategy as something ‘born when things get done’. She questions the notion that strategy should ‘point us to a certain direction’, to have a normative effect on operations. The two definitions offered by M3 for strategy in [3] and [5] do not seem to support each other, as ‘making choices’ at the organizational level hardly seems necessary to ‘getting things done’, which seems like an operational expression. M2 seeks to resolve this ambiguity [6], trying to push the discussion back into the general management language game. [6] M2: Yeah, and then you have to register all sorts of things that would have needed to be done anyway. It is non-strategy work in any case. Everyone is looking for profitable growth, there are no companies out there that want to cut back at a loss of profitability. Sure the customer is valuable and this can create a certain ambiance for the company, but that a company works towards growth is not really a choice, it is stating the obvious.

Even if M2 starts with a ‘yeah’, he seems to oppose M3’s definition of strategy, characterizing ‘getting things done’ as ‘non-strategy work’. He notes that all operations are striving for profitability. This is ‘non-strategy work’. He pushes the operative language game into the corner, noting that ‘everyone is looking for profitable growth’. M2 appears to argue that strategy is to not do what every other company is doing. Strategy is something other than ‘stating the obvious’. Consequently, an analytical discussion should treat strategy and operations as separate issues. To be strategic, an organization needs to be different from ‘everyone’. This represents a general management view on strategy. The unit of analysis is the organization in relation to other organizations. M3 does not back away. She continues [7] by toying with the notion of disbanding the general management language game altogether, suggesting

that all strategy may be about eliminating nonprofitable activities. [7] M3: Yes, so then profitable growth should be expressed strategically in a way that eliminates all non-profitable activities. [ – ] Perhaps it [strategy] is that indeed, but we just don’t dare to say it. Or what it actually means.

M3 defines strategy simply as profitable operations [7]. This notion seems trivial while playing the general management language, yet it is not trivial at all while playing the operational language game. We can use Wittgenstein’s work on language games to tease out two central aspects to strategy practice from the transcript. First, it reinforces the notion that in Organization 2, strategy practice exists at the nexus of a number of language games. Strategy talk is embedded in non-linguistic foundation, in routinized conceptions about what strategy means in terms of how it is lived and practised. The language games people promote are not only used to promote particular forms of life, but also to contest other forms of life. Importantly, as we have seen Wittgenstein argue in his example about missionary work, the two strategy language games seem to contain localized rationalities that are incompatible with each other. The general management and the operational language games are used to portray each other’s foundations as absurd, in the manner that a meteorologist might portray the foundations of a rain dance as ‘superstition’ and vice versa. Second, strategy practice is characterized by the pursuit of agreement. The middle managers spend a great deal of effort trying to persuade each other about the correct meaning of the label ‘strategy’. They are trying to forge agreement while playing a number of competing language games. Nevertheless, the language games on which they are drawing are built on competing rationalities. In [3], M3 toys with the general management rationality, only to find herself arguing in favour of the operational rationality [5], almost contradicting her initial sentiment: ‘I feel that strategy is just like you said, making choices, and I think our strategies are of the kind that no clear choices have been made’ is contrasted with the sentiment: ‘profitable

A Wittgensteinian perspective on strategizing

growth should be expressed strategically in a way that eliminates all non-profitable activities. [ – ] Perhaps it [strategy] is that indeed, but we just don’t dare say it.’ Language games thus highlight a key aspect in our language use: some language games, some sets of rules are needed. In strategy practice in particular, which is often an arena for crucial decisions – mergers, spin-offs, corporate restructurings, layoffs, acquisitions, market entries and exits – the collective need for agreement is to be expected. People need to figure out the rules as a lot is at stake. We also see, however, the way in which different language games reflect the local rationalities of the forms of life upon which they are founded. Wittgenstein’s example of the practices of consulting an oracle or a physics expert in finding ‘good grounds’ showed us that when language games come into contradiction, we reach the end of reason and enter the realm of persuasion.

Towards a Wittgensteinian research agenda within Strategy as Practice scholarship How can Wittgenstein’s work on language games help in our inquiry into Strategy as Practice? It would appear that the most natural way to approach the concept of language game is to regard it as a heuristic instrument, which we can use to make sense of the practice of strategy at various different levels of analysis. A key criterion for drawing the borders on a particular language game is agreement over the proper use of concepts in determining matters of course. Wittgenstein argued that people agree in the language they use. Situations where we see disagreement over the use of language are particularly fruitful for this inquiry, as we can see the outlines of competing rationalities when they are contrasted with each other. It must be kept in mind, however, that any way we choose to draw the borders of a specific language game is essentially contestable. This is true whenever we choose to talk about the language game of a specific organization, the language game of its management team, that of a specific business unit within the organization, and so on. Language

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games bear family resemblance to each other, that is, they are intertwined and interconnected as a network. As resemblance is carried through membership in a family, areas of agreement and disagreement extend over a network of what could be called the strategy language game. As noted above, its borders are open for dispute and change over time, as Wittgenstein would seem to suggest to us through his example of language as an ancient city. I will conclude by suggesting two potential venues where Wittgenstein’s work could further our understanding of the practice of strategy in and around organizations. First, Wittgenstein’s work can fuel novel research on agreement and disagreement over language in studies of strategy discourse. This is particularly relevant for research that has focused on strategy discourse as an arena of discursive struggle (e.g. Hardy et al. 2000; Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008). This literature seeks to understand the fact that strategy discourses are employed by various stakeholders in promoting particular realities within an organization. Focusing on particular arenas of agreement and disagreement over the use of language, for instance, furthers the agenda of studying the discursive struggles in the practice of strategy. The study of conflicting language games would help us unravel the behavioural commitments that specific conceptual arrangements within an organization involve, as well as how such behavioural arrangements are contested through discursive practice. The inquiry into agreement and disagreement in language does not have to be contained at the intraorganizational level. Discursive struggles over the use of concepts at the institutional level also merit our attention. The agenda of understanding strategic management as a ‘discipline’ (Knights and Morgan 1991) or an ‘industry’ (Whittington 2006; Whittington et al. 2003) could be advanced through careful study of particular contests over the proper use of concepts – perhaps beginning with the very concept of ‘strategy’. Scholars playing a particular language game need to proceed to study the topic of strategy in a particular manner. What behavioural commitments underlie the language games where strategy is regarded as ‘fiction’ (Barry and Elmes 1997a), ‘a distinctive market

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position’ (Porter 1996) or ‘pattern in a stream of actions’ (Mintzberg 1978), for instance? Second, Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance would seem to open up interesting possibilities within the study of Strategy as Practice. In addition to devoting our attention to discursive struggles, serious attention should also be devoted to how different organizational language games support each other through relations of family resemblance. Specifically, family resemblance could be used to further the agenda set by Seidl (2007) in the study of the transfers of language between the institutional and organizational levels of analysis. Organizational language games are connected with their environments in various different ways (Mauws and Phillips 1995), which the concept of family resemblance could elucidate. While Seidl’s focus has been on the uniqueness of organization-specific strategy concepts that appear under common labels, family resemblance could be a way of understanding the commonalities between them. Family resemblance could also inform empirical work on how different discursive practices interact and intertwine in organizational strategy practice. Extant empirical work (Ezzamel and Willmott 2008; Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008) has largely concentrated on particular discursive practices in isolation. This chapter has been an early reflection in what I hope might become a Wittgensteinian stream of thought within the Strategy as Practice agenda. I hope that I have managed to convince the reader that Wittgenstein could be considered alongside thinkers such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Luhmann, Heidegger and Foucault, who have already informed and inspired our work. References Ansoff, H. I. (1991), ‘Critique of Henry Mintzberg’s The Design School: Reconsidering the Basic Premises of Strategic Management’, Strategic Management Journal, 12: 449–461. Astley, W. G. and Zammuto, R. F. (1992), ‘Organization Science, Managers and Language Games’, Organization Science, 3: 443–460. Barry, D. and Elmes, M. (1997a), ‘Strategy Retold: Toward a Narrative View of Strategy

Discourse’, Academy of Management Review, 22: 429–452. (1997b), ‘On Paradigms and Narratives: Barry and Elmes’s Response’, Academy of Management Review, 22: 847–849. Beech, N. (2008), ‘On the Nature of Dialogic Identity Work’, Organization, 15: 51–74. Beyer, J. M. (1992), ‘Metaphors, Misunderstandings and Mischief: A Commentary’, Organization Science, 3: 467–474. Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chia, R. and Holt, R. (2006), ‘Strategy as Practical Coping: A Heideggerian Perspective’, Organization Studies, 27: 635–655. (2008), ‘On Managerial Knowledge’, Management Learning, 39: 141–158. Donaldson, L. (1992), ‘The Weick Stuff: Managing Beyond Games’, Organization Science, 3/4: 461–466. (1995), ‘The Weick Stuff: Managing Beyond Games’, Organization Science, 3: 461–466. Ezzamel, M. and Willmott, H. (2008), ‘Strategy as Discourse in a Global Retailer: A Supplement to Rationalist and Interpretive Accounts’, Organization Studies, 29: 191–217. Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society, Berkeley: California University Press. Glock, H. (1996), A Wittgenstein Dictionary, London: Blackwell. Hamel, G. and Prahalad, C. K. (1994), Competing for the Future, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Hardy, C., Palmer, I. and Phillips, N. (2000), ‘Discourse as a Strategic Resource’, Human Relations, 53: 1227–1248. Hassard, J. (1988), ‘Overcoming Hermeticism in Organization Theory: An Alternative to Paradigm Incommensurability’, Human Relations, 41: 274–259. Ireland, D. R. and Hitt, M. A. (1997), ‘ “Strategyas-Story”: Clarifications and Enhancements to Barry and Elmes’ Arguments’, Academy of Management Review, 22: 844–847. Johnson, G., Langley, A., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2007), Strategy as Practice. Research Directions and Resources, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knights, D. and Morgan, G. (1991), ‘Corporate Strategy, Organizations and Subjectivity: A Critique’, Organization Studies, 12: 251–273.

A Wittgensteinian perspective on strategizing Kripke, S. (1982), Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laine, P. and Vaara, E. (2007), ‘Struggling over Subjectivity: A Discursive Analysis of Strategic Development in an Engineering Group’, Human Relations, 60: 29–58. Lyotard, J.-F. (1986), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mantere, S. and Vaara, E. (2008), ‘On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective’, Organization Science, 19: 341–358. Mauws, M. K. and Phillips, N. (1995), ‘Understanding Language Games’, Organization Science, 6: 322–334. Mintzberg, H. (1978), ‘Patterns of Strategy Formation’, Management Science, 24: 934–948. (1990), ‘The Design School: Reconsidering the Basic Premises of Strategic Management’, Strategic Management Journal, 11: 171–195. (1991), ‘Learning 1, Planning 0. Reply to Igor Ansoff’, Strategic Management Journal, 12: 463–466. Monk, R. (1990), Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius, New York: Penguin. Oakes, L., Townley, B. and Cooper, D. (1998), ‘Business Planning as Pedagogy: Language and Control in a Changing Institutional Field’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 43: 257–292. Porter, M. (1996), ‘What is Strategy?’, Harvard Business Review, 74, November–December: 61–78. Powell, T. C. (2001), ‘Competitive Advantage: Logical and Philosophical Considerations’, Strategic Management Journal, 22: 875–888. Rao, M. V. H. and Pasmore, W. A. (1989), ‘Knowledge and Interests in Organization Studies: A Conflict of Interpretations’, Organization Studies, 10: 225–239. Regnér, P. (2003), ‘Strategy Creation in the Periphery: Inductive Versus Deductive Strategy Making,’ Journal of Management Studies, 40: 57–82. Rindova, V. P., Becerra, M. and Contardo, I. (2004), ‘Enacting Competitive Wars: Competitive Activity, Language Games and Market Consequences’, Academy of Management Review, 29: 670–686.

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Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003), ‘Strategizing as Lived Experience and Strategists’ Everyday Efforts to Shape Strategic Direction’, Journal of Management Studies, 40: 141–174. (2005), ‘Strategic Practice, “Discourse” and the Everyday Interactional Constitution of “Power Effects” ’, Organization, 12: 803–841. Schatzki, T. R. (1997), ‘Practices and Actions A Wittgensteinian Critique of Bourdieu and Giddens’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 27: 283–308. Schatzki, T.R. (2001), ‘Introduction. Practice Theory.’ In T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London: Routledge, 1–14. Seidl, D. (2007), ‘General Strategy Concepts and the Ecology of Strategy Discourses: A SystemicDiscursive Perspective’, Organization Studies, 28: 197–218. Shotter, J. (2005), ‘ “Inside the Moment of Managing”: Wittgenstein and the Everyday Dynamics of Our Expressive-Responsive Activities’, Organization Studies, 26: 113–135. (2008), ‘Dialogism and Polyphony in Organizing Theorizing in Organization Studies: Action Guiding Anticipations and the Continuous Creation of Novelty’, Organization Studies, 29: 501–524. Shrivastava, P. (1986), ‘Is Strategic Management Ideological?’, Journal of Management, 12: 363–377. Tsoukas, H. and Vladimirou, E. (2001), ‘What is Organizational Knowledge?’, Journal of Management Studies, 38: 973–993. Whittington, R. (2006), ‘Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research’, Organization Studies, 27: 613–634. Whittington, R., Jarzabkowski, P., Mayer, M., Mounoud, E., Nahapiet, J. and Rouleau, L. (2003), ‘Taking Strategy Seriously. Responsibility and Reform for an Important Social Practice’, Journal of Management Inquiry, 12: 396–409. Wittgenstein, L. (1922/2001), Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, London: Routledge. (1951), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1969–1975), On Certainty (Uber Gewissheit), Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1976), ‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’, Philosophia, 6: 409–425.

CHAPTER

11

A Foucauldian perspective on strategic practice: strategy as the art of (un)folding F L O RE N C E A L L A R D -P O ESI *

Strategic management defines itself as the art, or science, of governing an organization with the aim of implementing intentions. In this way, strategic management presents itself as an exercise of will which includes the capacity to influence, to fold or have folded, the actions of other organizational members.1 However, this view, which is dominant in strategic management, needs to be further examined. Like other areas of management, strategic management can be regarded as a social practice (Whittington 2002). In this sense, strategy involves routines, norms and rules that both enable and constrain the actions of the subject-strategist and limit the field of possible action (Schatzki 2001). It equally contains vocabulary, discourses and meanings that, at least partially, define the list of problems and possible solutions envisioned by the strategist (Vaara 2006). Departing from a conception of strategy as something companies have or do not have, the Strategy as Practice approach views strategy as an activity that individuals accomplish as they interact in both a physical and social context (Whittington 2002). As a social practice, strategizing is animated by a dialectic tension between the singularity of the here and now of all activity, and the generality and recurrence of routines, norms, rules, techniques and tools on which all practice relies; between the uniqueness of the activity in the situation (that which we call the practice; Whittington 2002, p. 4) and the repetition of the sociocultural artefacts by which the strategic activity is actually realized

* I am very grateful to Eero Vaara for his helpful advice and encouragement. I would also like to thank my translator, Anoli Simon, for her insightful questions and suggestions. 1 This view does not exclude the emergent, unpredictable part of collective actions.

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(artefacts that are called practices; p. 4). This dialectical conception of strategy draws attention to both the enabling and potentially limiting aspects that are inherent in social practices (cf. Giddens 1993). As currently developed, however, Strategy as Practice research continues to retain the idea of the strategist as a deliberate, competent and sometimes all-powerful ‘bricoleur’ (AllardPoesi 2006). This research argues that, despite an apparent similarity between ‘pre-packaged’ strategic practices amongst corporations in the same field, actors are still able to recreate practices and adapt them to their particular demands and specific context. In developing a discursive version of the Strategy as Practice approach, some researchers underline the influence of discursive practices on the subjectivity and the behaviours of organizational members (see Alvesson and Sveningsson 2003; Vaara 2006; Laine and Vaara 2007). They follow Knights and Morgan’s (1991, 1995) seminal Foucauldian analysis that considers strategy as a discourse, that is ‘a set of ideas and practices which condition our ways of relating to, and acting upon, particular phenomena’ (Knights and Morgan 1991, p. 253). As a body of knowledge, strategy is thus embodied in social practices that actualize and reproduce its discourses, constituting in this way a ‘power-knowledge’ system. This critical analysis of strategy draws attention to the historical, contextual and accidental character of strategic discourses. It is equally heedful of the effects of these practices on the subjectivity of the actors who, in this way, become ‘strategists’. To be a strategist and to carry out strategy is, above all, to

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have intentions, designs and plans (Knights and Morgan 1991), to take risks, be an agent of change, be responsible and autonomous (Knights and McCabe 2003), mastering, at least in part, one’s environment and future. According to this perspective, strategic practices thus inscribe a capacity of choice and action (Knights and McCabe 2003), and to a larger extent, the ability to influence the behaviour of others. Such a discursive approach appears then to distance itself from mainstream Strategy as Practice research. As it favours the discursive dimension of strategic management, Knights and Morgan’s analysis undermines the material and concrete restrictions implied by social practice. Knights and Morgan view discourses, concrete practices, techniques, technologies and subjectivities of the strategist, as a homogeneous set of characteristics. Nevertheless if, as we say, God is in the details (Foucault, 1975 p. 164), a critical analysis must reveal the different levels of reality, the non-correspondences and the ruptures that are brought about by the different constituent practices of what we call strategy. In addition, strategic practices cannot be considered in isolation, as they depend on, and are fed into by, other practices and management techniques. At this point, a more detailed reading of Foucault would be likely to fuel a critical analysis of strategy. Foucault aimed to distinguish the different ‘systems’ through which we experience reality (things, others and ourselves). In his numerous works, Foucault studied the manner in which we are constructed as ‘subjects’ in the West. What we think, say and do, does not refer back to some hidden essence, but is what has formed us historically. Consequently, he sets out to analyse the ‘ensembles of practices’, not meaning either the understandings that men develop of themselves or the conditions that make them who they are without them knowing it, but referring to what they do and the way in which they do it (Foucault 1984a, 2001, p. 1395). Because it is through these practices and the relationships that are woven between men and the world around them that they will form themselves as ‘subjects’. Three broad sets of practices captured the attention of Foucault:

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• The practices of organization, distribution in space and time, supervision, punishment and correction by which we seek to influence the behaviour of others, and which contribute to an arena of power (Foucault 1978, 1975, 1976). • Discursive practices and techniques of knowledge (description, classification and observation, for example) by which we seek to master the elements that surround us and through which we seek to create a knowledge base (Foucault 1969, 1966, 1971). • Practices and techniques of self by which we work on and govern ourselves (Foucault, 1983a 1988, 1984c, 1984d). For Foucault (1984a), the above sets of practices are distinct. While one should not confuse discursive practices with power practices,2 they are certainly not strangers. These practices influence, feed and challenge each other and yet are able to remain unique, a feature that allows their transformations, which is partly autonomous, and partly bound to the others. Foucault’s perspective, attentive to the heterogeneity of the practices to which we adhere, questions the structure of these different sets of practices, their possible junctions and disjunctions, a question that is rarely considered by strategic management research.3 Even if the question of subject that interests Foucault can appear somewhat unrelated to the preoccupations of strategic management, this attention to the details of the practices and techniques by which we seek to govern the world should be of great interest to this area of research. Following on with the analysis of Lilley (2001) and of Knights and Morgan (1991, 1995), we will first view strategic practices as part of a much larger arena of power and then as a body of knowledge and discourse. Finally, drawing on Foucault’s later 2 ‘It is said, and you understand that when I read it, I know very well that it is attributed to me, when I read that “knowledge is power” or “power is knowledge” – it makes no difference, I have to laugh, as that is precisely my problem – to study the relationship between the two. If they were the same I would not be studying their relationship and I would be a lot less tired’ (Foucault 1983b, 2001, pp. 1273–1274). 3 Even when the practice approach of strategy is referred to.

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work (1983a, 1988, 1984c and 1984d), we will present strategic practices as a particular technique of self. This analysis leads us to highlight: • First, as being inscribed in a power field, strategic practice emerges as the result of multiple conditions and random events. It takes part in techniques of control at a distance in the modern enterprise, whereby strategists are led to reveal their intentions. • Second, as a field of knowledge, strategic management may be seen as a heterogeneous set of discursive and material practices. These discursive and material practices are governed by specific rules that structure in part what can be read, said and done about reality. It is characterized by a will to influence that is abstract and all-powerful, yet, even so, this will be limited by what we can ‘see’. Strategic management’s will to influence is, in fact, framed and structured by techniques of information and communication. • Third, as techniques, or practices, of self, strategic practices do not imply work on oneself in order to create a specific subjectivity; but rather involve the strategist’s elaboration of a project. In this sense, strategic management is similar to a monitoring technique in which the strategist is led to ‘unfold’ himself (Deleuze 1986, p. 110): to reveal one’s intentions, say what is hidden, ‘objectify’ one’s subjectivity in order to, once again, enter into the relationships of knowledge and power. The critical approach developed in this chapter distances itself from the idea of adaptability that is prevalent in the current Strategy as Practice trend (even in its ‘discursive’ version) by noting the inscriptions that practices and strategic discourses leave on the practitioners and their behaviour. Moving away from the idea of adaptable practice, strategic practices are seen more as techniques of control at a distance, whereby strategists are led to reveal their intentions. The juxtaposition of the Foucauldian perspective and the current approach(es) of Strategy as Practice reveals contrasting conceptions of strategy, strategists and their volition, paving the way for new areas of research.

Genealogical practices Genealogy Developed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), genealogical analysis relies on the idea that a practice or political technique, such as imprisonment, takes its meaning and dynamic as an element in a larger field of power techniques that aims to sway individuals’ behaviour. Punishment via imprisonment, for example, can only be understood as an extension, or expression, of a much larger group of disciplinary techniques elaborated elsewhere (school, factory, army); techniques whose purpose is to control populations and to maximize individual and collective efficiency. According to genealogical analysis, the emergence and development of a practice is never simple, but is the consequence of a complex series of multiple conditions and appearances. The progressive substitution of torture by imprisonment in France can be taken as the result of: (a) the contestation of these techniques as well as of judicial functioning;4 (b) the emergence of alternative models such as those proposed by reformers, on the one hand, and by those represented by a few model prisons in England and the United States, on the other; and (c) the connection between the model ‘prison’ and other disciplinary practices (from containment, surveillance and reform) developed elsewhere and whose efficiency appears superior. These new disciplinary methods assure a better result for the productive body, both individually through reform and surveillance, and collectively by the coordination of individual strengths. In addition, these techniques are efficient in that they rely on simple management tools both in time (via normalizing sanctions5) and space (via hierarchical surveillance). Given their depersonalized nature, these techniques can also spread easily within the social body.

4

This punitive model was actually incapable of handling new forms of criminality that were concerned with goods. It also suffered from the irregularities and profusion of the judicial courts. 5 Normalizing sanctions involve individual evaluation and their classification compared with others.

A Foucauldian perspective on strategic practice

In genealogical analysis, the emergence and transformation of a social practice, and the knowledge connected with it, are analysed as resulting from the transformation of previous practices, from the appearance of rival practices, and finally from the connection of some of these new practices to an existing diagram of practices.

The genealogy of strategic practices It is through this genealogical reading that Knights and Morgan (1991, p. 1995) take into account the emergence and diffusion of strategic practices. The authors (1991, p. 254) note that strategic discourse took flight in the United States after World War II. Like most managerial innovations, the discipline has benefited, since the 1930s, from collaboration between the business schools and the business world, as well as from the existence of powerful professional groups. Strategic practices and ideas did not immediately find their place, however. Management practices were initially turned towards the organization and supervision of production, and not towards clients, markets or the competition. There are numerous reasons for that. The domination of an entrepreneurial ideology with the notion of the invisible hand made the idea of planning a difficult one, as it promoted ‘inspired leaders’, as opposed to rational ones. In addition, the domination of large market-controlling conglomerates left only unoccupied niches to small enterprises, thus impeding strategic moves. At the end of World War II, the major changes facilitated a widespread interest in proactively planning the operations of corporations in different markets. The gradual change in property structures, and the appearance of managerial firms, encouraged managers to justify the actions of their corporations and favoured practices of proprietary information (audit and financial advice, for example). The rapid internationalization of American enterprises and the emergence of multi-divisional firms made the challenges of operating in different markets salient. A discursive space was opened, linked to the need to explain what is being done and why it is being done, as well as the objectives that are being targeted.

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While strategic discourse was not yet inevitable, Knights and Morgan (1991) emphasize that its rise was facilitated by strategy’s previous success and progress within the military domain, as well as the influence of academic authors such as Igor Ansoff. The appearance of specialized practitioners working for managers and investors allowed it to become fully entrenched. Genealogical analysis of the emergence and diffusion of strategic practices clearly distinguishes itself here from the concepts developed with the Strategy as Practice approach. The practice approach views all strategic practice as resulting more or less from social practices, techniques, tools or interpretive schemas used in a recurrent and generalized manner by organizations. Being inspired by, or reflecting, the contributions of neoinstitutionalism (see Whittington 2002; Johnson et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski 2004); and work on fashions in management (see Jarzabkowski 2004), the adoption and diffusion of these practices are seen as a necessity for the corporations. Confronted with institutional expectations, the organizations will adopt certain structures and forms (organizational templates; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), programmes and policies (Greenwood et al. 2002) or particular ways of carrying out a function (Kostova and Roth 2002). By contrast, the genealogical perspective developed by Knights and Morgan underlines that strategic practices are not ‘necessities’ but rather the result of prior changes in practice and discourses as well as chance occurrence. Considering strategic practices as belonging to a larger arena of power techniques, genealogical analysis also helps us to understand their particular meanings and aims within a contemporary socioeconomic context.

To be governed at a distance The analyses of Knights and Morgan suggest that the success of strategic practices can be linked to the particular economy of control that they create. Following the normative agency theory (see Eisenhardt 1989), strategic practices can be viewed as techniques of control that are directed towards an expected result and not behaviour. It is a technique that is both more effective and less costly

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in certain circumstances: when a behaviour is not directly observable, as is the case in managerial firms (stockholder–manager relations) and large multi-divisional or international enterprises (relation between headquarters and subsidiary or headquarters and business unit), or when the behaviour cannot be specified in advance because the tasks are not routine and assume adaptation to the unexpected, as is the case when a firm goes international and competition diversifies and intensifies. Looked at from this angle, strategic practice appears less as a rupture with the disciplinary model described by Foucault (1975), and more as an economic change in terms of its target and method of application. It is no longer the behaviour that is monitored but, through the formulation of intent, the result that this behaviour must produce. In fact, strategic practices share a number of traits with the disciplinary model described by Foucault. They rely on: • Hierarchical supervision. The formation of strategy supposes a reporting of proposed actions and results to management, then to shareholders. A number of management techniques are oriented towards the recording, grouping and communication of this information. • Normalizing sanction. The results obtained are compared to norms (sectoral, in particular) and to initial intentions. It is in regard to these elements that the success, failure or evolution of the enterprise can be evaluated. • Examination. The technique of examination (by shareholders, by managers) links the techniques of supervision and normalizing sanctions at a given moment within the disciplinary process (every month, trimester, once a year). Three aspects, however, clearly distinguish strategic from disciplinary practices: • Discontinuity. Different from the disciplinary model, hierarchical supervision is discontinuous in that it is concerned with results and not with ongoing behaviours. • Endogenicity. Supervision and review does not depend solely on the supervisor and the architecture that allows this supervision. It is, in effect, up to those who are the object of review to make

themselves seen by declaring intentions, communicating obtained results and describing their own methods of supervision. The above two characteristics constitute a system of control that is more efficient than the disciplinary model described by Foucault in that it does not require the permanent presence of a supervisor and it also facilitates the review process. • Change in the nature of the norm. The purpose of inspection and sanction is not to evaluate personnel behaviour in terms of a given norm, but to evaluate the gaps between declared intentions and actual results. Certainly, a norm exists, but it concerns the communication of results and internal review procedures; in other words, review procedures, supervision and sanctions that the enterprise and its members apply to themselves, rather than their actions and behaviours. What appears determinant here is to what extent the enterprise, its managers and members communicate the truth about themselves, which is not at all the same as being revealed through the eyes of others.6 In this sense, strategic practices fully share the ethic of authenticity that characterizes the modern techniques of government that Rose (1999, p. 267) speaks of: ‘In such an ethic, the mode of judgment of conduct is not external but internal – that is to say, it proceeds by comparing the public conduct with private secrets, public statements with privates desires, the outer person with their inner truth.’ This view of strategy as a technique of control-at-a-distance is a departure from the Strategy as Practice view of the emergence and diffusion of strategic practices. Strategy as Practice research (see Mazza and Alvarez 2000; Vaara et al. 2004) in fact maintains that these processes suppose a theorization, that is to say, an argumentation that specifies the properties of the practice and justifies its use and interest (Tolbert and Zucker 1996, p. 183). This 6

The model described here relies on self-revelation, which appears, finally, closer to the ‘pastoral’ power model as described by Foucault (1984b) than to the disciplinary model. As for the Christian examination of conscience, it involves the description of desires, not as a method of selfquestioning but as a method of control.

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theorization includes the formulation of the problem, on the one hand, and the demonstration of the novelty and efficiency of the response that constitutes the new practice, on the other. The necessity of the new practice, which accounts for its diffusion among corporations among the same field, is in fact ‘discursively’ constructed. Given a certain discomfort with the determinism that underlies this argument of necessity, researchers studying Strategy as Practice frequently refer to the notion of uncoupling (Meyer and Rowan 1977) between the adopted ‘pre-packaged’ strategic practices and discourses and the practice as locally implemented. They emphasize that the meanings and discourses accompanying these practices and methods are far from being necessarily appropriated by the members of the organization, even when the practice itself has been implemented (Kostova and Roth 2002; Lozeau et al. 2002; Regnér 2003; Jarzabkowski 2004). Strategic practices, in their generality and repetition, appear as techniques that, while sometimes widely diffused, can, in fact, remain ‘empty’ (Allard-Poesi 2006). That is to say, they are pre-packaged practices, easily transported, with an obligation to be adopted in order to increase legitimacy. Departing from this view, genealogical analysis shows that strategic practices are not just discursive constructions that managers adopt to pretend ‘as if’; they may be considered as techniques of control at a distance that both shape and restrict individual behaviours and relationship to the self. Just how does this technique of control at a distance operate? Foucault’s (1969) archaeological analysis invites us to consider strategic practices as a set of discourses and techniques of knowing (observations, description and classification) by which subjects seek to master their environment, thus building a body of knowledge on that environment.

Strategic practices as a body of knowledge Strategic practices as knowledge The analysis of strategic management as a ‘field of knowledge’ can be related to those viewing

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strategy as discourse (for a synthesis, see Vaara 2006). These studies search to decrypt the meaning of what is said and to characterize its effects at different levels of analysis. For example, they emphasize the rhetorical competencies that strategic discourse brings into play; its effects of persuasion and exclusion (Samra-Fredericks 2003); its role in the coordination of actors’ individual actions (Weick 1995) or in the legitimization of choices and decisions (Vaara et al. 2004); its narrative dimension and its effects on the identity and objectives of the organization; and finally, its ideological character and the phenomena of domination and resistance that it gives rise to (Laine and Vaara 2007; Levy and Evan 2003). Beyond these differences, the different approaches of strategy as discourse suppose that either it is driven by a particular meaning that the research must uncover (Laine and Vaara 2007) or that the actors, individual or collective, control the effects of these discourses (Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2005). These approaches refer back to a ‘muscular’ conception of discourse (Alvesson and Karreman 2000, p. 1130), where discourse and meaning are seen as inseparable or strictly overlapping (be they transient, emerging from local context, or more enduring and universal ways of making sense of the world). Foucault’s discursive analysis clearly differs from these concepts on principally two aspects. For Foucault, the proliferation and irregularity that these discourses reveal, even when belonging to the same domain (strategy, for example), must not be reduced by referring to a hidden sense or origin. Instead, the analysis must address the conditions and rules that permit the particular heterogeneous configuration. Even if these discourses are numerous and varied they are always, in a given period, less than they could be. It is thus advisable to look for rules of statements (Foucault 1969; Deleuze 1986) which these strategic discourses, in all their variability, obey; rules that simultaneously take into account their dispersion (i.e. many different things are said …) as well as their rarity (i.e. … but not everything). At the same time, the emergence and transformation of discourses cannot be completely understood without analysing the social rules and

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material practices (non-discursive) that will authorize, influence and be influenced by what is said: strategic discourses, as with scientific discourses, take their strength from rules of visibility (Deleuze 1986): practices and techniques that mask certain aspects, reveal others, record, class, count and calculate (Lilley 2001); sets of interlocking routines, policies, material artefacts and procedures which underpin and perpetuate strategic discourses (Linstead and Brewis 2007). Knowledge must then be distinguished from discipline or science (Foucault 1969). That which unites heterogeneous discourses is not the particular objects (objects whose conception and name will change over time) but the complex set of interrelations between discursive and non-discursive practices which, together, will define possible knowledge (what can be said). According to this concept, we may treat strategic management as a body of knowledge as soon as we have shown that: • over and beyond their diversity, the discourse obeys rules of statements (Deleuze 1986) and associated reading system (Lilley 2001) that will limit their development. • they are tied to rules of visibility (Deleuze 1986) and associated seeing systems (Lilley 2001). Archaeological analysis has, as its objective, the definition of these rules and practices and their relationships (Foucault 1969). In what way does discourse of, or on, strategy constitute a body of knowledge? What are its rules?

Strategic practices as a (limited) will to influence The archaeology of strategic knowledge remains to be looked at. Townley (2002, 2005) shows that management discourse satisfies the following: the rule of objective rationality that seeks to isolate, classify and calculate; the rule of hierarchy that orders things, people and objectives; the rule of causality that mechanically tightens the links between different objects and eliminates all ambivalence; and the rule of agency, according to which the individual is autonomous and capable of choosing independently from political or social systems. It remains,

however, that not all management discourse can be qualified as strategic and that there must exist other rules and situations/relationships that will distinguish and rarefy them. Broadly speaking, and following the outline of archaeological analysis, we can note the multiplicity of areas where strategic discourses emerge, on the one hand, and the efforts expended to connect these different objects (from value for the client to value for the shareholder, for example), on the other. These efforts express a rule of influence which all strategic statements must obey (see also Lilley 2001). We can only thus characterize as strategic those objects, concepts or theories that, in addition to other rules, also reflect possible influence. This is why, relative to other sectors, we do not (yet?) speak of ‘strategic accounting’ and it is why strategic discourse has only recently affected regulated sectors (banking and social sectors, for example; Knights and Morgan 1995). One can also note the episodic character of strategic discourses (Hendry and Seidl 2003). Strategic discourse is limited to certain areas and groups. It takes place at a distance from daily practices and operations, a dimension behind which we can see signs of a rule of intentionality: an abstract and formalized intentionality (Lilley 2001), detached from specific practices and context.7 Strategic discourses will only retain those objects, theories and concepts that show a willingness to influence. However, not all objects that we may wish to influence are ‘strategic’, and the material and social practices that limit the possibilities of this discourse of influence must be analyzed. On this point, Deleuze (1986) underlines that discursive practices cannot be understood without first appreciating the practices and techniques of visibility that bring to light certain elements, while hiding others. Lilley (2001) emphasizes that while strategic discourse is knowledge marked by influence and intentionality, one can only influence what one can see. Strategic knowledge cannot, in fact, be envisioned independently from the techniques and practices of other management disciplines that allow us to see what can be influenced (techniques 7

See the distinction made by Giddens (1993, pp. 82–84) between practical intents, and projects or purposes.

A Foucauldian perspective on strategic practice

and practices of visibility): accounting recording techniques, marketing research analysis, financial analysis, skill evaluation, etc. Without a doubt, the extension of strategic knowledge is equally owed to information technologies that, over time, have permitted the recording of collected information, their treatment and, today, their interrelating through ERP systems. These systems of visibility widen the possibilities of strategic discourse, to the extent that we can more clearly see the multiple chains of influence among management practices. The analysis of strategic practices as a field of knowledge departs from the idea of a flexible strategic practice, adaptable and adapted to the context and purposes of the actors, that is prevalent in the Strategy as Practice approach. Empirical research on Strategy as Practice (Chesney and Wenger 1999; Jarzabkowski 2003; Lozeau et al. 2002; Regnér 2003; Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2005) underscores the continuous adaptation of strategic practices to their micro-context (which includes the relationships between individuals, and the set of tools, vocabulary and supports at their disposal) as well as the transformations that the practices themselves exercise on organizational context (Tsoukas and Chia 2002). Admittedly, localized practices are not free of all influence from other structures and institutions in which they operate. Remaining attached to the idea of practices and social structures that both enable and constrain action and interaction (cf. Giddens 1993), researchers take care to recouple this adaptable and localized strategic practice with social practices (familial, political, professional, linguistic or organizational). On the one hand, Hendry and Seidl (2003) and Regnér (2003) consider certain strategic practices (respectively, away-days or strategic episodes and distancing of centre/periphery) as areas that, because they suspend, at least in part, the rules and routines of the organization, enable freer and more creative thought by the actors on their practice, thus favouring transformation. However, Hendry and Seidl (2003) also stress that the very detachment of away-days from the operational and routine makes the eventual recoupling and transformation of the practice within context limited. Regnér (2003) shows that innovative ideas and practices

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are favoured by the autonomy of the subsidiaries and that this subsequently gives rise to a gap with the practices of the centre. On the other hand, other researchers see strategic practices as a set of resources allowing them to create a particular strategic practice. Taking inspiration from Giddens (1991, p. 80), Whittington (1992, p. 696) considers that the diversity of social systems and activities in modern societies offers the individual an increased capacity to choose their lifestyles and identities. Participating in a multiplicity of social systems (political, domestic, professional, etc.), individuals are liable to import rules and resources to an organization, and to question and transform its system of practices (Hung and Whittington 1997). In a closely related perspective, Jarzabkowski (2003), following Engeström’s activity theory (1987), postulates that the inherent contradictions of the different dimensions of a concrete activity are likely to destabilize the activity system, leading to change. She views strategic practices of direction, allocation of resources and supervision, respectively, as a group of tools, rules and terms of labour division between the actors and the strategic activity itself (the result). Studying these practices in three British universities, she emphasizes their role as vehicles of meaning, and highlights the possible tensions that drive them, showing how a manager might use these tensions to introduce strategic change. In summary, works in line with the Strategy as Practice approach generally make reference to an image of adaptability. As individuals can cut themselves off from daily practices with strategic episodes, and as they are at the same time integrated in multiple social systems and their associated practices, they are capable of reconstructing and adapting their strategizing to their interests and problems of the moment. Departing from this perspective, the Foucauldian analysis of strategic practices as a body of knowledge shows that while strategic discourse and practices may be quite diverse, this does not necessarily imply that they are created by free, all-powerful individuals. In effect, strategic practices obey a specific regime which has an established set of rules and parameters, a regime that excludes, at the same time, other ‘worlds of possibilities’ (Calàs

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and Smircich 1988, p. 206, cited in Linstead and Brewis 2007, p. 359). As discourse, strategic practices obey rules of statements that retain as strategic only those objects that can be intentionally influenced. As a system of visibility, strategic practice appears controlled by the techniques of data collection and analysis, techniques that illuminate certain aspects, while masking others. As a body of knowledge, strategic practices narrow the range of possible actions and the ways with which we see and understand ourselves. Recognizing both their constructed and structuring aspects encourages us to question their consequences for our lives and subjectivities.

The strategist ‘unfolded’: say what you want From the ‘do-what-you-want’ to the ‘say-what-you-want’ strategist In the Foucauldian view, the practitioner is a subject constituted through the discursive and non-discursive practices that he accomplishes. This conception clearly distinguishes itself from the Strategy as Practice view of strategist, which envisions the strategist as a bricoleur strategist who does what he wants within the limit of the means and resources at his disposal. While practitioners in the Strategy as Practice approach may adopt practices in order to appear to conform to the expectations of the environment, they are also capable of manipulating the materials at their disposal (rules, resources and current norms; Hung and Whittington 1997; Jarzabkowski, 2003, including stocks of knowledge, rhetorical resources and procedures; Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2005) and equally capable of taking advantage of contradictions and diversity in order to transform, adapt and combine these pre-packaged practices to their own purposes. Thus, within the Strategy as Practice approach, the strategist is necessarily competent (see, in particular, Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2005): capable of ‘pretending’, of persuading those from the exterior that the desired practice is, in fact, being adopted (Lozeau et al. 2002), of convincing

collaborators of the necessity of adapting a particular practice and/or modifying their interpretation (Jarzabkowski 2003) and of bringing together new practices with existing ones (Regnér 2003; Hendry and Seidl 2003). Strategists are also capable of distancing themselves from what they do, of considering the diversity of available materials and, finally, of achieving their objectives (Hung and Whittington 1997). Thus, this image of the bricoleur strategist, competent and deliberate, is often referred to in works involving the Strategy as Practice approach. In contrast, ‘Foucauldian’ practitioners are to a large extent what the practices and discourses want them to be. This idea has been debated and commented on by sociologists of practice (see Schatzki 2001). Giddens (1993) and Schatzki (2001) recognize the intentional character of all practice, but following Foucault, they emphasize that the notion of intent must not be confused with the notion of project or purpose (Giddens 1993, pp. 82–84). Intention of practice is, in fact, endogenous, constitutive of the practice itself, oriented towards the continuation of the activity and largely dependent on the level of knowledge we have regarding the practice. It must be distinguished from the strategist’s capacity to develop a project, a project that defines itself, at least in part, separately from the practice itself (Barnes 2001, pp. 20–21). The Strategy as Practice approach appears to obscure the distinction between this capacity to develop a project and the intention that is carried by the strategic practice itself. Following on from Knights and colleagues, one may argue that strategic practices inscribe the subjectivity of practitioners, endowing them with particular identity and intentions. Being a strategist means to have intent, designs and plans (Knights and Morgan 1991), to take risks, be an agent of change, be responsible and autonomous (Knights and McCabe 2003), and to master, at least in part, their environment and future. These inscriptions accord them the capacity of choice and action so that they may oppose what is being asked of them (Knights and McCabe 2003), giving rise to resistance and opposition. In this sense, strategic discourses have ‘ontological power’. They influence how people make

A Foucauldian perspective on strategic practice

sense of their environment, and at the same time assign organizational members distinctive positions and rights to take part in strategic decision-making which may lead to ‘discursive struggles’ (Laine and Vaara 2007): while strategic discourses are aimed at gaining control, they can also give rise to resistance as they undermine the subjectivity of particular members, who will develop alternative strategic discourses to reestablish their legitimacy and identity as ‘strategic actors’. In addition, these inscriptions that strategic practices create do not occur on virgin ground but on previous inscriptions, giving way to a process of sedimentation and hybridation that could distort them (Allard-Poesi 2006). In effect, work studying the realization of strategic practices within context emphasize the limits (limits not uniquely related to resources) of the adaptability of the structures and social practices in place. More than a creative exploitation of the contradictions of social systems, the emergence of a new practice is often the result of its assimilation to existing social practices. Within the hospitals studied by Lozeau et al. (2002), the principles and processes of strategic planning, for example, poorly corresponded to the existing practices and methods of interactions. It was shown that the strategic planning introduced was diverted from its original purpose and meaning in order to reproduce the prior processes of influence and negotiation where the opinions of physicians prevail. Thus, according to this discursive conception, strategic practices clearly inscribe the actor’s subjectivity, which may, at the same time, constitute possibilities for resistance (Knights 2002). However, in our view, such a version of resistance does not sufficiently take into account the dimension of control implied by strategic practices. In adopting a ‘muscular’ conception of strategic discourse (where discourses both reveal and inscribe people’s subjectivities; Alvesson and Karreman 2000), analysis may overestimate both the power of the discourse and the capacity of resistance of the organizational members. At the same time, such a view neglects that we (also) are what we do. Foucault (1975) urges us here to pay particular attention to the concrete practices and techniques

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that shape people’s conduct and relationships, which together create matrices of power. To reiterate, strategic practices can be seen as a response to the problem of control at a distance that is prevalent in the modern corporation. Looked at from this angle, strategic practice appears less as a rupture with the disciplinary model as described by Foucault (1975), and more as an economic change in its applications and targets. Through a formulation of strategic intentions, it is no longer the behaviour that is supervised (what we do), but the result that this behaviour should bring. Different from the disciplinary model described by Foucault, supervision and inspection don’t rely uniquely on the perspective of the supervisor. It is, in effect, up to the controlled ‘subjects’ to make themselves known by declaring intentions, by communicating the obtained results and by describing their own methods of supervision and control. What appears determinant here is to what degree the enterprise, its managers and members will reveal themselves. Strategic practices thus constitute a method of supervision, through the objectifying of intentions (cf. Knights and Morgan 1991) and the demonstration of self-control (maîtrise de soi), and not exclusively through the hierarchical inspection of behaviour. As everybody wants to be a strategist8 and may resist others’ attempts to discursively control them (Laine and Vaara 2007), they are motivated to reveal (or express) their intentions and projects.

What resistance? In such a context, to what extent can we talk about resistance? Do strategic practices create the capacity to resist for organizational members? For Foucault (1988, 2001, p. 1604), resistance supposes the exercise of practices of self-transformation by which the subject, relying on social practices, tries to transform himself (see also Foucault 1984b; Townley 1995). In ancient Greece, these techniques of self require that one has listened to and 8

This may be due to the diffusion of strategic discourses and techniques across the hierarchical levels as a way to foster autonomy, participation and responsibility among organizational members.

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assimilated the lessons of the masters or the ancient texts.9 The constitution of self also supposed at the same time significant work on self as a means of freedom, as only a free man can dominate others (his children, his wife). It is only by using the ‘personal’ rules that he has acquired through self-work, that he will be able to create a personal subjectivity. This work on self supposes that the individual will actively engage with others and the world, analyse his personal reactions and ensure that these reactions respect the principles of order (Townley 1995). For Foucault, a power relationship exists that is understood as the ability to influence others’ conducts (conduite de la conduite) to the extent that the behaviour of individuals is free a priori (Foucault 1984b). More specifically, the capacity to fold-in outside forces in order to create oneself as an independent being assumes irreducible freedom. In other words, the resistance comes first and is not (alone or uniquely), as works by Knights (2002) and others indicate, a consequence of practices of knowledge and power, of their diversity, of their contradictions and of the ‘multiple identities’ they allow. Moreover, it is this liberty that allows the constitution of a personal subjectivity. Deleuze (1986, pp. 104, 107–108) highlights the fact that, for Foucault, subjectivity is created by ‘foldings’: the inside of thought being a fold from the ‘outside’ (relationships of power and knowledge). This subjective fold is not a sign or a reflection of the outside. It is a specific derivative that takes a sort of independence from forces of power and knowledge, to the extent that the individual is capable of bending those using techniques and work on self. Foucault’s conception of subjectivity clearly distinguishes itself from the Strategy as Practice approach (see also Townley 1995; Linstead and Brewis 2007). As opposed to an existing ‘self’ waiting to be revealed, excavated and eventually transformed, Foucault invites us to envision the self as a kind of ‘work-in-progress’ as one actively 9

The Grecian self-techniques aimed at managing this area of power present in all relations and were thus akin to a form of government.

engages with others and the world. To resist, in this perspective, necessarily assumes working with, and questioning, these subjectivities that are ‘given’ to us through management practices (strategic practices, projects), practices that aim to reveal, fix and instrumentalize, via intention, desire. It is a struggle then, not only with individualized practices of control, but equally against those practices ‘that consist of attaching each individual to a well-known and well-learned identity, determined once and for all’ (Deleuze 1986, p. 113). In this perspective, resistance must be distinguished from the various discursive battles that take place among organizational members as they all claim a strategist’s position and associated identity (cf. Laine and Vaara 2007). Resistance must also be distinguished from disengagement or passivity that may be observed as people encounter difficulties enacting the various (and sometimes contradicting) injunctions of strategic discourses (cf. Knights and McCabe 2003; Knights 2002). In more generic terms, strategic practices do not assume the intensification of the subject’s relationship to self that the Foucauldian conception of resistance implies. It is not concerned with working on oneself, but rather working on a project, thus revealing what one wants to accomplish. While working on oneself may help to constitute the ‘subject’ by the changes that the work requires, strategic practices imply an ‘unfolding’ of self, bringing forth the subjectivity in order to be better seen. The transformation of strategic diagnostic tools clearly illustrates this ‘unfolding’, a sort of ironing out of subjectivity. The models developed by McKinsey in the 1960s made the manager indicate interesting business opportunities based on specific criteria, by which he expressed his intentions (turnover, profit and growth, for example). More recent tools developed on the basis of this model (Copeland et al. 2000) do not permit the strategist to translate his intentions into specific criteria, having portfolio value as a terminal objective and proposing a series of concrete steps to reach it. As Knights and Morgan propose, perhaps strategic practices do constitute forms of subjectivity,

A Foucauldian perspective on strategic practice

but we believe, strategic practices aim, above all, to bring to light the subjects’ subjective ‘folds’ and desires. As such, they appear poorly equipped to create a form of resistance.

Conclusion Foucauldian analysis invites us to envision strategy as a body of knowledge that is a specific set of discursive practices and practices of visibility. These strategic practices appear to be governed by rules of influence and intent that will be limited by what we can ‘see’. Being inscribed within a larger field of power, strategic practices emerge as a complex series of transformations that take part in techniques of control at a distance of the modern enterprise. In this way, these strategic practices diverge from the model of disciplinary supervision that Foucault describes (1975). It is, in effect, up to those who are being supervised to show that they are supervising themselves using adequate procedures and it is up to them to make themselves seen by revealing their intentions and results. In this sense, strategic management is similar to a monitoring technique in which the strategist is led to an ‘unfolding’ of self (Deleuze 1986, p. 110): to reveal one’s intentions, say what is hidden, ‘objectify’ one’s subjectivity, in order to, once again, enter into the relationships of knowledge and power. Strategic practices fully involve the modern techniques of governing that Rose (1999) speaks of. Far from creating a supervisory technique that is piloted from the outside, strategic management appears as a technique through which the strategist–subject ‘makes the feelings, wishes and emotions of the self visible to itself’ (p. 228). Strategic management would not be an art of folding (or leading) others, not even self-folding (submitting to the control of others), but more of a personal unfolding: bringing to the surface, and objectifying, desires and intentions in order to be better ‘seen’ (Rose 1999), and to be caught up in the relations of knowledge and power (Deleuze 1986); becoming, through self-revelation and self-control, a blank surface upon which other intentions and other projects can be inscribed.

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This Foucauldian perspective opens up new areas of research for the study of Strategy as Practice: • To what extent do strategic practices participate in a field of power? What would be the constituent traits of this field? As imprisonment cannot be seen independently from other disciplinary practices and techniques, strategic practices cannot be conceived of without taking into account other management techniques (within corporations and society as a whole) and the matrices of power that are inherent in such systems. Such a genealogy of strategic practices would also allow a more precise explanation as to why intentionality appears as the centre around which strategic knowledge and its associated control methods gravitate. Rose’s (1999) work on the techniques of modern governmentality may constitute a useful base for understanding this. • What are the respective rhythms of transformation and evolution of the discourse and practices of visibility that form the basis of today’s strategic knowledge? Archaeological analysis of strategic discourse would enable us to determine if principles other than intentionality, as discussed in this chapter, would not equally limit the proliferation of strategic discourse. This analysis would also clarify the roles and influences of information technology in the evolution of this body of knowledge since World War II. It would rely on a detailed analysis of the classic textbooks on strategy and on the discursive and material ‘conditions’ that enable such discourses to emerge (see Foucault 1969, for details). • What kinds of resistance can strategic knowledge be subject to? What are the sources of this resistance? Can this phenomenon be conceived of, and taken into account, within strategic practices and the subjectivity they create, as proposed by Knights and his followers? Or does resistance in organizations imply that subjects work on themselves in order to ‘fold-in’ strategic knowledge thus creating a specific, independent subjectivity? In our view, studies of resistance in organizations should be compared with those carried out in other social contexts.

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In sum, Foucault’s perspective invites us to question the ‘limits’ of strategic management: as a coherent group of discourse and techniques first of all, second as a practical or rational necessity, and finally as a free and creative space. In a larger sense, the differences between the Foucauldian perspective of strategy and the Strategy as Practice approach as discussed here can be usefully mobilized to question their foundations. The notion of an actor’s intentionality (or will and desire) appears as an important line of demarcation. Although indeed a structuring element, this notion has been the object of a limited number of studies, as if it is assumed that intention exists and doesn’t need to be questioned (also see Ruef 2003, p. 247). After the (socio-)cognitive approach questioned how managers and their teams ‘think’, we became interested in what they do and who they are, and by this bias, have avoided the question of what they want. This could very well be a unique opportunity to question the notion of strategic intent. Whether managers do what they want, or they are, and want, what they do, remains unexplored.

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A narrative approach to Strategy as Practice: strategy making from texts and narratives VA L É R IE -IN È S D E L A V IL LE a nd E L É O NO R E MO U N O U D

The narrativizing of practices is a textual ‘way of operating’, having its own procedures and tactics. […] Shouldn’t we recognize its scientific legitimacy by assuming that instead of being a remainder that cannot be, or has not yet been, eliminated from discourse, narrativity has a necessary function in it, and that a theory of narration is indissociable from a theory of practices, as its condition as well as its production. (de Certeau 1988: 78)

Introduction The Strategy as Practice approach requires a close and detailed scrutiny of practitioners’ activities. Such a micro-level approach enables us to depart from the conventional perspective and delve into the ‘internal life of the process’, to study in more details ‘individual’ rather than ‘organizational’ performance (Samra-Fredericks 2003). Moving attention away from macro-processes towards various aspects of the minutiae of strategy making has changed the discourse used by researchers to explain how strategy is conceived, explained and communicated (Whittington 2007). In practice, strategy is still essentially considered as microprocesses – i.e. the actual activities carried out by individuals within their organized contexts. Although social practice theory tends to emphasize the tacit and informal dimensions of practices and praxis, Strategy as Practice research has focused much more on explicit practices, especially on operating procedures and standards (Jarzabkowski 2004, 2005), norms of appropriate strategic behaviour set by industry recipes (Spender 1989) and legitimizing discourses (Barry

and Elmes 1997). Futhermore, while social practice theory advocates ‘agency’ for everyone in everyday life, Strategy as Practice research pays attention mainly to special events (Hendry and Seidl 2000) and top management personnel (Samra-Fredericks 2003). Thus the approach’s achievement has been a change in the method of observing a phenomenon’s processes, and not the basic categories of thought. However, so far Strategy as Practice research has mainly focused on the visible part of the iceberg: people, events and explicit tools. The actual practice in itself has not been sufficiently investigated. Focusing on micro-activities leaves the macro– micro distinction intact, but raises the subsequent problem of linking individual actions to macro outcomes. Making a ‘practice turn’ in strategy research requires not only knitting together ‘micro-practices’ and ‘macro-outcomes’, but also avoiding being caught in the trap of considering practices as just something people do. Practices are construed as social skills that have been culturally acquired, hence unconsciously absorbed and embodied. This compels us to take the dynamic and emerging fields of practices as the starting point for analysis, thereby getting by with the usual macro–micro distinction. Hence, Chia and MacKay’s (2007) call for shifting the focus of analysis ‘from individual strategists to the historically and culturally transmitted fields of practice’. Schatzki (2005) proposes that we should view practices as relational sites in which events, entities and meanings compose one another. The challenge is now to overcome the prevalent individualistic focus on micro-level managerial activities and roles, which leaves a mass of larger 183

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social issues melting into the under-theorized, all-encompassing category of ‘context’ (Tsoukas 1994; Willmott 1997). Following the Heideggerian view, Chia and Holt argue that the dominant ‘building’ mode of strategy making, in which actors are distinct entities deliberately engaging in purposeful strategic activities, is actually derived from a more basic ‘dwelling’ mode in which strategy making emerges nondeliberately through everyday practical ‘coping’. Practical ‘coping’ is rooted in social practices. Social practices are identity-forming and strategysetting activities. They provide individuals with resources to interpret and improvise their role; they shape the scope and the extent of their exploratory activities and initiatives to cope with the ongoing flow of organizational development (Chia and Holt 2006). Mundane practical ‘coping’ can produce unexpected and strategically important outcomes, as shown in the famous example of Honda’s success in the USA (Pascale 1984), in Regnér’s (2003) uncovering of local improvisation at the periphery of corporate reach, in de La Ville’s (2006) work on emerging technological strategies in a start-up, and in Rouleau’s (2005) analysis of strategy formation in everyday interactions. These studies show the importance of recognizing how much of strategy formation is rooted in the non-deliberate practical action of ‘coping’ that escapes the logic of planned and intentional action. This chapter builds upon the distinction between the ‘building’ and the ‘dwelling’ modes in order to introduce a narrative approach to Strategy as Practice. We contend that Strategy as Practice research is still mainly imbued with the conceptual categories of the dominant ‘building’ mode. We propose that the recognition and integration of the ‘dwelling’ mode into strategy formation, as well as the combination of the ‘building’ and the ‘dwelling’ modes in strategy-making, are the key challenges for research analysis. In order to include in the picture the hidden creativity embedded in mundane practical ‘coping’, closer scrutiny and better accuracy in methodology need to be achieved. We propose a narrative approach to Strategy as Practice. It relates strategy making to using texts and narratives, and also provides the conceptual and methodological means to deal

with the challenges mentioned above. A narrative approach enables strategy research to engage more deeply in the ‘practice turn’ and to develop a ‘certain research sensibility to the unspoken, the inarticulate and even the often unconscious aspects of strategy-making’ (Chia and MacKay 2007). This chapter is organized in four sections. The first section describes the various perspectives on narratives brought into strategy research. Beyond the overall functionalist interest in good stories, it shows the importance of texts in strategy and management. The second section, on the basis of the work of Paul Ricœur, develops the implications of this very notion of text. The third section follows Michel de Certeau’s analysis of practices to identify a narrative way of forming strategy. In line with Chia’s distinction based on Heidegger, we consider producing texts as the dominant ‘building’ mode of strategy making. This mode is actually derived from a more basic ‘dwelling’ mode, in which strategy formation emerges through reading texts and producing daily narratives. The last section draws the implications of our conceptual framework of ‘strategy-making from texts and narratives’, which is based upon the dynamics of reading and writing ‘texts’. It offers a perspective in which all organizational actors participate in strategy formation when dealing with texts produced by others as well as in reading these texts and thus engaging in bricolage of strategy.

Narratives in strategy research Since the publication of Barry and Elmes’ (1997) article on the narrative aspects of strategic discourses, it has been generally accepted that strategy – both organizational strategies and theories of strategy – consists of stories told by key people, generally leaders, to other people such as shareholders, members of the organization and other stakeholders. This work highlighted the double nature of strategy – narrative production and process of narration – by which various stories about strategic choices are connected, tested, reinforced or weakened. It also related strategic change processes to the romantic genre, the adventure novel of

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ordeal and to realistic fiction. With a certain degree of irony, the authors underlined the epic, even hagiographic, character of several strategic discourses of leaders. For example, the promotion of neoSchumpeterian heroes in entrepreneurial strategies created a demiurgic drift in many research accounts of new venture founding (de La Ville 2006). Why are stories and narratives so interesting? The basic function of a story is to organize a series of events and actors into a common, acceptable and comprehensible temporal framework. By reorganizing events in a temporal framework, stories preserve and build the continuity of actions. The perception of the stakes of the present situation enables us to reorganize past events into a story. Restructuring a group of relationships creates retrospective senses, hence enabling further action. This faculty of generating sense has led researchers to become interested in stories told within organizations. Research on organizational culture and identity considers both large stories – myths, texts and discourses – and smaller ones such as stories, storytelling, gossip and narratives (Gabriel 2000; Boje 1991, 1995; Boyce 1996) as important in analysing and understanding organizational life. Stories and storytelling have now pervaded management, strategy and marketing research areas (Salmon 2007) and have put in the forefront a new array of consultants and gurus. Good stories are hence considered an effective factor in implementing strategic ideas. Strategy formulation involves a narrative production of an integrative story that enables the leaders to reorganize past events according to a plausible and desirable logic. What is at stake is the capacity of stories to construct a persuasive and stimulating message to facilitate memorization and training or to convince stakeholders of the relevance of a strategy. Leaders need to be good storytellers, i.e. be able to tell good stories which must be both coherent to gain credibility and stimulating to facilitate its reception and implementation. In a functionalist view, the construction of a good story supposes an overall intentionality, meaning total control of the plot through to its final outcome. However, it does not take into account such organizational phenomena as improvisations or routine activities, to which it

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is difficult to attribute intentionality due to their taken-for-granted nature. Thus, the functionalistic view of strategic stories fails to capture the complexity of strategic processes and practices. It prevents us from widening the field of analysis to include the ordinary narratives of mid to low-level organizational members in relationship with the higher-level ‘visionary’ strategy produced by senior executives. However, is the intrinsic quality of a good story able to dissolve the integrative difficulties inherent in the strategic exercise? Moreover, can the integrative strategic narrative be considered effective without including the interpretations of people to whom it is addressed? To escape this over-simplistic view of storytelling management, we need to account more accurately for the narrative perspectives brought into strategy research. For social scientists, the interest in narratives is based on the way people organize knowledge in their daily life. It is suggested that people organize their experience in the form of scripts about goal-based events that include people, places and events, and these scripts are recounted in the form of stories. On the one hand, it seems fairly evident that narrative is a universal form in which people construct, represent and share experience (Bruner 1990). On the other hand, evidence shows how deep cultural narratives are, how powerful stories are as a socializing agent and, conversely, how much they reveal about the values, beliefs and thought processes of a given culture or community. Bruner (1986), among others, has argued that it is difficult to distinguish between the stories children learn and the stories they build from their direct experience and knowledge. The narrative ability to create stories develops during childhood through reminiscing and engaging in symbolic play (Engel 1995). Narratives do not merely convey fantasies or the representation of unusual feelings or experiences, but also provide a fundamental intra- and interpersonal process, through which children make sense of themselves in the world. Storytelling is a deep social activity and a powerful private activity. Children tell stories when alone, they tell stories that have private meanings, and they use stories as much for their internal thoughts and feelings as they do to

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communicate. What researchers have learned so far is that children create stories in much the same way as they create play scenarios – with the pleasure of creativity. It is important to keep in mind that the form and content of children’s stories are tied to the context in which they are told and the purpose for which they are told (Engel 2005). Following Czarniawska’s distinction between three different modes of mobilizing narratives, we acknowledge three narrative perspectives in strategy research. It is possible for the researcher either to build explanations out of ‘narratives from the field’, or to build his own ‘narrative in the field’ and even to define ‘organising as narration’ (Czarniawska 1997, p. 25). The first mode is visible in the interactional perspective developed in communication science, the second is at play when strategy is portrayed as a story of domination and discipline, and the third envisages strategy formation as narration.

Strategic narratives as meta-conversations The interactional perspective highlights the vital importance of communication in organizational life in general and strategy formation in particular. For followers of this approach, ordinary activities develop through conversations, which constitute coherent discursive units in themselves. Giroux describes this process as a ‘chain of conversations’ spread out in time and space. She considers a dialogical mode of production of strategy, ‘through a polyphonic vision of the community where several voices are heard, and where the heteroglossia (the simultaneous presence of several languages) is accepted’ (Giroux 1998, p. 7, our translation). The formulation of strategy is then conceived as a narrative process that organizes polyphony. The concept of polyphony recognizes the coexistence, interaction and mutual definition of various logics. In this polyphonic process, strategy formulation is never controlled by one single author, so it is particularly complex. Strategy is worked out gradually by negotiation within a ‘meta-conversation’ (Giroux and Demers 1997) dedicated to strategy formation, and leads to the drafting of a strategic text.

Taylor and Robichaud (2004) suggest that for organizational members to interact, they must construct a shared language, embodied in a text which enables them to cooperate. This begins with everyday conversation with mutual interaction, which is a prerequisite of organized activity. The resulting narratives constitute secondary productions, which formalize the interpretations constructed in conversation and carry them toward future actions. Not only does the text produced retain the traces of the original conversations, it frames subsequent actions by offering interpretative frameworks for the sensemaking of ongoing events. This view relates the concept of text to that of the framework of interaction, which is inspired by Erving Goffman and has previously been used in analysing strategy formation (de La Ville 2001). This proposition is based on the analytical distinction between the two dimensions of discourse as text (what is said) and conversation (what is accomplished in the saying): ‘Conversation refers, in other words, to the interactive, situated “eventfulness” of language use; text refers to the semiotic artefact (oral or written) produced in the use of language, which may persist as a trace and record of past conversations’ (Robichaud et al. 2004). A meta-conversation is then defined as ‘a conversation that embeds, recursively, another conversation’ (Robichaud et al. 2004). The meta-conversation simultaneously incorporates and reconstructs the local discussions within the organization into an encompassing conversation, where the identity of the organization as a whole is continuously regenerated. The process at work is the production of a meta-narrative that enfolds and transcends the narratives of the different communities comprising an organization.

Strategic narratives as discourse of domination Inspired by the work of Foucault, the critical organizational discourse perspective (Vaara 2002; Phillips and Hardy 2002; Fairclough 2005) focuses on discourses as linguistically mediated constructions of social realities. Discourses are important means through which beliefs, values and norms are reproduced and at times transformed in social life

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(Fairclough 2003). This perspective is one of the various approaches to discourse analysis (van Dijk 1997) and to organizational discourse analysis in particular (Hardy and Philips 2004; Grant et al. 2004). Based on the work of Foucault (1971), this study highlights the disciplining power of discourses on the ordinary practices of organization members, stemming from their capacity to impose and legitimize certain interpretative frameworks at the expense of others. Foucault warns that it is a question ‘of no longer treating the discourses as sets of signs (of meaningful elements which refer to contents or representations), but as practices which systematically form the objects about which they speak’ (Foucault 1976). Discourses should be considered ‘surreptitious objectivations’ (objectivations subreptices): they appear to be built by induction and serve to describe the world, but in fact they actually constitute the world. More generally, the language used on a daily basis within an organization is itself a bearer of logics of domination, which direct ordinary interactions and activities and legitimize power relations (Hardy 2004). Strategy discourse is thus considered to be a complex set of meanings constituting this body of knowledge (Knights and Morgan 1991), as well as a part of the complex set of social practices formulating strategy as an organizational practice. Moreover, discourse analysis enables us to identify how specific conceptions of strategy work are reproduced and justified in organizational strategy formation. The idea that strategy includes a disciplining dimension emphasizes the importance of the stakes of power and legitimization invoked in the strategic exercise. Critical theorists (Alvesson and Deetz 2000; Putnam and Cooren 2004) offer a distinctive point of view on key documents, such as regulations, procedures and memorandums. Discourses are selected, perpetuated and subsumed in texts, which are registered, preserved and memorized in accordance with the disciplinary function of the organization. These texts do not result from interaction between organization members; they rather influence strategy formulation by virtue of their structured and permanent character that enables organizations to survive (McPhee 2004). Discourses and texts

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mobilize mechanisms of domination based on legitimized rationality and the invoked scientific nature of the discipline. They result in practices of monitoring and controlling, but also aim at influencing the subjectivity and identity of organization members. Hardy and Phillips (2004) highlight how certain actors are able to mobilize economic, cultural and social capital to legitimize their power. From this point of view, the very notion of discourse includes domination and is opposed to the ordinary, fragmentary, situational narratives being built during the course of the everyday activities of organization members and bearing the stamp of subjectivity and of emotion.

Organizations and strategies as narration The claim made by McIntyre (1988) that ‘it is useful to think of an enacted narrative as the most typical form of social life’ (cited in Czarniawska 2002) is adopted in the third view. Czarniawska’s (1997) interest is in the daily activities of the organization members, which result in the creation of the organization itself. She identifies two types of conversations: those allowing for the confrontation of personal experience or actions between two parties, and those manufacturing texts beyond the personal experience of the individual by imposing standards of behaviour and decision. This coexistence results in fierce competition between the ‘stronger’ order – that of the official discourse which reinforces institutional domination by controlling interpretations – and the ‘weaker’ order – that of the ordinary narratives which try to make sense of daily activities. Her work suggests an ironic stance with regard to the impact of strategists, as she finds strategy to be a relatively artificial discursive construction, far removed from the realities experienced by organization members and geared to institutional concerns for domination and justification. Without any impact on the future of large public organizations and with no control over its daily activities, strategy appears in her description to be a kind of meaningless ritual (de La Ville and Mounoud 2003). The severity of this assessment is partly explained by Czarniawska’s focus on public organizations where the distance between official

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discourses and actual practices might be particularly perceptible. In Czarniawska’s view, everyday life within the organization takes shape through ordinary narratives in which individuals select events, organize temporalities, typify key characters, build identity relationships, structure their experience, and construct and transform their interpretations. Drawing on Bruner’s point that ‘there is an availability, or a predisposition to organise experience in narrative form by building intrigues’ (Bruner 1990), we estimate that the continuity of existence may be understood by recounting this same existence, a narrative process of fashioning one another’s identities. Through the spoken word, exchanged and retained among themselves, organization members construct and perpetuate their identities and their organized activity. Language, speech, plot production, mere stories and ordinary narrations are experienced and consubstantial with organizing itself. The construction of activities, knowledge and identities is thus structured in and through a complex interlacing of narrative processes, which is always spontaneous, related to unforeseen events and socially organized (Czarniawska 1998). In the following section, we will study strategy in terms of narration, including narrative production and the process of narration, in which the future is created through a collective narrative that is dispersed and fragmented, being the subject of partial developments, major transformations and inscriptions perpetuated in texts. Strategy-making, when considered as directing the future and leading organization members to comply with this direction, results partly in the production of texts. Nevertheless, not all texts can be qualified as ‘strategic’, nor is strategy formation confined to the processes of creating or monitoring the effects of ‘strategic’ texts. We will now consider the implications of this production of texts.

Strategy formation as producing texts Strategic texts constitute forms of mediation, in and through which organizational actors reflexively understand their situations, give meaning to their actions, and anticipate their futures. Produced strategic texts thus have a double relation with the

context (the preceding texts with which they interact) and the situation (the mundane organizational activities and practices to which they relate and help organize).

Texts organize relationships of intertextuality and polyphony The production of a strategic text relies on a group of scriptural prerequisites. To be described as ‘strategic’, the text must bring together appropriate standards, rules and criteria that explicitly connect it to the discipline of management and to various genres relevant to strategy, such as management reports, business plans, development plans, refocusing plans, asset redeployment plans, etc. Processes of institutionalization accompany and support the production of strategic texts while differentiating them from other textual productions. MBA programmes, specialized academic courses, consulting firms and trade associations legitimize strategists and increase their influence. Strategic activity is seen through textual productions that communicate to shareholders the relevance of the strategic project and the strategic team’s control. Strategic texts are embedded in intertextual relations, with pre-existent strategic texts that are themselves governed by the instituted kinds of organizational productions, and by discursive orders based not only on strategic management as a discipline (Hardy 2004), but also on objectives and strategies derived from the constitutive values of the local social system. Since strategy formulation is directly embedded in an institutional environment, it inevitably includes an ideological dimension, because it reproduces the inequalities of the capitalist society, extends Western managerial structures and presents the objectives of dominant elites as universal goals. Being institutionally inscribed, strategic texts propose worlds that include a disciplining function founded both on legitimized scriptural standards and on institutionalized value systems. Because they present a proposal for a relation with the world, strategic texts cannot ignore the multiplicity of voices, actions and narratives within the organization (Giroux and Demers 1997). The

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very production of strategic texts organizes a polyphonic relationship among voices, which always remain singular and develop autonomously, but answer one another, oppose one another and contribute to proposing new worlds (O’Connor 2000; Hardy 2004). Strategy formation proceeds from the application of strategic apprenticeship, which goes beyond the order of discourse and conversation to integrate a body of knowledge into explicit activities and tacit tactics. Furthermore, the ordinary practices of managers and the texts that underlie them, through the resistance that they express, continually nourish the inventiveness of the organizational actions and form an ongoing, emerging and vital part of the strategic activity. Either these practices are gradually recognized, named and defined so as to be integrated into the strategic text, or they remain invisible or exterior (perhaps because they occur outside official channels). Thus, strategic texts operate a selection and organization of mundane organizational narratives. The notion of ‘intertextuality’ allows us to appreciate writing as a permanently creative flux integrating previous standards and conventions in order to produce texts, which are likely to be readable, understandable and recognizable by an audience. It was described by Julia Kristeva (1980, p. 69) as a reaction to the tendency to analyse texts as discrete and closed units, whose meaningfulness lay in their internal structure. Drawing on the dialogue perspective proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) in literary theory, she contends that texts become meaningful if they are considered as a fragment relating to former texts. Shared codes allow both the writer and the reader to recognize, situate and appreciate the text in the continuum of literary production. It is worth noting that this post-structuralist perspective considers that every text is under the dominance of previous texts that impose a universe of codes in relation to which it will be read and understood by certain audiences. This suggests a drastic shift in the method of analysing reading and writing by focusing the effort on studying the process of structuration through which the text comes into being. By questioning the romantic roots that lead to the invention of the notion of ‘authorship’, this perspective lays special emphasis on the fact that

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writers are compelled to use pre-existing concepts and conventions to communicate with an audience. When speaking they are at least partially expressed and their individual creative skills are socially founded in shared language and scriptural conventions. That is why Roland Barthes defines text as a tissue of quotations, a creative art consisting in weaving former codes, references and genres (Barthes 1974). Texts draw upon a large range of codes and social norms that allow them to be assigned to a particular genre. Genres are situated and evolving conventions that enable us to classify texts and outline their relationship with each other. Literary theorists have demonstrated that the definition of genres is quite fluid and relates to ongoing changes and social renegotiations, leading to a permanent blurring of borders and a constant mitigation of their distinctive characteristics. We are fully aware that such a brief presentation of the complexities linked to the notion of ‘intertextuality’ and its use in cultural studies and literary analysis is a risky undertaking. Nevertheless, in the context of this chapter, we aim at transposing this notion into a managerial perspective, in an attempt to offer some guidelines to support managers’ efforts in mastering the complex stakes of ‘intertextuality’ needed to exploit strategically the creativity hidden in mundane organizational activities.

Texts call for reading To analyse the dynamics of texts, we draw on Paul Ricœur, for whom the concept of text covers a limited category of signs: those which comprise a form of fossilization comparable with that produced by writing (Ricœur 1991) because the latter allows the conservation and the linearization of the conversation. When writing is added to a previous statement, it modifies the relationship with the utterances, which is called the ‘ostensive reference’ by Ricœur, i.e. the object with which one expresses oneself. Writing creates a different relationship from that of interlocution: the reader is absent from the writing and the author from the reading. The text is thus the product of a simultaneous eclipsing of the reader and the author. In this

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view, the nature of the text is underlined. Because of its fossilization into a medium, because of the lack of association between the intention of the author and the intention of the text, because of the use of ‘non-ostensive’ references and the substitution of unknown readers for a visible listener, the text must be differentiated from a face-to-face or situated discourse. Consequently, ‘the text awaits and calls for reading’ (Ricœur 1991). Ricœur distinguishes two ways of understanding reading: to explain and to interpret. ‘To explain is to bring out the structure, i.e. the internal relations of dependence, which constitute the static of the text. To interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text and to start heading towards the orientation of the text’ (Ricœur 1991). This dualism suggests a dialectic in the activity of reading, as movement between these two attitudes produces interpretation. The open nature of the text is made salient: references are offered to propose a ‘world’ and build a new project. Reading is possible because text is not closed in on itself; it is open to other things. Reading is thus a creative activity that prolongs the creation of writing. As stated by Ricœur (1991), ‘to read is, in any hypothesis, to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text’. Strategic texts are characterized by their plurivocity: their significance is unresolved and each text, because of the distance caused by its written form, is open to alternative readings and constructions depending on the situations of readers. Interpreting strategic texts, organizational actors propose their relations with the world. This process of appropriation, which takes place in the narrative register, as we will show in the next section, is complex, dense, emergent and dynamic. We have underlined the ‘building’ mode of strategy formation as producing strategic texts. It is important to keep in mind that these texts are themselves embedded in a ‘context’ of previous texts and are derived from the polyphony of situated narratives. It is now possible to envisage the more basic ‘dwelling’ mode of strategy formation, the everyday practical ‘coping’ with the rules and the texts of the organization. The relationship of this ‘dwelling’ mode with the ‘building’ one is similar to that of reading with writing.

Narratives as practical coping with strategic texts The creativity of reading is shared by Michel de Certeau, who argues for a greater emphasis on the activity of reading to oppose the excessive importance placed on writing in contemporary society, a society that he finds ‘increasingly written, organised by the capacity to modify things and to reform the structures through scriptural models (scientific, economic, political), and gradually transformed into combined “texts” (administrative, urban, industrial, etc.)’. He strives to show that reading is not a passive activity; it modifies its object, reinvents beyond the intention of the text, and builds a different ‘world’, which belongs to the reader in place of the author, ‘to make the text liveable’. Readers carry out ‘a reappropriation of the other’s text: he poaches there, he is transported there, he becomes plural there’ (de Certeau 1988).

Reading as consuming texts According to Michel de Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. An interesting point is the distinction he makes between the concepts of strategy and tactics. De Certeau links ‘strategies’ with institutions and structures of power, while ‘tactics’ are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies. In one chapter, he describes ‘the city’ as a ‘concept’, generated by the strategic manoeuvring of governments, corporations and other institutional bodies, who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole experienced by someone looking down from high above. By contrast, a walker on the street moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies. He may take shortcuts or meander aimlessly, rather than follow the utilitarian layout of the grid of streets. This concretely illustrates de Certeau’s assertion that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, recombining the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.

A narrative approach to Strategy as Practice

For de Certeau, consumption supposes the acceptance of an offer of products. But consumers are active; they take pleasure in consuming and consider themselves free and creative in doing so. Under the apparent banality of ordinary gestures and routine actions lurks an extraordinary creativity often ignored by theory. Individuals show a great capacity for ‘making do’. They exhibit inventiveness in terms of shrewd ploys and stratagems to work out their own way of doing things, whether it is cooking, strolling through a town or shopping, etc. Being analysed superficially, certain routine behaviours reveal a form of submission. Through in-depth analysis, they reveal ongoing experimentations filled with resistance and creativity. The relationship between reading and writing is of a comparable nature: texts, just like the goods offered on the market, are produced by manufacturers who offer them to consumers – the readers – who decide upon their significance and use them in their own ways. De Certeau’s analysis of consumption is oriented towards the ordinary practices of consumers, who are defined as ‘users of goods imposed upon them by producers’. Indeed, in offering products to consumers, producers assume a position of domination, against which consumers resist by developing inventive attitudes and practices. By mirroring consumption and reading, de Certeau reveals the two sides of consumption. On the one hand, consuming entails a form of acceptance of an imposed offer of goods. On the other, consumers are neither passive nor docile; they experience freedom, creativity and pleasure – just as readers do. Commenting on empirical investigations of several situational social practices such as reading, talking, dwelling, cooking, wandering around, etc., de Certeau explores scientific literature in order to clarify the purpose of his theoretical undertaking: It may be supposed that these operations – multiform and fragmentary, relative to situations and details, insinuated into and concealed … within devices, whose mode of usage they constitute, and thus lacking their own ideologies or institutions – conform to certain rules. In other words, there must be a logic of these practices. (de Certeau 1988)

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Narrativity in strategy formation Thus, strategy making can be understood as a permanent creative process including not only what strategists produce/write, such as texts, budgets, plans, matrices, charts and strategies, but also the ways in which organization members consume/ read these productions. This conceptual framework leads us to question how organizational actors read, use and transform strategic texts in their daily activities. Reading takes place through the mobilization of innumerable fragmentary, instantaneous, opportunistic tactics (de La Ville and Mounoud 2001b). ‘These tactics also demonstrate the degree to which intelligence is inseparable from the struggles and the daily pleasures which it articulates […] Because of its intangible nature, a tactic depends on time and remains vigilant to catch any possibilities of profit. It does not keep what it gains. It is necessary for it to play constantly with the events to transfer them into opportunities’ (de Certeau 1988). Being incapable of capitalizing voluntarily on their achievements to control temporality and the course of events, these tactics, which are peculiar to the art of reading, may produce tangible and sometimes irreversible strategic effects, such as delays in implementation, side-tracking from the main objectives, operational diversions, more or less continuous symbolic rejections or the subversion of authority. Adopting this view provides a new way of looking at organizational practice, because it enables us to accept strategic discourses as a production and an offer of a (cultural) good: a text. Thus, we might be able to suggest new ways of explaining how people read, use and transform this particular cultural product. Linstead and Grafton-Small (1992) contrast the production of corporate culture with the creative consumption of organizational culture by organization members. Using this conception requires supplementing the analysis of the discourse of strategy (representation) and of the time spent attending strategic meetings (behaviour) with a study of what middle managers and employees actually ‘make’ or ‘do’ during that time and how they use these discourses. With their ‘making’ or ‘doing’ being devious and dispersed, it remains difficult for the researcher to analyse.

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In organizations, employees and managers do not adopt, adhere to or share the ‘strategic’ vision or intent of their ‘charismatic leaders’. In their everyday activities, they actively interpret, criticize, learn and experiment with possible attitudes and micro-decisions in order to implement or resist the multiple implications of strategic changes imposed on them. Practice expresses creativity, a capacity ‘to put up with’, to subvert imposed rules and create room for manoeuvre. Practice includes the subconscious part of creativity, seen in clever devices and inventions. This creativity is also evident in attempts to negotiate meanings of actions and events among organization members, i.e. in ordinary and everyday narratives. The narrative register indeed enables the practical art to express itself, to experiment, to improvise and to resist the domination of a disciplining totality envisioned by some strategic texts. De Certeau identifies three places where this practical creativity of ordinary accounts can be seen: the ‘games’ that formalize the organizing rules of ‘actions’, the ‘game texts’ that teach the practices available, and tales and legends that expose the available good and evil tricks. This aspect of consumption, included in strategic activity because of its dispersion, surreptitiousness and deviousness, evades the eye of both the researcher and the manager. This reading – or consumption – of strategic texts constitutes a second-order production, which de Certeau calls a fabrication, i.e. a narrative which is added to the intention of strategic texts. Employees often do not adhere to, embrace or share the strategic vision or the worlds produced by strategists or top management. In their daily activities, managers and employees learn, test and demonstrate critical thinking to take micro-decisions, be they to implement or resist strategic mandates. This conceptualization makes it possible to comprehend the complexity and the creativity of strategy formation and to reconsider the problematic bond between the ‘emergent’ and the ‘deliberate’. On the one hand, processes of institutionalization accompany and support the emergence of integrative organizational discourses that become strategic texts. On the other, innumerable readings ensue in a disorderly way,

gradually giving shape to a multiplicity of tactics that constitute strategic practice.

Implications for research As summed up in Figure 12.1, we have defined strategy formation as both producing strategic texts and reading them, thus, as producing daily narratives. The writing of strategic texts implies the use of standards, which authorize the inscription of the text in the strategic genre. Strategic texts are based on the institutional ruling order and combine together to produce the dominant discourse of strategy. Strategic texts proceed from a selection and polyphonic organization of mundane organizational narratives. But strategy formation also includes the creative reading of strategic texts, producing unpremeditated tactics for resisting their domination. Thus, it is important to study the consumption side of strategy making. The central concept of plot developed by Paul Ricœur helps us to bring to light the various narratives produced while organizational members consume dominant discourses, strategic texts and formal procedures, etc. Ricœur (1984) built his concept of ‘emplotment’ (mise en intrigue) around Aristotle’s sentence that ‘the plot is the imitation of the action – for by plot, I here mean the arrangement of the incidents’ (Poetics, part VI). For Ricœur, the narrative defined as ‘emplotment’ combines the Aristotelian concepts of mimesis (imitation) and muthos (arrangement of the incidents): ‘With the narrative, the semantic innovation consists in the invention of a plot, which is also a work of synthesis: through the plot, objectives, causes, incidents are brought together under the temporal unity of an action that is complete and whole’ (Ricœur, our translation). Thus, narrative is defined as a ‘synthesis of the heterogenous’. The concept of ‘emplotment’ may be used to identify how the main plot or story-line is read in different narratives. These reading practices revealed by narratives can be reconstructed by the researcher from qualitative inquiry based upon observations and conventional unstructured and semi-structured interviews as well as from archival data. The narrative perspective gives way to the analysis of the

A narrative approach to Strategy as Practice

Building mode of existence STRATEGIZING AS PRODUCING TEXTS / WRITING

Mobilization of scriptural standards which authorize the inscription of the text in the strategic genre

Selection and polyphonic organization of mundane narratives to draw up strategic texts

Ruling order

Repertoire of texts

Unruly practice

Dominant discourse genre

STRATEGIC TEXTS OPERATING PROCEDURES FORMAL PRACTICES

Narratives Situated experience

Intertextual relationship which positions the text with regard to previous strategic texts

Creative reading of strategic texts and tactics for resisting their domination

STRATEGIZING AS CONSUMING TEXTS / READING Dwelling mode of existence Figure 12.1 Strategy making from texts and narratives

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194 Valérie-Inès de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud Table 12.1 A consumption perspective on strategy formation Consumption/Production

Ruling order: institutional environment

Producing dominant discourses / Consuming social practice

Strategic texts and formal practices

Producing strategic texts and formal practices / Consuming dominant discourses

Unruly practice

Consuming strategic texts and formal practices: the consumers’ stories / Producing social practice

consumption/production interplay across three levels of analysis as shown in Table 12.1. Under the label ‘formal practices’, we mainly include the tools, techniques, norms and routines used in everyday activity to do things. Such practices fit Jarzabkowski’s (2004, p. 545) definition of a specific subset of practices: ‘those management tools and techniques present in macro-institutional and competitive contexts, arising from co-production within different communities of practice, that is, industry, academia, consultancy, and the press, each with some common points of discourse’. They are diffused through the teachings and research of business schools, the use by consultancy firms, and through management fashion (Abrahamson 1996), in which the popular press also plays a role. The consumption of dominant discourse, strategic texts and formal practices can be tracked within the management fashion framework (Corbett and Mounoud forthcoming; Abrahamson 1996; Sturdy 2004). Such an analysis then encompasses rhetorical approaches (i.e. what direction is conveyed in the official discourse), as well as political views focusing on the instrumental use of strategies to secure power, and cultural perspectives highlighting the impact of corporate culture. A rhetorical approach looks at the language and arguments used to convince an audience. Rhetoric can appeal to rationality: strategies are adopted because ‘they work or promise to do so’. But it can also appeal to emotions. New strategies are adopted not because of their supposed effectiveness, but rather because they ‘provide a potentially comforting sense of order and identity and/or control’ (Sturdy 2004). Rhetoric can also refer to the language devices and tricks used by management gurus and other suppliers of ideas to convince the somewhat naïve manager to adopt a new practice. In such a

‘dramaturgic’ perspective, managers are often portrayed as puppets in the hands of cunning strategists. By contrast, the political view gives an active role to those adopting new management ideas or practices. This view is concerned with the instrumental use of ideas/practices to secure power, and/ or with their content in terms of their material and/ or discursive power. The political view also highlights contestation, tensions and resistance to the adoption of management ideas, whilst the cultural view focuses on the local embeddedness of ideas and practices. Culture – here the organization’s culture – can be either a bridge or a barrier to the transfer of some management ideas and practices. Focusing on daily practice allows us to grasp all the contradictions and tensions of daily activity. Individuals are able to play with the rules and to use the artefacts of everyday practice for their own ends. Actors are also full of intent in their use of these practices and the intent of the actor may not comply with the objective purpose of a particular practice. Thus, the properties of a practice are open to interpretation according to the use to which they are put (Jarzabkowski 2004). Practice is the singular art of coping through combination, inventiveness and ‘Do it yourself!’ techniques, i.e. ‘a way of thinking invested in a way of acting […] which cannot be dissociated from an art of using’ (de Certeau 1988).

Conclusion Drawing from the narrative perspective in organization studies, we address the strategic role of mundane stories and narratives that give meaning to daily experiences and enable cooperation. In particular, we consider the fundamental role of

A narrative approach to Strategy as Practice

reading as a process of comprehension and application of texts. We propose a model for strategy formation that states how strategic texts are created recursively, starting from the mundane narratives which influence daily practices (de La Ville and Mounoud 2001a). We also clarify the relationships that these mundane narratives have with texts produced by other stakeholders. The strategic text is thus involved in a double relationship with the context (the body of the preceding texts to which it relates) and with the situation (the ordinary activities it accounts for and helps organize). This framework highlights the mediation role of strategic texts between institutional contexts and organizational situations and clarifies the processes involved in strategic textual productions. Strategy making has much to do with the capacity to master the skills of discussion. However, the practice aspect of strategy-making appears to be immersed in the narration of human experience. We consider strategic documents that organizations produce, such as written plans, as texts. Thus, they may be considered as ‘being read’ by organization members. Understanding strategy making based on reading and writing is useful in order to understand the complexities of strategy formation. Strategy formation brings into play complex processes of interaction between organizational productions of a contrasting nature. It may be understood by using the text as a model of ‘judicious’ or sensible action. The latter ‘becomes a subject of science on the condition that a kind of objectivity equivalent to the fossilization of the discourse through writing exists’ (Ricœur 1991). Ricœur thus equates ordinary action with speech and conversation: action is also a representation anchored in the present, whose structure resembles that of speech acts and utterances. Conversely, the judicious action, associated with strategic action, perpetuates itself, leaves traces and becomes memorable. An action leaves its mark when it contributes to the emergence of significant configurations. A process of recording transforms it into a ‘document’ or ‘archive’ of organizational action, which brings it closer to the textual form and distinguishes it from the conversation. The judicious action results from emancipation with regard to the initial context and develops meanings that can be actualized or

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completed under new and different circumstances. Consequently, the analysis of strategy formation must not be centred only on the conversations or the interactions described as ‘strategic’. Strategy making should be considered as the combination of the production of texts and their creative consumption in daily activities. Consumption can be understood as the dominated production of second-order narratives. The descending order of the dominant discourse of strategy and the ascending order of the resisting narrative, two realms of strategy making and strategic texts are their point of intersection and articulation. This meeting shows the complexity of strategy formation. The context dominates and informs the strategic text because it provides the rules for it to form itself. In return, the strategic text, fuelled by ordinary accounts of organization members’ practices, is subject to creative readings and resistant consumption. ‘Human action is open to whoever can read’ (Ricœur 1991). Through this double role of mediation, the strategic text gathers meaning and becomes effective. References Abrahamson, E. (1996), ‘Management fashion’, Academy of Management Review, 2/1: 254–285. Alvesson, M. and Deetz, S. (2000), Doing critical research management. London: Sage. Bakhtin, M. (1968), Rabelais and his world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barry, D. and Elmes, M. (1997), ‘Strategy retold: Toward a narrative view of strategic discourse’, Academy of Management Review, 22/2: 429–452. Barthes, R. (1974) S/Z: An Essay. London: Cape. Boje, D. M. (1991), ‘The storytelling organisation: A study of story performance in an office-supply firm’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 36: 106–126. (1995), ‘Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as “Tamaraland” ’, Academy of Management Journal, 38/4: 997–1035. Boyce, M. (1996), ‘Organisational story and storytelling: A critical review’, Journal of Organisational Change, 9/5: 5–26. Bruner, J. S. (1986), Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

196 Valérie-Inès de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud (1990), Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chia, R. and Holt, R. (2006), ‘Strategy as practical coping: A Heideggerian perspective’, Organisation Studies, 27/5: 635–655. Chia, R. and MacKay, B. (2007), ‘Post-processual challenges for the emerging strategy-as-practice perspective: Discovering strategy in the logic of practice’, Human Relations, 60/1: 217–242. Corbett, I., and Mounoud, E. (forthcoming), ‘Looping the loop: The consumption and production of knowledge management ideas and practices’, Management Learning, Special Issue: The (co) -consumption of management ideas and practices. Czarniawska, B. (1997), Narrating the organisation – Dramas of institutional identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (1998), ‘A narrative approach to organisation studies’, Qualitative Research Methods Series, 43, Thousand Oaks,CA: Sage Publications. (2002), ‘Interviews and organisational narratives’, in Gubrium J. F. and Holstein J. (eds.), Handbook of interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 733–749. de Certeau, M. (1988), The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. de La Ville, V. I. (2001), ‘L’actualisation collective des pratiques stratégiques’, in Drisse (ed.), Le management stratégique en représentations. Paris: Ellipses, 113–148. (2006), ‘Collective learning processes in high tech firms: Enablers and barriers to the innovation process’, in Bernasconi, M., Harris, S. and Monsted, M. (eds.), High tech start-up – Creation and development of technology based firms. London: Routledge, 69–85. de La Ville, V. I. and Mounoud, E. (2001a), ‘Narrating the practice of “strategy”: In search of a genre…’ Paper presented at the European Group for Organisation Studies (EGOS) – XVII° International Colloquim, Lyon, 5–7 July. (2001b), ‘The tactics of strategising: A very ordinary perspective’. Paper presented at the Workshop Micro-strategy and strategising, EIASM, Brussels, 1–3 February. (2003), ‘Between discourse and narration: How can strategy be a practice?’, in Czarniawska, B. and Gagliardi, P. (eds.), Narratives we organise by. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 95–113. Engel, S. (1995), The stories children tell. New York: W.H. Freeman.

(2005), ‘Narrative analysis of children’s experience’, in Greene, S. and Hogan, D. (eds.), Researching children’s experience – Methods and approaches. London: Sage, 199–216. Fairclough, N. (2003), Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. (2005), ‘Critical discourse analysis, organisational discourse, and organisational change’, Organisation Studies, 26: 915–939. Foucault, M. (1971), L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard). Inaugural speech at the College de France referred to as The order of the speech, in the anglo-saxon literature. (1976), The archeology of knowledge. New York: Harper and Row. Gabriel, Y. (2000), Storytelling in organisations Facts, fictions and fantasies. New York: Oxford University Press. Giroux, N. (1998), ‘La communication dans la mise en œuvre du changement’, Management International, 3/1: 1–14. Giroux, N. and Demers, C. (1997), ‘Communication organisationnelle et stratégie’, Management International, 2/2: 17–32. Grant, D., Hardy, C., Oswick, C. and Putnam, L. L. (2004) (eds.), Handbook of organisational discourse. London: Sage. Hardy, C. (2004), ‘Scaling up and bearing down in discourse analysis: Questions regarding textual agencies and their context’, Organisation, 11/3: 415–425. Hardy, C. and Philips, N. (2004), ‘Discourse and power’, in Grant D., Hardy C., Oswick C. and Putnam L. L. (eds.), Handbook of organisational discourse. London: Sage, 299–316.. Hendry, J. and Seidl, D. (2003), ‘The structure and significance of strategic episodes: Social systems theory and the routine practices of strategic change’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 175–196. Jarzabkowski, P. (2004), ‘Strategy as practice: Recursiveness, adaptation and practices-in-use’, Organisation Studies, 25/4: 529–560. Jarzablowski, P. (2005) Strategy as practice: An activity-based approach. London: Sage. Knights, D. and Morgan, G. (1991), ‘Corporate strategy, organisations and subjectivity: A critique’, Organisation Studies, 12/2: 251–273.

A narrative approach to Strategy as Practice Kristeva, J. (1980), Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art. New York: Columbia University Press. Linstead, S. and Grafton-Small, R. (1992), ‘On reading organisational culture’, Organisation Studies, 13/3: 331–355. McIntyre, A. (1988), Whose justice? Which rationality? London: Duckworth. McPhee, R. (2004), ‘Text, agency and organisation in the light of structuration theory’, Organisation, 11/3: 355–371. O’Connor, E. (2000), ‘Plotting the organisation: The embedded narrative as a construct for studying change’, Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences, 36/2: 174–192. Pascale, R. (1984), ‘Perspectives on strategy: The real story behind Honda’s success’, California Management Review, 26/3: 47–72. Phillips, N. and Hardy, C. (2002), Discourse analysis: Investigating processes of social construction. London: Sage. Putnam, L. L. and Cooren, F. (2004), ‘Alternative perspectives on the role of text and agency in constituting organisations’, Organisation, 11/3: 323–333. Regnér, P. (2003), ‘Strategy creation in the periphery: Inductive versus deductive strategy making’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 57–82. Ricœur, P. (1984), Time and narrative, trans. by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (1991), From text to action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. by K. Blamey and J. B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Robichaud, D., Giroux, H. and Taylor, J. R. (2004), ‘The meta-conversation: The recursive property of language as the key to organizing’, Academy of Management Review, 29/4: 1–18.

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Rouleau, L. (2005), ‘Micro-practices of strategic sense-making and sense-giving: How middle managers interpret and sell change everyday’, Journal of Management Studies, 42/7: 1413–1442. Salmon, C. (2007), Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer des histoires à formater les esprits. Paris: La Découverte. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003), ‘Strategising as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 141–174. Schatzki, T. R. (2005), ‘The sites of organisations’, Organisation Studies, 26/3: 465–484. Spender, J. C. (1989), Industrial recipes. Oxford: Blackwell. Sturdy, A. (2004), ‘The adoption of management ideas and practices: Theoretical perspectives and possibilities’, Management Learning, 35/2: 155–179. Taylor, J. R. and Robichaud, D. (2004), ‘Finding the organisation in the communication: Discourse as action and sensemaking’, Organisation, 11/3: 395–413. Tsoukas, H. (1994), ‘What is management? An outline of a metatheory’, British Journal of Management, 5/4: 289–301. Vaara, E. (2002), ‘On the discursive construction of success/failure in narrative of post merger integration’, Organisation Studies, 23: 211–248. van Dijk, T. A.(1997), Discourse as social interaction. London: Sage. Whittington, R. (2007), ‘Strategy practice and strategy process: Family differences and the sociological eyes’, Organisation Studies, 28/10: 1575–1586. Willmott, H. (1997), ‘Rethinking management and managerial work: Capitalism, control and subjectivity’, Human Relations, 50/11: 1329–1340.

PA RT III

Methodological Tracks

CHAPTER

13

Broader methods to support new insights into strategizing A N N E S IG ISMU N D H U FF, ANNE- KATRI N NEYER a n d K AT H R IN MÖ S L E IN

waxman: ‘In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.’ greenspan: ‘Absolutely, precisely […] you know, I was shocked because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.’ (Transcription from hearings by the Government Oversight Committee of the United States House of Representatives, 23 October 20081) ‘…the situation is manifestly not coming under control. Things continue to fall apart.’ (Paul Krugman, 27 October 2008)

Introduction Crises affecting different aspects of the global economy began to capture public attention as we prepared the final version of this chapter in the last months of 2008. Markets were on a downward roller coaster generating dramatic government responses around the world. While elected officials tended to speak and act as if they were close to calming volatile economic behaviour, other observers were less sanguine, including former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan and Professor Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in mid-October for his research on trade and the location of economic activity. Gradually, the increasing instability of financial institutions, housing markets, employment and other indicators of economic activity became so 1

Knowlton, B. and Grynbaum, M.M. (2008). Two lions face a reckoning: Greenspan makes rare admission of fallibility. The International Harold Tribune, 24 October, p. 1. See also http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081024163819. pdf, p. 37.

significant that we decided we could not finish this chapter without a substantial change in perspective. Our initial draft applauded increasing attention to Strategy as Practice, or strategizing,2 recognized the importance of the case studies that provide almost all empirical evidence of the microbehaviour that is the focus of this area of inquiry, but argued for a broader methodological base. We gave little attention to theoretical arguments supporting strategizing research because we agreed with them. It was time to re-examine that acceptance. Different assumptions were being made about the nature and extent of disruption in late 2008. Some observers believed that the situation was similar to previous financial crises and would be resolved by relatively predictable government and organizational strategies. An increasing number thought instead that a distinct shift was taking place in the world economy. Richard Rumelt (2008), a pioneer in the strategy field (Rumelt 1974, 1979; Rumelt et al. 1994), suggested that: We are looking at a structural break with the past – a phrase from econometrics [… that] denotes the moment in time-series data when trends and the patterns of associations among variables change […] The wrong way forward in a structural break during hard times is to try more of the same. The break and the hard times are sure indications that an old pattern has already been pushed to its limits and is destroying value.

We too believe that structural breaks are occurring at multiple levels of analysis and therefore 2

We use the word ‘strategizing’ rather than ‘Strategy as Practice’ in this chapter to emphasize our primary interest in non-routine behaviour, but both words are used by researchers interested in micro-behaviour who we wish to engage in conversation.

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202 Anne Sigismund Huff, Anne-Katrin Neyer and Kathrin Möslein

that more of the same kind of research about strategizing and strategy more generally is suspect. However, by the time we finished revising this chapter we decided that whether or not structural change was underway, strategizing research can be strengthened by trying to encompass the more dire forecasts of late 2008. Those taking a strategizing perspective need an expanded set of explanatory lenses to consider significant changes in behaviour, in our opinion. This extension in turn helps define the need for data-gathering tools that augment the ethnographic approaches that heretofore have characterized strategizing research. Not only are more and more varied data needed, but also methods that are better equipped to reveal activity patterns in large organizations and across organizational boundaries. Methodological changes cannot be made in a vacuum, of course. Supportive decisions about ontology, epistemology and the involvement of policy-makers, practitioners and academics from other disciplines are briefly discussed at the end of the chapter.

The challenge: new mechanisms and new infrastructure By the end of 2008, the expertise of many organizational strategists and policy-makers was suspect. Given that problematic conditions persisted in spite of responsive actions, it seemed inevitable that a few early complaints about academic expertise would also grow in volume and that lack of confidence in academic observations might also ensue. Within academic circles, even scholars who had been criticizing business practices were likely to find that some aspects of the status quo they tacitly assumed were fixed had radically changed in character. Unfortunately, neither strategists nor policymakers nor researchers had much time for contemplation as the ‘meltdown’ continued. Two deceptively familiar problems confused those with a responsibility to act – the speed and the complexity of change. Krugman’s prognosis (2008) for government policy-makers was that:

The simple mechanics of producing a rescue […] are very hard. The pace at which things are getting worse is so great that […] even with the best of understanding [rescue measures] can’t come fast enough to prevent a great deal of damage.

But where will ‘the best of understanding’ come from? Krugman appeared to be looking among his fellow economists for new ideas, yet the challenge is more widely applicable. Actions by various stakeholders, though often consonant with advice from strategy researchers, seemed to increase rather than control variance. As Rumelt (2008) pointed out, many old practices need to change: Consider an analogy. When oil is cheap and plentiful, we create a vast infrastructure that works well if oil remains cheap and plentiful. When it becomes expensive, we wish we had a different infrastructure. Similarly, when economic opportunities abound, we invest in a management infrastructure that harvests them very well. When the field of opportunities becomes less verdant, we must change our management infrastructure.

As management practices change significantly, strategizing is even more relevant to practice than leaders of the field have claimed (Whittington 1996). However, we believe that research on micro-behaviour to date is too limited in scale and scope when held up against the global, highly interconnected events that currently engage us. A great deal of time has been spent in descriptive study; continuing this effort makes sense. But the current situation not only requires expanded data gathering and analysis, in our opinion, it also calls for a broader set of theoretical or explanatory perspectives.

Expanding the strategizing agenda to consider inter-organizational process and content The recent book Strategy as Practice by Johnson et al. (2007) moves conversation about strategizing forward in several important ways. The authors emphasize that understanding micro-level activity requires attending to multiple actors at multiple levels of analysis, can and should use multiple

Broader methods to support new insights into strategizing

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Macro events Strategies developed by interconnected organizations

Processes used by interconnected organizations

Institutionalized strategies

Institutionalized processes Organizational Culture

5 6

5

Organizational strategies

1

External actors’ content activities

4

Strategies in the focal organization

5 Processes in the focal organization

1

Organizational processes

6

2

Content activities in the focal organization

3

Process activities in the focal organization

4

External actors’ process activities

Figure 13.1 Further explosion of the strategizing agenda, extended and adapted from Johnson et al. (2007, p. 18)

theoretical perspectives and multiple methods, and can address organizational change as well as routinized behaviour. Their agenda for further research, as summarized in the white boxes at the centre of Figure 13.1, focuses on four connections: V1: the interrelationship of organizational processes and systems; V2: the link between activities within organizations and the strategies of those organizations; V3: the relationship between institutionalized strategic management processes and people’s activities within the organizations; V4: how institutionalized strategies [are] actually pursued, not only at the organizational level, but in terms of people’s activities within organisations. (Johnson et al. 2007, pp. 17–24). Johnson et al. begin to outline how strategic change might be examined at these levels, but events over the last year in our opinion reveal insufficiencies in their agenda. First, this and most other proposals for strategizing research have usefully emphasized how strategy is made, but it no longer makes sense

to exclude or even marginalize strategy content (what strategy is about) in the strategizing agenda. As a start, there are recursive relationships between micro-level content activities and organizational strategy just as there are between micro-process activities and organizational processes. Second, activities and strategies by other organizations become more important as macro-events impinge upon an organization in unexpected ways. This statement can be read as a neo-positivist observation on the impact of changing relationships, but equally as a comment about interpretive sensemaking. Both are important in the highly interconnected world revealed by worldwide recession, and suggest that faceless ‘institutional forces’ can be usefully examined at the micro-level in terms of multiple interactions with specific organizations. Further, if environmental conditions with negative impacts (‘real’ or ‘perceived’) continue, the strength of previously institutionalized strategies and processes should be expected to decline. As new behaviours are found to be helpful, observers of strategizing would expect repetition and

204 Anne Sigismund Huff, Anne-Katrin Neyer and Kathrin Möslein

routinization to move towards their institutionalization, but the strength of past institutional forces can no longer be assumed. These observations are not inconsistent with past strategizing research, but they head towards an even broader agenda than strategizing researchers have been pursuing and anticipating. Johnson et al. call for ‘exploding’ the strategizing agenda; we believe their call needs to be exploded again. Figure 13.1 shows the subjects they emphasize in white boxes as part of a larger agenda outlined in grey. The numbers point to six sets of questions that we would like to see strategizing research take the lead in investigating: 1. How are organizational level strategies and processes across a range of organizations affecting micro-activity in a specific organization of interest (especially in times of crisis)? Is there evidence that micro-activities within one or more specific organizations are affecting organizational level strategies and processes in other entities? 2. How are micro-level strategies and processes in a given organization interacting with organizational level strategies and processes, and vice versa, how are organizational processes and strategies affecting micro-level activities? How does organization culture stabilize and destabilize these interactions (especially during crisis)? 3. What is the interaction between micro-processes and micro-content activities (especially in times of crisis when established structures may have been dismantled or become problematic)? 4. How are external micro-activities affecting micro-activities within a given firm? (Can promising new micro-activities be identified in times of crisis?) 5. What is the interaction between content and process within the top management team and on the board (especially activities influenced by and influencing response to crisis)? How are these activities affected by content and process at the top levels of other organizations? 6. How do institutionalized structures and processes affect micro-behaviour? (Are new microlevel behaviours in response to crisis becoming institutionalized?)

The strengths and weakness of ethnographic methods currently dominating strategizing research Ethnographic evidence cannot satisfactorily answer all the questions outlined above. Our overview of strategizing research indicates that almost all studies have relied on ethnography – broadly defined to include interviews and case studies as well as more traditional longitudinal observation. This observation may not concern those who work in this area. Ethnographic methods provide specific, rich detail unmatched by other methods, and this is an especially attractive approach to understanding little-known contexts and subjects (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). We too have carried out ethnographic studies and benefited from them. We are none-the-less concerned that many studies (including our own) do not achieve the full benefits of ethnography and, further, that even the most intense ethnographic studies cannot provide the range of evidence needed to understand any phenomenon, especially the complex, fast-moving interactions of current concern (Balogun et al. 2003). Every method has inevitable weaknesses. In the case of ethnographic study, a frequently noted problem is that prolonged, close contact jeopardizes the researcher’s ability to make independent assessments. But published studies often fall short of the ideals of ethnography. For a variety of reasons (especially lack of resources and lack of detailed training) too many conclusions about strategizing based on ethnographic methods are jeopardized by: • Limited time on site (a few days to perhaps a few months), which is insufficient to understand contextual complexities. • Limited time with any informant (rarely more than 1–1½ hours), which limits opportunity for detailed questions or answers. While more could be said (for example, about insufficient attention to artefacts) these two problems alone help explain why ‘simple stories’ have to be told to those who do not have the data to understand greater nuance. A first methodological objective for the field in our view is

Broader methods to support new insights into strategizing Point of maximum concern with precision of measurement of behaviour

B Lab experiments

Experimental simulations

Judgment tasks

Field experiments

Sample surveys Point of maximum concern with generality over actors

A

205

Field studies

Formal theory

C

Point of maximum concern with system character of context

Computer simulation

Figure 13.2 Strengths of different research strategies (Huff 2009, p. 186; simplified from McGrath 1982, p. 73)

therefore to improve ethnographic studies. But this is not enough. Although ethnography continues to be a necessary method, it is not sufficient for robust theory development. McGrath (1982) forcefully argues that researchers face dilemmas that inevitably lead towards multiple methods among a group of conversing researchers, if not by single researchers. Figure 13.2 summarizes his observations about the relative strengths of field or ethnographic studies when compared to a range of other choices. The ‘dilemmatic’ of research this figure describes for ethnography is that it is intrinsically unable to do as good a job of providing either generalizable or precise conclusions as other methods. Therefore, in our view, a second methodological objective for strategizing is to use a broader range of methods that can provide more general and more precise theory. There are some moves towards methodological plurality in strategizing research. A good example is a developmental paper submitted for discussion at EGOS 2007 in which Jarzabkowski and Matthiesen

‘propose that rigorous, situationally-sensitive coding of transcripts of everyday practice can render it analysable statistically’ (2007, p. 2). This paper describes the development and use of an Event Database (EDB) to summarize non-participant observations of 198 meetings held in four divisions of a utility company. Data were collected over a period of eighteen months; all pertained to coping with significant regulatory changes. The authors wanted a ‘methodological solution that could enrich the practice field without sacrificing too much […] richness of data’ (p. 9). The solution they develop draws on three theoretical arguments published by sociologists: Abbott’s (1990, 1995) consideration of the temporal order of events and causality, Abell’s (2004) discussion of comparative narrative analysis and Heise’s (1988, 1989) event frames analysis. In addition to tables that give examples of categories and coded material, the paper offers several pictorial representations of the temporal order of discussions in meetings. It also provides descriptive statistics of categories developed from qualitative

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observations and a pie chart showing the distribution of event types in one data set. Though their data set is observational, they suggest that the EDB methodology could be used to analyse interviews, diaries and other data at macro-, mid- and microlevels of analysis. We hope that this chapter is at the beginning of a trend, because an expanded toolbox is needed.

Suggestions for expanding evidence on strategizing To summarize the argument so far: Ethnographic methods have become the cornerstone of the field and will continue to be useful, despite their inevitable limitations. Especially in times of structural upheaval, more in-depth studies of varied contexts are needed. However, methods with other strengths are also needed. As past strategies are repudiated across industries and new understandings have to be forged, it is particularly important to collect data that can support more generalized and more precise conclusions. As we see it, there are five desirable characteristics for data gathering – their initials will appear in the summary of specific suggestions found in the next few pages: Q – Quantity. Increases current capacity to collect and analyse data. V – Variety. Increases the variety of data currently collected and analysed. C – Contextual understanding. Improves understanding of system characteristics (or context). G – Generality. Increases generalizability of findings. P – Precision. Increases precision of data collection and analysis. Increasing the quantity and variety of evidence can potentially support methods at every point on Figure 13.2. Tools that improve contextual understanding are particularly important for those who continue to carry out ethnographic studies, even though, accepting McGrath’s argument, there will be inevitable limits to the generalizability and precision of the data gathered. Tools that provide more generalizable or more precise information (not at all

the same thing according to McGrath) are particularly important for improved theory, even though these data-gathering activities will be inherently incapable of providing broad systemic detail. While general categories for expanding data collection are offered in Figure 13.2, we saw our task as being more specific in the context of strategizing. Our initial brainstorming focused on expanding data collection in a general way. Redrafting the chapter in the context of a worldwide recession caused us to re-examine and expand the initial list of data collection ideas we identified. In the end, we settled on the seventeen suggestions briefly summarized below. They are presented as a springboard for discussing four generic ‘solutions’ to the methodological limits we see facing strategizing research: analyse larger data sets, broaden the number and variety of research collaborators, observe unusual contexts, and go beyond ethnographic methods.

Analyse larger data sets As noted above, the scope of organizational activities has rapidly pulled away from current capabilities for academic observation and analysis. It is not just the scale of global organizations that defeats us, but the speed and complexity of interaction among organizations of many different sizes, in many different locations. One prescription is obvious: work with more data. Our first three suggestions are easy to outline, though they pose significant difficulties in implementation. 1. Take advantage of data currently collected by the organization. (QVCGP) Organizations are prodigious producers of data when compared to even the most well-financed research project. There are potential problems with using the data they collect. On the one hand, the data collected may not fit researcher needs, especially in times of crisis. The most useful data are likely to be proprietary and strategic, thus not readily shared. On the other hand, data collection and use are inevitably biased by social and political processes, and may not even be used by the actors in the organization or larger network studied. Against these potential problems,

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however, are an interesting set of potential positives: a. Organizations collect and use a vast amount of information that is impossible for researchers to collect. b. The information collected and used plays an important role in framing strategizing activities. c. Common data collection and use across organizational units and even across organizations facilitates comparison and generalization. d. The timing of behaviour changes may be signalled by shifts in large data sets, even if the behaviour of interest is not the focus of data collection. e. Willingness to release data to researchers may indicate organizational interest in the research project. If the results of initial analysis are informative, decision-makers may be persuaded to provide additional information, though it should be recognized that researcher independence is paramount in many research paradigms and may be jeopardized by collaboration. 2. Identify data collected within larger systems. (QVGP) Databases created by government and other entities may also reveal behaviour and pinpoint changes in behaviour. Some potential problems with this suggestion mirror concerns about availability and interpretability raised by our first suggestion above. The retrospective nature of the data collected and the time that often elapses before posting are particularly problematic in government systems. In addition, it can take even more time to collect and analyse data from government sources than from organizational sources – and time is in especially short supply during a crisis. Still the compensating potential of this approach also should be considered: a. Quantitative analysis of large data sets can help target times and places for more labourintensive and time-consuming observation of micro-activity. b. Data from multiple sources, analysed in different ways, generally strengthen theory development.

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c. If done well, external evaluators tend to be positive about this kind of triangulation. 3. Use the Internet, cell phones and other electronic tools to collect data. (QVCGP) The 24/7 interactive capacity of electronic connections offers unique opportunities for collecting data. Of course, there are many competitors for attention on these channels. At the same time, these tools are relatively unfamiliar to some researchers and some informants. Another problem is that it is often more difficult to recognize deceit in electronic transmission than in interpersonal or more researcher controlled interactions, one reason why evaluators may not find these sources of information trustworthy. However: a. Electronic data gathering can be the least demanding way to interact with busy strategists. b. These tools facilitate collecting more (and perhaps more precise and time-sensitive) data from strategists and other informants than is likely from other data-gathering tools. c. Prompts and replies can take place directly before, during or after events of interest. d. Currently available software and hardware facilitate interaction with and among informants. e. Interaction may be especially effective with younger, Tweet-savvy respondents, yielding insights that are unlikely to be collected in other ways. f. Electronic tools facilitate longitudinal, repetitive reports from many informants in geographically dispersed locations. g. The possibilities for large-scale, timesensitive inquiry have been demonstrated by public opinion polls (Gallup, etc.).

Broaden the number and variety of research collaborators The single researcher is a time-honoured figure across many areas of academic inquiry, though not common in many science and engineering subjects. Experience with large-scale projects in these fields, carried out by teams that sometimes work in many countries, is worth analysing. Researchers

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interested in strategizing also have options for more unique contributions, as noted in the suggestions below. 4. Coordinate researcher efforts. (QVCGP) Collaborative research projects with multiple researchers can provide a rich demographic base for observation and theorizing; they also facilitate interdisciplinary designs. Potential problems begin with the time required to design and fund large projects, which can sap participant motivation. Longitudinal projects also require long-term commitment from participants, especially project leader(s). Cooperation can be jeopardized by disciplinary and national differences. Further, the more complex the project the more there will be inevitable variations in project implementation by different individuals and teams – which jeopardizes the generality of findings. The off-setting potential of this suggestion includes: a. Increased data collection may reveal patterns not recognized at one or a few sites. b. More generally, multiple points of view can increase understanding of system complexity. c. International research can be significantly improved by team members with local knowledge. d. Opportunities for funding should increase if multiple institutions are involved. e. More practically, many funding sources (including the UN, the EU and NSF) are positive about international, interdisciplinary team research, when it is well-designed. 5. Use student inquirers. (QVC) Students can be involved in research in various ways: as informants, data gatherers and even research collaborators. Of course, students tend to have little or no relevant training and are typically naïve. Large numbers of students cannot be given detailed training, and even well-trained student assistants may make simplistic assumptions or overlook information of interest to researchers. These problems are recognized by research evaluators, who tend to doubt the trustworthiness of data from students. On the other hand:

a. Students are a large, widely available and intelligent workforce. b. Students are demographically close to some organizational stakeholders of potential interest (e.g. younger employees and customer groups). c. Students can be highly motivated by work that is relevant to their interests. d. Informants may be more willing to respond to students than to faculty or other inquirers. e. Professors who use student assistants responsibly fulfil their obligation to develop student research capabilities. f. Younger naïve observers may uncover connections overlooked by informants and by experienced researchers; this fresh perspective may be especially valuable in times of uncertainty. 6. Involve strategists and other organizational insiders as collaborators. (VC) The concerns of strategizers and researchers can be very close, therefore they are natural research collaborators. Of course, each partner has different priorities and very different task and time pressures; joint projects therefore take time to arrange and coordinate. It is difficult for an individual to understand any other person, and the insider/outsider divide can increase this inevitable difficulty. However, those who have worked as collaborators tend to report that, despite significant difficulties, the benefits of collaboration can also be large: a. The two perspectives tend to balance each other: insiders have unique insight and access to data not available to outside academic researchers, but insiders often make assumptions and overlook connections that are more easily recognized by outsiders. b. Useful information about the possibilities and problems of ‘insider–outsider’ research can be found in many publications and websites (e.g. Bartunek and Louis 1996). c. Most important, researchers tend to improve their understanding of practical problems through insider–outsider cooperation. 7. Collect data from, and give research feedback to, groups rather than individuals. (QVC) It may be useful for strategizers to help each other

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reflect (and possibly invent new solutions) in focus groups and workshops. It does take time to prepare for and carry out group work – thus some researchers and organizations may resist this method of data gathering. Further, as noted under suggestion 6, the interests of insiders will inevitably differ from researchers’ interests. More generally, convergence within and among groups can be difficult to establish. And once again, this less familiar method is harder to prove trustworthy to outside reviewers. Still: a. Interaction with groups can be a more efficient method of collecting some kinds of data than interacting with individuals. b. Knowledgeable insiders can ask more effective and probing questions of each other than outsiders can. c. Focus group methodology has been well worked out in the field of marketing. d. A variety of tools are available to discover overlapping opinions or create consensus. 8. Consider customers, suppliers and other stakeholders as co-producers of strategy. (QVC) It makes sense to collect data from the most important external actors affecting the formation and success of strategy, especially those impacting strategic outcomes through networked cooperation. Of course, interaction with buyers, suppliers and other stakeholders may be several steps removed from the focus of many strategizing studies. On the other hand, the benefits noted above for interacting with strategists as individuals and in groups are also potential benefits of this suggestion, and there are more unique arguments for considering customers and other stakeholders as data sources, including: a. Stakeholder groups are important to strategic success. b. Unique insights may be generated if interested individuals in these groups are treated as research collaborators. c. Customers in particular are of increasing interest in the strategy literature, but given little attention in almost all conversations about strategizing. d. Suppliers are a second critical group shaping strategy and are especially important

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as supply chains and networks become a common form of inter-organizational collaboration. 9. Interact with those who work with strategists (e.g. assistants, co-workers, superiors). (QVCP) Less-visible actors in an organizational setting often deserve more attention. Of course researchers cannot assume that all actors are powerful players, and even those who have a role to play may provide information that is one step removed from the focus of inquiry in a strategizing study. Also, the position of less visible informants may be problematic in itself, e.g. information may be influenced by posturing. Organization members may also be motivated to protect or blame a boss, co-worker or subordinate. We nevertheless recommend this source of information because: a. Arguments about the co-creation of strategy are a centrepiece of the strategizing literature, but assistants etc. are rarely the subject of research. b. Reflection on strategizing is part of these informants’ jobs and they often directly contribute to strategizing even if they are not formally recognized. c. Assistants and superiors have significant access to data about strategizing; they typically need to understand it to carry out their jobs; and may be more helpful guides to secondary data than more ‘central’ informants. d. Less-considered actors may challenge currently accepted explanations or provide explanations for behaviour that current puzzles analysts.

Observe and theorize about unusual contexts and less frequently considered evidence and artefacts Purposeful selection of sites is always recommended. As theoretical arguments are constructed from ‘typical’ organizations, it is useful to test and extend them with evidence from settings that might extend current understanding. Within an organizational site, it may be useful to look for less considered circumstances, individuals, events and artefacts. While this strategy is familiar to those

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who do case studies (Eisenhardt 1989), similar strategies can be used when carrying out quantitative analysis or experimental studies. 10. Collect data from unique contexts and extreme conditions. (VCGP) Population and temporal extremes help calibrate central tendencies. The suggestion to gather data from atypical situations must be treated with care: identifying an ‘extreme’ assumes knowledge about a distribution that may not be available. Some unique conditions may not be relevant to other organizations or relevant over time. We nonetheless recommend considering this datagathering approach because: a. Key issues may be more clearly revealed under unique and/or extreme conditions. b. Actors can be more purposeful, or less driven by routine, under extreme conditions. c. While actors may hope that a current situation (like the economic crisis that began in 2008) is atypical, some circumstances are likely to persist and baseline data are needed. 11. Collect information on use of time, money and corporate tools. (VCGP) It is perplexing that strategy researchers do not pay more attention to the information that many strategists spend a great deal of time analysing. On the other hand, relatively few of us have expertise in accounting, finance or similar technical subjects, and it is true that assistants (not the strategist of interest) may handle many decisions involving time, money and other routinely collected information. It is also possible that no one is making conscious decisions based on these data over a specific time of interest. However: a. Allocation of time and other resources can be an excellent unobtrusive indicator of strategy. b. Many strategic decisions are data-based. c. Often these data are used in similar ways across organizational units, facilitating comparisons. d. A significant contribution to the strategizing literature may be made on the basis of these neglected data.

e. Interest in these areas can be expected to be much stronger in the current period of financial crisis. 12. Treat internal and external events as natural experiments. (PGV) We recommend that some strategizing researchers apply logic from data gathering in laboratory settings. Of course, ideal laboratory conditions cannot be replicated in the field. For example, strategists have diverse personal characteristics and work in disparate settings. It may not be plausible to assume that exogenous variables are the same, especially across organizations. When unusual events occur (like the current economic crisis) the researcher may not have enough understanding to frame the ‘experiment’. Further, many events cannot be predicted, and thus the researcher is not immediately available for observation and other data-gathering tasks. Finally, as for many of these suggestions, reviewers may be sceptical about natural experiments while colleagues working with ethnographic tools may not be convinced by laboratory logic. Still we are positive about this suggestion: a. Laboratory experiments enable researchers to come to more precise conclusions, which would be valuable for strategizing theory. b. Credible laboratory experiments are almost impossible to conduct with strategists, but organizational contexts provide many opportunities to analyse differential responses to the ‘same’ event. c. It may be possible to assume that important contextual influences are held constant when comparing responses within the same unit, organization, industry or country. 13. Observe strategists as instructors. (VCP) The researcher who can evoke an instructional mode (for example, via student inquirers, organizational newcomers or shadowing) may be able to get insights into strategists’ knowledge and beliefs that are unlikely to be gathered in interviews or through observation of strategic events. The researcher should worry that instructions are often based on ideals rather than common practice. They tend to

Broader methods to support new insights into strategizing

convey explicit rather than implicit knowledge, though demonstrations can meld explicit and implicit understanding. And finally, awareness of social desirability on the part of instructor and those instructed tend to bias interaction. Potentially balancing these concerns is evidence that: a. People are often ‘at their best’ (less selfcentred, more helpful, etc.) when trying to help others. b. Interaction with those who need or want to learn what the strategist knows can generate information not collected by more knowledgeable inquirers. c. Problem solving (and response to crisis) can prioritize and focus information transferred.

Consider non-ethnomethodological methods We have argued that ethnography is desirable but not sufficient for understanding strategizing. While any research methods textbook can be used as a source for alternatives, we generated several alternatives that directly relate to the strategizing agenda. 14. Experiment with organizational participants around real tasks. (PCVQG) It is possible to create laboratory experiments that relate to real strategic issues. However, it may be very difficult to capture strategists’ time for experimental purposes, especially if they do not find the task interesting or relevant to their primary concerns. Evoking ‘real’ situations may also generate unanticipated bias, since informants may be thinking of disparate past experience rather than the experimental prompt. However: a. Engaging tasks may be seen as predictive and therefore accepted. b. Strategists may find it useful to interact with each other over a task that is not directly connected to high stress or high stakes decisions. c. The information generated in an experimental setting may be useful grounds

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for interaction between researchers and strategists. 15. Compare reasoning via protocol analysis. (QVGP) Protocol analysis is a method of recording verbal reports from actors as they carry out a task. Those who follow the requirements of the method sometime complain that it can be intrusive, and strategists may be unwilling to take the time to verbalize their thoughts while engaged in important activities, such as responding to a crisis. On the positive side: a. Protocol analysis captures insights during actual task performance, rather than retrospectively when many insights are likely to be lost. b. The Strategy as Practice and strategizing literatures are particularly interested in performance of repetitive tasks, which are monitored relatively easily. c. Validity and other standards have been well documented (cf. Carnegie studies of decision-making). 16. Use prototypes to observe future oriented interactions. (VP) Strategists can be observed as individuals and in teams as they develop tangible presentations of new strategy (sketches, PowerPoint slides, physical examples of products, etc.). Of course, a prototype is by definition incomplete and may prove to be uninteresting or unworkable. It is also true that some individuals are more interested in and talented at developing prototypes. Further, this action-oriented research design may not be accepted by some evaluators. Still, evidence from many settings, especially engineering, is promising. a. There is considerable evidence that interaction around tangible job-related artefacts elicits implicit knowledge. b. Interaction around prototypes is arguably closer to strategy than interaction within established routines. c. A prototype can become a ‘transitional object’ (Winnicott 1951) that generates new information. d. Practitioners are likely to respond positively to future-oriented prototyping.

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17. Use tangible objects to elicit descriptions from informants. (VCG) Sims and Doyle (1995) are among the small number of researchers who have asked members of an organization to use physical objects to describe past, current and future situations. They use a specifically designed ‘play box,’ while others have presented pictures and abstract objects such as Lego (Roos et al. 2004). It is true that some strategists will be more engaged by using physical ‘props’ than others. And once again, this approach is used infrequently in strategy research, and thus may not be easily accepted by academic evaluators. We nonetheless recommend considering this method for several reasons: a. Physical objects may evoke information about some aspects of a strategic situation that is not elicited with other data-gathering tools. b. Use of the same objects may generalize comparable responses across informants. c. Focus on an object can shorten the time required to gather interesting data from individuals or small groups.

Complementary research design decisions The suggestions listed above are not exhaustive, of course, but they illustrate our general argument that strategizing researchers can do more to create and capture relevant data. However, it is important to recognize that effectively carrying out these and other broadening ideas requires compatible decisions in other areas of research design, including: • • • •

ontological and epistemological commitments disciplinary anchors literature reviewed connections with themes of interest to policymakers and practitioners • choice of empirical contexts to observe, and • theoretical perspectives. In illustration, key decisions made by Jarzabkowski and Matthiesen (2007), are shown in Figure 13.3. Beginning at the 12:00 position

and moving to the right, the paper is written, as virtually all strategizing papers are, from an interpretive perspective. It makes a substantive contribution to conversation about strategizing (though it uses the term ‘Strategy as Practice’), among other things by drawing a distinction between what are called ‘discursive’ and tangible events. The execution of the study relies on ideas from three conversations in sociology, as discussed above. Though it does not emphasize the content of discussions observed, the fact that they are policy relevant is important and obviously more could be said in this or other reports. The primary data are from a non-participant observer of utility board meetings, quantitatively summarized. An important contribution of this working paper is that it shows how qualitative and quantitative analysis can be used in a complementary fashion and it uses the idea of sequencing to bring ‘descriptive fluidity’ to data report and interpretation. From a methodological point of view, the paper relies on activity analysis, a perspective Jarzabkowski (2005) has been instrumental in introducing to the field. We admire this paper. While we will resist the urge to suggest alternatives in each decision area highlighted in Figure 13.3 for other research projects, we remind readers that alterations in methods like the ones we suggest will require similar supportive research design decisions. As we stand at the end of 2008, we would be very interested in strategizing research carried out in public organizations. Relatively few business professors have good contacts with strategists in government. A promising research design might involve joint work with political scientists or behavioural economists. We worry that in these times of structural change, too many strategists and academics will continue down well-established paths. While further contributions can undoubtedly be made, this field and all others miss a significant opportunity if they carefully catalogue ineffective activity when there is greater need to discover the effective. More challenging decisions could be made in all areas shown in Figure 13.3 (taking a critical ontological position, for example), but an especially important area of choice seems to be theoretical.

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Interpretive

Ontology/ epistemology Activity analysis at different levels of analysis

Disciplinary or professional subfield

Theoretical perspective

Strategy as Practice

Literature review & conversation

Context 198 Utility company meetings

Method(s)

Policy/ Practice

Quantitative summary of micro-events

Policy issues primary topic of meetings observed

Sociology: causality, categorization and narrative analysis of temporal events

Figure 13.3 Summary of Jarzabkowski and Matthiesen (2007) in a figure adapted from Huff (2009) Key collections of papers (Johnson et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Johnson et al. 2007, and the Strategy as Practice website at www.s-as-p. org/) provide accessible summaries of the theoretical foundations that have been guiding strategizing research in the first years of its independent existence. Four perspectives stand out in the review by Johnson et al. (2007): • • • •

Situated learning. Actor network theory. Institutional theory. The Carnegie School of sensemaking and routines.

These and other perspectives used to investigate strategizing have inevitable strengths and weaknesses. However, in a radically changing environment, it is problematic that all are so firmly rooted in the past. For example, Lave and Wenger (1991) stress co-construction of knowledge, embedded in a specific environment, in their development of situated learning. This idea is certainly relevant in times of uncertainty, but their examples assume the existence of knowledgeable practitioners (midwives, tailors, navy quartermasters, meat cutters and recovered alcoholics) who have useful, tested advice to pass on and this has become a hallmark of subsequent research. In contrast, the current

crisis reminds us that expertise from the past can not only be ineffective but disastrous. A similar complaint can be made about the other three perspectives highlighted for their support of the current strategizing agenda. We agree that all action is situated or embedded to some degree, but the ‘backward view’ of theorizing up to this point makes less sense now than it did in what seems in hindsight to be relatively stable conditions. The four perspectives listed above have been very useful for directing attention away from a research agenda focused on rational, economic plans and their performance outcomes, yet more futureoriented perspectives need to be available. Six promising ideas are summarized in Table 13.1 as examples to be considered by strategizing researchers. In each case the theoretical base of the perspective shown is still being constructed. However, in our opinion each might expand the domain of strategizing research by suggesting new areas of observation and theorizing. As we envision a future-oriented agenda for strategizing we are particularly interested in sensemaking, though not the routine-based sensemaking explained by the Carnegie School (Johnson et al. 2007, pp. 37–38, 40–42). As indicated above, we are drawn instead to the book Managing the Unexpected by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe

214 Anne Sigismund Huff, Anne-Katrin Neyer and Kathrin Möslein Table 13.1 Additional explanatory perspectives for understanding strategizing Potential strengths of research evidence and theoretical explanations

Perspective

Sensemaking under uncertainty. The current crisis has escalated uncertainty, yet an increasing number of organizations have already been operating under persistent uncertainty. Weick and Sutcliffe’s (2007) study of hospital emergency rooms, forest firefighting and other situations emphasizes, among other things, that in these environments expertise is more ‘relational’ – it is an ‘assemblage of knowledge, experience, learning and intuitions that is seldom embodied in a single individual’ (p. 78).

Considering the ‘mindful’ response of groups to uncertain activities may balance conclusions from less considered routine practices by individuals.

Appreciative inquiry. Cooperrider and Whitney (2005) and the Center for Positive Organization Scholarship at the University of Michigan (www.bus.umich.edu/positive/) summarize a set of practices aimed at engaging the positive potential of all employees to change organizational culture as well as outcomes. Rather than diagnosing problems, this perspective begins by appreciating and valuing the best of ‘what is’.

Recognizing positive behaviour and results may balance a tendency in many areas of inquiry to focus on standard outcomes and problems experienced in meeting those expectations.

Open distributed problem solving. The phenomenal success of open source programming has inspired activity in many other areas. Karim Lakhani and Panetta (2007) describe how broadcasting problems is a radical departure from traditional problem solving. Instead of asking small groups of insiders to work on problems, broadcasting requires that insiders do as little problem solving as possible, while trying to interest a heterogeneous set of external actors in finding solutions.

Voluntary problem solving by a large and varied group of outsiders balances emphasis on assignments given to individuals and small groups within an organization. Whether or not distributed problem solving is formally adopted, this perspective reminds researchers to be aware of exogenous activities and ideas.

Experimentation and prototyping. Experimentation has long played an important role in the development of ideas and concepts. While the focus has been primarily on controlled laboratory experiments, rigorously designed field experiments might be a stronger way to generate information relevant to the strategizing agenda. The German management researcher Eberhard Witte has impressively summarized the pros and cons of real-world piloting and field experimentation for management research in Germany, a country with a strong culture of field research (Witte 1997).

Experimental construction of new solutions in real-world contexts balances emphasis on the functions of solutions that have already been implemented.

Collaborative research. Shani et al. (2008) are among those who show how different research foci and outcomes result when managers join researchers in collaboratively identifying questions, choosing methods, collecting data and analysing results.

Projects executed with organizational members may expand or redefine the results of projects designed, executed and interpreted by academics.

Use value. A focus on value-in-use reaches beyond abstract calculation of pure value and value appropriation to look at processes of value co-creation with customers and users (Vargo and Lusch 2004). The logic being developed requires abandoning distinctions between products and services while emphasizing interactive relationships (Lusch et al. 2008).

The word ‘value’ has been primarily used by strategy researchers in companyoriented calculations, as in ‘appropriating value’. Continuing to use the word, but with a new definition, may help researchers collect overlooked or undervalued data.

(2007). Their summary includes five pieces of advice from the observation of ‘mindful’ managers: 1. Preoccupation with failure. Small events can lead to huge failures. Treat any lapse as a symptom that something may be wrong with the system. Be aware that you have yet to experience all of the ways your system can fail. 2. Reluctance to simplify. Get comfortable with the idea that the world you face is complex,

unstable, unknowable and unpredictable. Welcome diverse experience and scepticism. 3. Sensitivity to operations. Be less strategic and more situational. A person with situational awareness can identify anomalies while they are still tractable and isolated, and then make the continuous adjustments that prevent errors from accumulating and enlarging. 4. Commitment to resilience. Be mindful to keep errors small and be committed to improvising workarounds that allow the system to keep

Broader methods to support new insights into strategizing

functioning. Use what you have learned from unexpected events to revise operating procedures and update plans. 5. Deference to expertise. Remember that the person with the most experience is not necessarily an expert when coping with the unexpected.3 These suggestions are surprising and evocative. They provide an interesting counterweight to observations of behaviour from organizations designed to produce standardized, controllable outputs and are an energizing vision of what might be achieved with a broader theoretical agenda as well as a broader set of observational tools.

Conclusion Methods typically play a supporting role in research design, chosen after theoretical direction and project purpose have been established. This chapter argues for a more egalitarian relationship and suggests giving methods and theoretical tools a more central role when significant, unexpected events have an impact on the organization studied. Our claim that strategizing researchers should move in this direction is underscored by the assertion that some basic, taken-for-granted assumptions appear to no longer pertain to the world economy (Alan Greenspan), formerly effective actions no longer yield desired outcomes (Paul Krugman) and established patterns of behaviour may destroy rather than create value (Richard Rumelt). In conclusion, however, we remind readers and ourselves of the essential indeterminacy of strategic situations. It is problematic to assume that the world presents ‘problems’ that can be ‘solved’.4 It makes more sense, in our view, to think of strategy as a precarious, ongoing activity. The current crisis is thus only a useful prompt for improving our understanding of all strategic efforts.

3

(http://www.bus.umich.edu/KresgeLibrary/Collections/ Dividend/2007-fall-dividend.pdf) 4 See de Rond (2003) for a more complete discussion of the theoretical difficulties of assuming there is a unique solution to strategic problems.

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References Abbott, A. (1990), ‘A primer on sequence methods’, Organisation Science, 1/4: 375–392. (1995), ‘Sequence analysis: New methods for old ideas’, Annual Review of Sociology, 21: 93–113. Abell, P. (2004), ‘Narrative explanation: An alternative to variable-centered explanations’, Annual Review of Sociology, 30: 287–310. Balogun, J., Huff, A. and Johnson, P. (2003), ‘Three responses to the methodological challenges of studying strategising’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 197–224. Bartunek, J. M. and Louis, M. R. (1996), Insider/ outsider team research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cooperrider, D. L. and Whitney, D. (2005), Appreciative inquiry: A positive revolution in change. San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler. Denzin N. and Lincoln, Y. (2000) (eds.), Handbook of qualitative research, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 163–88. de Rond, M. (2003), Strategic alliances as social facts: Business, biotechnology and intellectual history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenhardt, K. (1989), ‘Building theories from case studies research’, The Academy of Management Review, 14/4: 532–550. Heise, D. R. (1988), ‘Computer analysis of cultural structures’, Social Science Computer Review, 6/1: 183–196. (1989), ‘Modeling event structures’, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 14/2–3: 139–169. Huff, A. S. (2009), Designing research for publication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Jarzabkowski, P. (2005), Strategy as practice: An activity-based approach. London, UK: Sage. Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. and Seidl, D. (2007), ‘Strategising: The challenges of a practice perspective’, Human Relations, 60/1: 5–27. Jarzabkowski, P. and Matthiesen, J. (2007), ‘Capturing strategy as an everyday practice’, European Group for Organisational Studies Colloquium. Accessed October 2008 at www. s-as-p.org/papers.php Johnson, G., Langley, A., Melin, L., and Whittington, R. (2007), Strategy as practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, G., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2003), ‘Guest editor’s introduction: Micro strategy and strategising: Towards an activity-based

216 Anne Sigismund Huff, Anne-Katrin Neyer and Kathrin Möslein view’, The Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 3–22. Krugman, P. (2008), ‘The widening gyre’, The New York Times, October 27. Lakhani, K. R. and Panetta, J. A (2007), ‘The principles of distributed innovation’, Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 2/3 (summer): 97–112. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lusch, R. F., Vargo, S. L. and Wessels, G. (2008), ‘Toward a conceptual foundation for service science: Contributions from servicedominant logic’, IBM Systems Journal, 47/1: 5–14. McGrath, G. (1982), ‘Dilemmatics: The study of research choices and dilemmas’, in J. McGrath, J. Martin, and R. Kulka (eds.), Judgment calls in research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Roos, J., Victor, B. and Statler, M. (2004), ‘Playing seriously with strategy’, Long Range Planning 37/6: 549–568. Rumelt, R. P. (1974), Strategy, structure and economic performance. Boston: Harvard University Press. (1979), ‘Evaluating competitive strategies’, in D. E. Schendel and C. Hofer (eds.), Strategic management: A new view of business policy and planning. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.

(1994), Strategy, structure, and economic performance. Boston: Harvard University Press. (2008), ‘Strategy in a structural break’, The McKinsey Quarterly, December. Rumelt, R. P., Schendel, D. and Teece, D. (1994) (eds.), Fundamental issues in strategy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Shani, A. B. R., Mohrman, S. A., Pasmore, W. H., Bengt Stymne, B. and Adler, N. (2008) (eds.), Handbook of collaborative management research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sims, D. B. P. and Doyle, J. R. (1995), ‘Cognitive sculpting as a means of working with managers’ metaphors’, Omega 23/2: 117–124. Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. (2004), ‘Evolving the new dominant logic for marketing’, Journal of Marketing 68/1: 1–17. Weick, K. E. and Sutcliffe, K. E. (2007), Managing the unexpected: Assuring high performance in an age of complexity, 2nd edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Whittington, R. (1996), ‘Strategy as practice’, Long Range Planning, 29/5: 731–735. Winnicott, D. W. (1951), ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’, Collected papers: Through pediatrics to psychoanalysis. London: Tavistock Publications. Witte, E. (1997), ‘Feldexperimente als Innovationstest – Die Pilotprojekte zu neuen Medien’, Zeitschrift für betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung, 49/5: 419–436.

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Critical discourse analysis as methodology in Strategy as Practice research E E RO VA A R A

Introduction In recent years, scholars have started to pay attention to the discursive aspects of strategizing (Knights and Morgan 1991; Hendry 2000; SamraFredericks 2005; Seidl 2007). These studies have highlighted the underlying assumptions of strategy as body of knowledge (Knights and Morgan 1991), the central role of narratives and other discourse forms in organizations (Barry and Elmes 1997), the importance of rhetorical skills in strategizing (Samra-Fredericks 2003, 2005) and the implications that specific conceptions of strategy have on identity and power (Mantere and Vaara 2008). This stream of research can be understood as part of the more general interest in the social and organization practices around strategy, although some scholars have argued that the Strategy as Practice movement has not been able to incorporate or develop original critical discursive perspectives on strategy (Clegg et al. 2004; Carter et al. 2008). I will in the following take a broad perspective and focus on the issue of how we can better understand the discursive aspects of strategy and strategizing from a critical angle. My intention is to try to refrain from constructing barriers between Strategy as Practice studies and critical discursive analyses, as such barriers would do a disservice both to the development of Strategy as Practice and to the promotion of critical analysis of strategy as discourse and practice. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can serve to further our understanding of strategy and strategizing. CDA is a methodological approach that allows one to examine the constitutive role that discourses play in contemporary society. Its origins lie in applied

linguistics (Fairclough 2003; van Dijk 1998; Wodak and Meyer 2002), and this is why it emphasizes the central role of texts and their analysis more than other approaches – e.g. Foucauldian and other poststructuralist methodologies – in discourse analysis. Unlike some other linguistic methods, however, CDA underscores the linkage between discursive and other social practices, thus not reducing everything to discourse, as is the danger with some relativist forms of discourse analysis. In brief, I argue that it is precisely through such an approach that we can better map out and understand the role of discursive practices in the micro-level processes and activities constituting strategies and strategizing in contemporary organizations. This is not to say that CDA would be the only fruitful methodology, but to try to explain how it can be used in the analysis of some of the most central but still poorly understood issues in strategizing. Lately, we have seen examples of strategy studies explicitly drawing on CDA (Hardy et al. 2000; Hodge and Coronado 2006; Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008). There are also papers that have focused on the use of CDA in studies of strategic management (Laine and Vaara 2007; Phillips et al. 2008). Nevertheless, there is a need to spell out in a concrete manner what exactly CDA can mean and tease out in terms of a better understanding of social and discursive practices constituting strategy and strategizing in and around contemporary organizations. In particular, I argue that CDA can advance our understanding of: (1) the central role of formal strategy texts; (2) the discursive construction of conceptions of strategy and subjectivity in organizational strategizing; (3) the processes of legitimation in and through strategy discourse; and (4) the ideological underpinnings 217

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of strategy discourse as a body of knowledge and praxis. At the same time, attention must be focused on the methods used in such analysis. My position here is that CDA can be conducted in various ways, but that a close reading of specific texts is a crucial requirement of such analysis. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. I will next provide an outline of CDA as a methodological approach to studying Strategy as Practice. Then I will explain how CDA can help to better understand the central role of formal strategy texts with selected examples of studies applying discursive approaches in various ways. This is followed by an example of the close reading of specific texts that is a crucial distinctive feature of CDA research. The conclusion summarizes the main points and emphasizes key issues in the application of CDA.

Critical discourse analysis: an overview Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a methodological approach that allows one to examine the constitutive role that discourses play in contemporary society. Its origins lie in applied linguistics, and it has been developed by scholars such as Fairclough, van Dijk, van Leeuwen and Wodak. In recent years, it has been applied in various ways across social and human sciences. Foucauldian and other post-structuralist approaches are at times also considered critical discursive analyses, although their epistemological assumptions are distinctively different. While these differences should be underscored, there is a linkage between the approaches as, for example, Fairclough’s work draws on Foucault’s ideas. Rather than forming one coherent whole, however, there are different traditions in CDA. For example, Fairclough and Wodak (1997, pp. 262–268) distinguish between French discourse analysis, critical linguistics, social semiotics, sociocultural change and change in discourse, socio-cognitive studies, the discourse-historical method, reading analysis, and the Duisburg school. As the label of CDA is at times linked exclusively with Fairclough and his colleagues’ work, it has also been proposed that we should move towards using a broader notion of Critical discourse studies (CDS) instead of CDA.

Like all discursive approaches, CDA sees discourse as both socially conditioned and socially constitutive. It is this latter ‘constructive’ or ‘performative’ effect of discourse that makes it a central object of study for social science. Accordingly, language not only reflects ‘reality’ but is the very means of constructing and reproducing the world as we experience it. CDA, however, implies seeing discourses as part of social practice. This means that, unlike some more relativist approaches, CDA scholars share a viewpoint according to which not everything is reducible to discourse. In a sense, discourses are particular ‘moments’ among others in the complex social processes constituting the world. Accordingly, CDA scholars usually emphasize the dialectics of (social) structure and discourse; discourses are in this sense both the products of structures and the producers of structures. These dialectics are especially salient in Fairclough’s work, where discourse is seen to have effects on social structures, as well as being determined by them, and so contributes to social continuity and social change (e.g. 1989, 1997, 2003). What is most distinctive in CDA is its inbuilt critical stance. In simple terms, CDA aims at revealing taken-for-granted assumptions on social, societal, political and economic spheres, and examines power relationships between various kinds of discourses and actors (van Dijk 1998; Fairclough 1989, 2003). In a sense, CDA attempts to make visible social phenomena that often pass unnoticed. Importantly, in CDA, discourses are not seen as neutral in terms of their ideological content but a major locus of ideology. Fairclough (1989) goes as far as stating that ‘ideology is pervasively present in language’ and ‘that fact ought to mean that the ideological nature of language should be one of the major themes of modern social science’ (p. 2). In discourse analysis of this kind, the concept of ideology is usually a broad one. Fairclough (1989) sees ideologies as ‘common-sense’ assumptions that treat specific ideas and power relations as natural. Van Dijk views ideology as the ‘basis of the social representations shared by members of a group’ (1998, p. 8). This view is different from the classical Marxist emphasis on ‘false consciousness’ and closer to post-structuralist (Laclau and

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Mouffe 1985) or culturalist (e.g. Chiapello 2003) conceptions of ideology. In this view, rather than one ‘ideology’, the focus is on alternative or competing ideologies linked with or mediated by specific discourses. Methodologically, CDA scholars point out that one cannot understand specific texts and discourses without considering the social context in question. Fairclough (2003) argues that discourses should be ideally analysed simultaneously at textual (microlevel textual elements), discursive practice (the production and interpretation of texts) and social practice (the situational and institutional context) levels, which is theoretically helpful but empirically very difficult to achieve. The discourse-historical method of Wodak (e.g. Wodak et al. 1999), in turn, emphasizes the importance of the historical dimension in such analysis by maintaining that the emergence of specific discourses always takes place in a particular socio-historical context. All CDA scholars also underscore the importance of intertextuality, that is seeing specific texts or communications as parts of longer chains of texts. In simple terms, this means that the meaning created in a particular discursive act can hardly be understood without a consideration of what is ‘common knowledge’ or what has been said before. This issue of intertextuality is also related to the broader question of interdiscursivity, that is how specific discourse and genres are interlinked and constitute particular ‘orders-of-discourse’, that is ensembles of relationships between discourses in particular social contexts. These orders-of-discourse can be seen as the discursive reflections of social order, and thus help to understand the discursive aspects of social structures (Fairclough 1989, 2003). Overall, organizational discourse analysis – including its more critical versions – has focused less on the textual micro-elements and more on the linkages between discourse use and organizational action (e.g. Phillips and Hardy 2002; Mumby 2004). This is an understandable perspective given the underlying interest in organizational processes. Yet it is important to analyse textual elements in sufficient detail to understand their subtle effects in the broader context (see also Fairclough 2005). In fact, a particularly appealing, but at the same time challenging, goal in CDA

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studies is to be able to place a specific discursive event into the broader interdiscursive context, and thus be able to exemplify more general tendencies through specific texts. However, the level of analysis must obviously depend on the research question and design. What are then suitable empirical materials for CDA? In principle, any kind of textual material (documents, speeches, conversations, media texts, etc.) is useful for critical discursive inquiry. However, such analysis can also include other modes of semiosis. Thus, for instance, visual representations in the form of pictures, symbols and so forth can turn out to be important in the critical analysis of discourses in particular contexts. In-built in CDA is the idea that its nature depends on the application, and that particular ideas have to be refined according to the context. Furthermore, such an analysis thus often becomes interdisciplinary. In fact, some CDA scholars argue that the essence of CDA is to combine methods of linguistic analysis with social theories and subjectspecific understanding (Fairclough 2005). How can CDA then be used to advance our knowledge of the discursive and other social practices constituting strategy and strategizing in contemporary organizations? In the following I will argue that CDA can advance our understanding of the central role of formal strategy texts, the discursive construction of conceptions of strategy and subjectivity in organizational strategizing, the processes of legitimation in and through strategy discourse, and the ideological underpinnings of strategy discourse as a body of knowledge and praxis. This is not intended as an exclusive list of important topics, but a serious attempt to spell out important research topics that can be elucidated by CDA.

A CDA approach to strategy and strategizing The central role of formal strategy texts From a CDA approach, it is natural to start with the central role of strategy documents in strategizing. Such texts are crystallizations of strategic thought

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and often play a crucial role as ‘official’ strategies legitimating or delegitimating specific actions. Further, strategy documents are a genre of their own, reproducing specific kinds of practices in and around organizational decision-making. Ironically, however, there is a lack of systematic critical analysis on strategy texts, which may be partially explained by a deficiency of useful methods such as CDA. A rare example is, nevertheless, provided by Hodge and Coronado (2006). They examined the role of strategy documents from a CDA perspective. They focused on the Mexican government’s Plan-Puebla-Panama, which is a historically significant policy document dealing with the southeast region of the country. They analysed the various discursive and ideological elements of this document, and illustrated how discourse on economic reform involved a ‘complex’ of global capitalist and nationalist discourses and ideologies that was used to promote the opening up of Mexican markets to multinational companies (MNCs) based outside Mexico. Their analysis also showed that the form and vocabulary of the document reproduced corporate rhetoric and thus had a fundamental impact on the discursive and ideological struggles in Mexican society. Another example comes from my own ongoing research (Vaara et al. forthcoming). We examined the role of strategy documents in the city of Lahti. In our analysis, we focused on the city’s official strategy document of 2005. The document is in many ways a typical strategic plan comprising a SWOT analysis, mission and vision statements, strategic objectives, critical success factors and scorecards which examine the operation of the city organization and its development. However, this strategic plan was the first of its kind, and it had a fundamental impact on decision-making in this city organization and crucial choices concerning its services and management. Our analysis showed that a proper understanding of the effects of strategy texts requires an analysis of the more general characteristics of strategy as genre as well as the specific discursive choices in the text in question. As a result of our own inductive analysis, we identified five central discursive features of this plan: self-authorization (representing the document as a

discursive text with frequent explicit references to its importance); special terminology (shared and specified lexicon known by strategy specialists); discursive innovation (new articulations that crystallized key strategic ideas); forced consensus (an expressed need to reach some degree of unanimity or alignment for the strategic plan); and deonticity (the obligatory and imperative nature of the plan). We argue that these discursive features are not trivial characteristics; they have important implications for the texual agency of strategic plans, their performative effects, impact on power relations, and ideological implications. While the specific characteristics and effects are likely to vary depending on the context, we maintain that these features can, with due caution, be generalized and conceived as distinctive features of strategy as genre. Whilst these examples illuminate some of the most important features of strategy documents as well as their effects, more work is required to better understand the role of individual strategy texts and more generally the genre of strategy texts. Such analysis should ideally combine detailed examination of the linguistic features of these texts with a social analysis of the processes of production and consumption in the specific setting in question.

Construction of strategy and subjectivity in organizational strategy talk Apart from specific strategy texts, CDA can be applied to analyses of strategy talk in organizations. Such an analysis can focus on the content on strategy discourse and various kinds of struggles around specific strategies. However, such analysis can also target underlying issues such as conceptions of strategy and their implications on subjectivity and identity of various organizational actors. CDA of that kind can thus elucidate the construction of organizational power relationships and more general power structures in organizational strategizing. Some prior studies on strategy discourse have highlighted these issues. In particular, SamraFredericks (2003, 2004a, 2004b) has taken a conversation analysis perspective on strategy talk. Although her work has been distinctively

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ethnographic in orientation and used methods such as conversation analysis (see her chapter in this handbook), this research can also have implications for the critical discourse analysis of subjectivity in strategy talk. Central in this approach that she calls ‘lived experience’ are the constant micro-level processes, practices and functions that constitute conceptions of strategy and organizational relationships in social interaction. In her analysis, she focused specifically on specific rhetorical skills that strategists use to persuade and convince others – and to construct a subjectivity as strategists. These include the ability to speak forms of knowledge, mitigate and observe the protocols of human interaction, question and query, display appropriate emotion, deploy metaphors, and put history to ‘work’. The essential point in such analysis is that it is through mundane speech acts and various micro-level practices that particular ideas are promoted and others downplayed, and specific voices heard or marginalized. She (Samra-Fredericks 2005) has later shown that Habermas’ theory of communicative action and ethnomethodological theories can pave the way for fine-grained analysis of the everyday interactional constitution of organizational power relations in strategizing. However, explicit CDA studies have been rare. An exception is provided by Mantere and Vaara (2008) (see also Mantere in this handbook). Our analysis focused on the discursive construction of strategizing in twelve Nordic-based professional organizations to better understand the problem of participation (or more accurately, the lack of it) in contemporary organizations. In our analysis, we followed a CDA approach to examine how managers and other organizational members made sense of and gave sense to strategy work. We concentrated on interviews, but also used other sources of data to map out discursive practices that characterized strategizing in these organizations. We distinguished three central discourses that seemed to systematically reproduce non-participatory approaches: ‘mystification’ (the obfuscation of organizational decisions through various discursive means), ‘disciplining’ (the use of disciplinary techniques to constrain action) and ‘technologization’ (imposing a technological

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system to govern the activities of individuals as resources). However, we also identified three discourses that explicitly promote participation: ‘selfactualization’ (discourse that focuses attention on the ability of people as individuals to outline and define objectives for themselves in strategy processes), ‘dialogization’ (discourse integrating topdown and bottom-up approaches to strategizing) and ‘concretization’ (discourse that seeks to establish clear processes and practices in and through strategizing). This analysis helped to understand how non-participatory approaches are legitimated and naturalized in organizational contexts, but also how alternative discourses may be mobilized to promote participation. Yet another example of CDA focusing on subjectivity and power is provided by Laine and Vaara in this handbook. In brief, our analysis shows how subjectivity and power relations are constructed in an engineering organization. We report three examples of competing ways of making sense of and giving sense to strategic development, with specific subjectification tendencies. First, we demonstrate how corporate management can mobilize and appropriate a specific kind of strategy discourse to attempt to gain control of the organization, which tends to reproduce managerial hegemony, but also trigger discursive and other forms of resistance. Second, we illustrate how middle managers resist this hegemony by initiating a strategy discourse of their own to create room for manoeuver in controversial situations. Third, we show how project engineers can distance themselves from management-initiated strategy discourses to maintain a viable identity despite all kinds of pressures. These studies provide examples of the various kinds of discursive constructions and their implications for strategizing and more generally for the subjectivity and power relations of organizational actors. These studies show how a careful analysis of specific interview and other texts can be combined with other methods of data. However, they also highlight the difficulties of having to select specific textual examples among many others and the challenges in reporting only glimpses of detailed analyses in articles of tight space constrains.

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Discursive legitimation of strategies CDA can also assist in the analysis of the legitimating and naturalizing effects of particular strategy discourses. This means focusing attention on the discursive practices and strategies that legitimate and naturalize specific social practices, but not others. It is important to emphasize that legitimation not only deals with the specific phenomenon, action or practice in question, but is also linked with the power position of the actors (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999). For example, the legitimation of specific strategic ideas taken by a corporation also legitimates the power position and leadership of the corporate management and the strategists in question. Hardy et al. (2000) provide an example of how CDA can be applied to better understand such legitimation processes in particular organizational contexts. They illustrated how the use of specific strategic statements involves circuits of activity, performativity and connectivity. First, in circuits of activity specific discursive statements are introduced to evoke particular meanings. Second, such discursive actions must intersect with circuits of performativity. This happens when the discourses make sense to other actors. Third, when these two circuits intersect, connectivity occurs. This means that specific ‘discursive statements’ ‘take’. They illustrated this process by a study of a Palestinian NGO organization where a specific kind of discourse finally ‘took’ and legitimated particular organizational changes. Vaara et al. (2004) in turn studied the discursive practices through which specific strategies such as ‘airline alliances’ are legitimated and naturalized. By drawing on CDA (Fairclough 1997), we focused on the discursive practices involved in the legitimation and naturalization of specific kinds of strategies in an industrial field. The case in point was the emergence and institutionalization of ‘strategic alliances’ as the appropriate strategies in the airline industry. The analysis revealed specific discursive practices that seem to be often used when legitimating specific strategies such as airline alliances. These discursive practices included the problematization of traditional strategies, rationalization, the objectification and factualization of

alliance benefits, the fixation of ambiguous independence concerns, the reframing of cooperation problems as ‘implementation’ issues and the normalization of alliance strategies. Despite these analyses, it seems that we have only begun to map out and understand the myriads of processes through which specific strategies are legitimated and naturalized. What these examples illustrate is that such legitimation analysis needs to take into consideration both the production and consumption of discourses, which is not easy to tackle in any empirical research project (Hardy and Phillips 2004). The example of Hardy et al. (2000) shows how the tracking down of discursive statements can be combined with contextual analysis focusing on the actions of specific individuals and groups. The study of Vaara et al. (2004) in turn demonstrates how analysis of legitimation can comprise various types of textual data, including company documents, interviews and media texts. Future studies of organizational strategizing could also focus on media texts, which appears to be a particularly fruitful way to make use of CDA (Vaara and Tienari 2008). I will come back to this issue in the example of CDA below.

Ideological underpinnings of strategy discourse Prior studies have helped us to better understand strategy as a body of knowledge and its ideological underpinnings. Such analysis covers the discipline of strategy, including its academic (spread, e.g., by business schools) but also professional (spread, e.g., by consultants) and popular (spread, e.g., by the media) versions (Whittington 2006). Shrivastava (1986) provided one of the first critical analyses of strategy as a body of knowledge. Although not focusing on the discursive aspects, his Giddens-inspired analysis highlighted specific problematic features that seem to characterize strategy as a discipline. In particular, he distinguished and elaborated on in-built ideological elements such as the undetermination of action norms, the universalization of specific (sectional) interests, the denial of conflict and contradiction, the idealization of specific sectional interests and the naturalization of the status quo. The major difficulty

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with such tendencies is that they are an inherent part of this body of knowledge; in fact so much so that they most often pass unnoticed. To uncover these ideological elements, others have then worked on specific theoretical perspectives. Most notably, by drawing on Foucault (1973, 1980), Knights and Morgan (1991) took a genealogical perspective to strategy discourse (as a body of knowledge). They traced the roots of this discourse in post-war American capitalism and emphasized that the advance of this discourse was not a ‘necessity’ but a result of a number of specific developments. In their analysis, Knights and Morgan focused on ‘the way in which individuals are transformed into subjects whose sense of meaning and reality becomes tied to their participation in the discourse and practice of strategy’ p. 252). They specifically argued that strategy discourse provides managers with a rationalization of their successes and failures, that it sustains and enhances the prerogatives of management and negates alternative perspectives on organizations, that it generates a sense of security for managers, that it sustains gendered masculinity, that it demonstrates managerial rationality, that it facilitates and legitimates the exercise of power and that it constitutes subjectivities for organizational members who secure their sense of reality by participation in this discourse. Their analysis has inspired others to engage in critical reflection on strategy discourse. For example, Levy et al. (2003) proposed a critical theory inspired perspective to go further in the exploration and analysis of the hegemonic nature of strategy discourse and associated practices. In particular, they draw on Gramsci’s (1971) analysis of hegemony. In this view, organizational structures and management practices are inherently political. Ideology then ‘works as a force that stabilizes and reproduces social relations while masking and distorting these same structures and processes’ (Levy et al. 2003, p. 93). This view implies that strategy discourse is part of the continuous reconstruction of the hegemonic relationships in contemporary organizations, in particular, in corporations. The important insight here is that by believing in and adopting the strategy discourse, the disadvantaged actors

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accept and reproduce their subordination – without being aware of that. Others have taken specific kinds of poststructuralist perspective on strategy discourse. Lilley (2001) provided a Deleuzian analysis of strategy discourse. He argued that we can only identify ‘strategy’ when we see it, and speak of it when we seek to create or transform it, because we can draw upon a specific set of techniques that allow us to turn the concept of strategy into a ‘thing’ that we can represent in words and/or pictures. As a result, what we nowadays see or construct as strategy is not something natural but rather particular, resulting from the specific historically determined practices and techniques that govern our cognition and discourse. Grandy and Mills (2004) offered another interesting analysis of strategy discourse. By drawing on Baudrillard’s ideas, they argued that we have reached a stage of third-order simulacra, that is, our strategy discourse has attained a level of presentation that is hyperreal. In a sense, the strategy discipline and its various models and practices have started to live a life of their own which is disconnected from the (other) reality. Although these analyses have greatly advanced our understanding of the ideological underpinnings and power implications of strategy discourse, they can be complemented with CDA. That is, CDA can assist in systematic analyses of how strategy discourse has evolved, how it has been spread, what kinds of underlying assumptions are ingrained in specific strategy texts and how these texts and discourses have constructed and reproduced specific kinds of ideological assumptions, identities and power relations. The methodological point is that the prior studies have remained at an abstract level and not provided clear textual examples of the discourses analysed. To be clear, this is not a problem from the point of view of the specific tradition in question, but means that there is a great deal of room for more text-oriented micro-level analyses that could on the one hand illustrate and validate the insights of prior analyses of this body of knowledge, and on the other hand make use of established methods and examples of conducting similar kinds of analysis in other areas (e.g. Fairclough, 2003).

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Step 1: Definition of research questions

Step 4: Findings and generalizations

Theoretical interpretation process

Step 2: Overall analysis of the textual material

Empirical interpretation process

Step 3: Close reading of specific texts

Figure 14.1 CDA as abduction (modification of a figure presented in Vaara and Tienari 2004)

How to conduct CDA? An example of a media text As should be clear by now, CDA is a methodology that can be applied in various ways. The tradition in applied linguistics has been to focus on the close reading of specific texts. However, in the context of strategy research, critical discourse analysis is likely to raise more questions concerning the selection of texts and the generalizability of findings than when applied in linguistics. Consequently, there is a need to proceed in stages such as the following (see also Vaara and Tienari 2004): • Definition of research questions that reflect critical orientation. As exemplified in the previous sections, CDA focuses on issues and concerns of social and societal importance that require critical scrutiny. • Overall analysis of the textual material leading to a selection of ‘samples’ of texts. CDA can focus on a larger number of texts or only on one text, but the selection of the sample needs to made very carefully. • Close reading of specific texts. this phase is crucial in CDA as the objective is to provide concrete illustrations at the textual micro-level.

• Elaboration on findings and their generalizability. after a close reading of a text, the key findings should be elaborated on and placed in their wider context. However, it should be emphasized that the CDA is in its very nature ‘abductive’, that is research involves constant refinement of theoretical ideas with an increasingly accurate understanding of the empirical phenomena (Locke et al. 2008). As Wodak puts it: ‘a constant movement back and forth between theory and empirical data is necessary’ (2004, p. 200). Figure 14.1 provides a simplified view of the typical stages in CDA research. The close reading of texts is the crucial distinctive feature of CDA research. I will in the following exemplify this close reading by an analysis of a media text that was originally published in Vaara and Tienari (2008). In our analysis, we focused on the discursive legitimation of a shutdown decision in the media. As discussed above, the discursive legitimation of specific strategies is an important but still under-researched area in Strategy as Practice research. Although such close reading can be conducted in various ways, it is important to focus attention on the representativeness of the text in terms of its genre and particular characteristics. Our analysis focused on a typical

Critical discourse analysis as methodology

media text that helped us to uncover and exemplify how the media makes sense of such strategic decisions. In such close reading, it is also vital to employ specific theoretical models and ideas as guiding principles in the analysis. We used the theoretical model developed by van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) in which they distinguished authorization, rationalization, moral evaluation and mythopoesis as typical discursive legitimation strategies.1 While such close reading is by its very nature interpretative and subjective, specified theoretical starting points help to structure the analysis and ascertain that the analysis captures essential aspects of the phenomenon in question. This is not to say that all CDA applications in Strategy as Practice research should use specific linguistic theories, but that it is important to be able to move beyond the most apparent surface level of the texts, to be able to identify and elaborate on the key discursive and social practices in question. The case in question is the shutdown of a longstanding marine engine factory in the city of Turku, Finland, carried out by Wärtsila Group in 2004 and 2005. The company’s decision created a huge debate in Finland around their strategy and the overall legitimacy of such decisions. The following text illustrates how the shutdown was initially presented in the leading Finnish daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, which can be seen as an opinion leader in the Finnish media. This reporting created a specific sense of legitimacy around the controversial decision and set the tone for the subsequent public discussion. Wärtsilä moves its engine manufacturing to Italy 480 people lose their jobs, 200 maintenance men remain in Turku Capacity is cut to improve profitability The engine manufacturer Wärtsilä will shut down its long-standing factory in Turku and move its production to Trieste, Italy. Of the 680 employees in Turku, 480 will lose their jobs. A 1

We thus focus on the discursive construction of ‘organizational strategies’ which are legitimated by ‘discursive legitimation strategies’ (sometimes called ‘practices’).

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couple of hundred people will retain their jobs in diesel engine maintenance service. About 130 of those who are going to lose their jobs will have an opportunity for early retirement; 350 employees will be dismissed. Production will be transferred to Italy in the fall. The CEO of Wärtsilä, Ole Johansson, says that engine production in Vaasa [another Finnish city] will continue as before. There are 1,600 employees in Vaasa and about 1,200 in Trieste. Vaasa is the technology and R&D center for the entire Wärtsilä Group. According to Johansson, the shutdown is not due to a lack of competitiveness in Turku. He says that the multinational has only bad alternatives since overcapacity has to be cut because of weak demand. This shutdown will, according to Johansson, secure full employment in Vaasa and Trieste. The shutdown is part of Wärtsilä’s restructuring program, which was started last September. The group will reduce its workforce by a total of 1,100 people. On Wednesday it was announced that a total of 70 people would be made redundant in Norway and Holland. Johansson estimated that the shutdown of the Turku factory would affect ‘a few dozen jobs’ with subcontractors in the Turku region. Johansson argues that concentration of large engine production at Trieste is justified because the factory is Wärtsilä’s largest. Concentration will create flexibility for changes in demand. While two different engine types are manufactured in Turku, several are made in Trieste, including those made in Turku. When demand is strong, a factory like Turku is effective, but it becomes problematic when the market slows down. Last year people in Turku faced temporary layoffs. Trieste does not require large investments, as is the case in Turku, where more production capacity is needed. Trieste also has direct access to natural gas, which is needed for testing gas engines. This solution will significantly increase the profitability of the ‘multinational corporation’, Johansson estimates. The share price of the corporation increased after the shutdown news. According to Johansson, restructuring production will generate annual savings of approximately 60 million euros, which will affect earnings from 2005 onwards. (Helsingin Sanomat, 15 January 2004)

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This news report is a typical example of a discursive struggle over shutdowns. The genre of the focal text is business news, but the text is also an approving commentary on the ‘official’ information given by Wärtsilä’s corporate communications. The text thus represents a hybrid genre, typical of contemporary media (Fairclough 1995; van Dijk 1990). On the whole, global capitalist discourse is the dominant discourse used; it provides the primary framework to make sense of the controversial decision. Several legitimation strategies are used. To a large extent, the text rests on the authorization provided by CEO Ole Johansson. The involvement of the CEO lends credibility to the evidence provided, most clearly shown in his speech acts. However, the journalist composing and editing the text also uses other means of authorization. Importantly, the reference to the increase in share price serves as a particularly powerful legitimation strategy. In a sense, the ‘market’ acts as the ultimate authority in contemporary global capitalism. Various rationalization strategies are also used. Financial rationalization plays an accentuated role: the shutdown is legitimated by references to profitability improvement and annual savings. This is the case even though the CEO admits that the ‘competitiveness’ of the unit is not a problem per se. This is one of the most striking features of this text – improvement of future profitability, rather than current problems, is the main reason given for the shutdown. In this sense the text deals with ‘imaginaries’ (Fairclough and Thomas 2004) or ‘futurological prediction’ (Fairclough 2003). The modality of the text is a significant part of the rationalization. For example, the claim that ‘overcapacity has to be cut’ is portrayed as an obligation in terms of the future success of the MNC, leaving no room for alternative scenarios. Defining the Wärtsilä Group as an MNC makes all the difference in the text. This framing legitimates the shutdown by appealing to the effect it will have on the overall profitability of the corporation. This is a key theme in the text, and it is explicitly spelled out in the final comment of the CEO: ‘This solution will significantly increase the profitability of the multinational corporation.’ From other media texts published – for example, in the local newspaper – we learn that this is in stark

contrast to the view held by people in Turku, who saw the factory (and the company itself) as an integral part of the shipbuilding tradition in the Turku region from the late eighteenth century. From this perspective, shutting down the unit – especially since it was profitable – did not make any sense. ‘Overcapacity’ is a particularly interesting rationalization theme in the text. It nominalizes a state of affairs accepted as fact. It also involves discursive ‘technologization’ (Fairclough 1995, pp. 91–111), in the sense that grasping the issue at hand (‘overcapacity’) is difficult without detailed knowledge of the industry dynamics. What happened in the previous year – the ‘temporary layoffs’ – is also used as evidence here. Other rationalizations include pointing out that the unit in Trieste is larger than the one in Turku, that the Trieste unit allows for better concentration of production and that it provides more access to necessary natural resources. ‘Concentration’ and ‘flexibility’ are interesting themes in this respect. They are often used by decision-makers in MNCs to create a positive sense of the prospects for reorganizing production across national borders. Moralization strategies are also used in the text. While the beginning of the text effectively raises doubts concerning the moral basis of the shutdown decision by pointing to dramatic job losses, the latter part of the text echoes the official corporate view. An important part of legitimation is that the eventual unemployment of the workers in Turku is necessary so that workers in Vaasa and Trieste will have ‘full employment’. As a linguistic detail, the verb ‘secure’ is used as a particularly forceful confirmation. The reference to Vaasa is crucial from a nationalistic Finnish perspective, since it justifies the layoffs in one location by the ‘fact’ that this will allow the other unit in Finland to survive. Taking up the layoffs in other countries (Norway and Holland) then serves as a justification of processual fairness. The significance of job losses elsewhere in the Turku region, for example, in relation to the MNC’s subcontractors, is played down (only ‘a few dozen jobs’ will be lost). It is, however, the apparent inevitability of the situation – ‘[we have] only bad alternatives’ – that serves as the overarching moralization strategy in the text.

Critical discourse analysis as methodology

Finally, there are interesting mythopoetical elements in the text. There is a restructuring programme already under way in the MNC, and the shutdown decision is an essential part of this programme. The restructuring programme can be seen as a euphemism for layoffs, and its narrative construction makes it a self-justifying structure. The shutdown becomes a strategic – not a haphazard – one-off decision. This attaches an additional sense of inevitability to this particular decision. We can thus see how particular discursive legitimation strategies are used to legitimate a specific organizational strategy with significant social and material consequences: transfer of production and loss of jobs. The point is that media texts such as this one are a key part of complex discursive processes through which particular organizational strategies – and not others – are legitimated. Methodologically, such close reading of a specific text can be the essence of the analysis. However, depending on the empirical research design, it might also be useful to combine examples from multiple texts and other observations to provide a more complete analysis of the phenomenon in question.

Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that CDA has a great deal to offer to Strategy as Practice research because it provides means to critically analyse contemporary social problems by targeted linguistic analysis (Fairclough 2003). This is why it can and should be applied to Strategy as Practice research. There are also specific reasons for advocating its use at this point of time. On the one hand, we still know little of the role of language in strategy and strategizing. While the discursive aspects of strategy have received increasing attention in prior studies (Laine and Vaara 2007; Mantere and Vaara 2008; Phillips et al. 2008), these analyses are still rare and have relatively little weight in the overall body of strategy research. CDA is one, though not of course the only, methodology that can assist in developing better understanding of the central discursive processes and practices as well as their implications. On the other hand, strategy research in general and

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Strategy as Practice studies in particular have been criticized for a lack of critical analyses (Carter et al. 2008). CDA is an approach that can partly help to remedy this state of affairs. However, CDA is no panacea. The applications of CDA in general and in management research in particular have been criticized for a lack of rigour and detail in the actual linguistic analyses. Moreover, students of CDA have at times been accused of self-serving selections of texts and distorted interpretations. CDA invites the researcher to take a stand on issues, more so than in conventional analyses. This should not be misinterpreted as an opportunity to produce any kind of critical comment based on one’s convictions or general observations. On the contrary, it is necessary to make sure that one’s own interpretations are based on careful textual evidence and logical argumentation. This chapter has provided some ideas as to what such analysis can entail. I have outlined particularly important topics that deserve special attention. These include the central role of formal strategy texts, the discursive construction of conceptions of strategy and subjectivity in organizational strategizing, legitimation in and through strategy discourse and the ideological underpinnings of strategy discourse as a body of knowledge and praxis. What I have sketched here can be seen as a preliminary research agenda that hopefully inspires more fine-grained empirical analyses. This list of topics is, however, by no means exhaustive, and there are many other questions that warrant attention in the future. Future studies can take many directions ranging from detailed linguistic analysis of the particular features of strategy texts to broader analysis of production and consumption of strategy research. While a critical discourse analysis methodology can accommodate various theoretical perspectives and empirical methods, I wish to conclude by emphasizing its three key requirements: First, the critical orientation must be taken seriously, which should be shown throughout the analysis from the initial formulation of the research questions to the final conclusions. The point is to focus on issues and concerns that require critical analysis in the strategy domain. Not all discourse analysis is or

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needs to be critical, but then it should not be called CDA. Second, CDA must include detailed analysis of texts that provide the empirical basis for the key arguments to be made. This most often requires close reading of specific texts that can provide concrete illustrations of the focal phenomena at the textual micro-level. Third, these texts must then also be placed in their social contexts. I believe that it is through such analysis that we can best understand the linkage between discursive and other organizational practices in strategizing and the social and societal consequences of strategy discourse.

References Barry, D. and Elmes, M. (1997), ‘Strategy retold: Toward a narrative view of strategic discourse’. Academy of Management Review, 22/2: 429–452. Carter, C., Clegg, S. and Kornberger, M. (2008), ‘So!apbox: Editorial essays: Strategy as practice’. Strategic Organization, 6/1: 83–99. Chiapello, E. (2003), ‘Reconciling the two principal meanings of the notion of ideology: The example of the concept of Spirit of Capitalism’. European Journal of Social Theory, 6/2: 155–171. Clegg, S., Carter, C. and Kornberger, M. (2004), ‘Get up, I feel like being a strategy machine’. European Management Review, 1/1: 21–28. Fairclough, N. (1989), Language and power. London: Longman. (1995), Media discourse. London: Edward Arnold. (1997), Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. London: Longman. (2003), Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. (2005), ‘Discourse analysis in organization studies: The case for critical realism’. Organization Studies, 26/6: 915–939. Fairclough, N. and Thomas, P. (2004), ‘The discourse of globalization and the globalization of discourse’. In D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick and L. Putnam (eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational discourse. London: Sage, 379–396. Fairclough, N. and Wodak, R. (1997), ‘Critical discourse analysis’. In T. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as social interaction: 258–284. London: Sage.

Foucault, M. (1973), The order of things: The archaelogy of human sciences. New York: Vintage Books. (1980), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, C. Gordon (ed.). Brighton Harvester Press. Gramsci, A. (1971), Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Grandy, G. and Mills, A. J. (2004), ‘Strategy as simulacra? A radical reflexive look at the discipline and practice of strategy’. Journal of Management Studies, 41/7: 1153–1170. Hardy, C., Palmer, I. and Phillips, N. (2000), ‘Discourse as a strategic resource’. Human Relations, 53: 1227–1248. Hendry, J. (2000), ‘Strategic decision making, discourse, and strategy as social practice’. Journal of Management Studies, 37/7: 955–977. Hodge, B. and Coronado, G. (2006), ‘Mexico Inc.? Discourse analysis and the triumph of managerialism’. Organization, 13/4: 529–547. Knights, D. and Morgan, G. (1991), ‘Corporate strategy, organizations, and subjectivity: A critique’. Organisation Studies, 12/2: 251–273. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985), Hegemony and socialist strategy. London: Verso. Laine, P.-M. and Vaara, E. (2007), ‘Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering group’. Human Relations, 60/1: 29–58. Levy, D. L., Alvesson, M. and Willmott, H. (2003), ‘Critical approaches to strategic management’. In M. Alvesson and H. Willmott (eds.), Studying management critically. London: Sage, 92–109. Lilley, S. (2001), ‘The language of strategy’. In R. Westwood and S. Linstead (eds.), The language of organization. London: Sage, 66–88. Locke, K., Golden-Biddle, K. and Feldman, M. S. (2008), ‘Making doubt generative: Rethinking the role of doubt in the research process’. Organization Science, 19/6: 907–919. Mantere, S. and Vaara, E. (2008), ‘On the problem of participation in strategy: A critical discursive perspective’. Organization Science, 19/2: 341–358. Mumby, D. (2004), ‘Discourse, power and ideology: Unpacking the critical approach’. In D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick and L. Putnam (eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational discourse. London: Sage, 237–258.

Critical discourse analysis as methodology Phillips, N. and Hardy, C. (2002), Discourse analysis: Investigating processes of social construction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (2004), ‘Discourse and power.’ In D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick and L. Putnam (eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational discourse. London: Sage, 299–316. Phillips, N., Sewell, G. and Jaynes, S. (2008), ‘Applying critical discourse analysis in strategic management research’. Organizational Research Methods, 11/4: 770–789. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003), ‘Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction’. Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 141–174. (2004a), ‘Understanding the production of “strategy” and “organization” through talk amongst managerial elites’. Culture and Organization, 10/2: 125–141. (2004b), ‘Managerial elites making rhetorical and linguistic “moves” for a moving (emotional) display’. Human Relations, 57/9: 1103–43. (2005), ‘Strategic practice, “discourse” and the everyday interactional constitution of “power effects” ’. Organization, 12/6: 803–841. Seidl, D. (2007), ‘General strategy concepts and the ecology of strategy discourses: A systemicdiscursive perspective’. Organization Studies, 28/2: 197–218. Shrivastava, P. (1986), ‘Is strategic management ideological?’ Journal of Management, 12/3: 363–377. Vaara, E., Kleymann, B. and Seristö, H. (2004), ’Strategies as discursive constructions: The case of airline alliances’, Journal of Management Studies, 41/1: 1–35.

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Vaara, E., Sorsa, V. and Pälli, P. (forthcoming), ‘On the force potential of strategy texts: A critical discourse analysis of a strategic plan and its power effects in a city organization’, Organization. Vaara, E. and Tienari, J. (2004), ‘Critical discourse analysis as a methodology for international business studies’. In R. Piekkari and C. Welch (eds.), Handbook of qualitative research methods for international business. Cheltenham: Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 342–359. (2008), ‘A discursive perspective on legitimation strategies in MNCs’. Academy of Management Review, 33/4: 985–993. van Dijk, T. (1990), News as discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (1998), Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. van Leeuwen, T. and Wodak, R. (1999), ‘Legitimizing immigration control: A discoursehistorical perspective’. Discourse Studies, 1/1: 83–118. Whittington, R. (2006), ‘Completing the practice turn in strategy research’. Organization Studies, 27/5: 613–634. Wodak, R. 2004. ‘Critical discourse analysis’. In C. Seale, J. F. Gubrium and D. Silverman (eds.), Qualitative research practice. London: Sage, 197–213. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., and Liebhart, K. (1999), The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wodak, R. and Meyer M. (2002), Methods of critical discourse analysis. London: Sage.

CHAPTER

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Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution DA LV IR S A MR A -FR E D E RI CKS

The studies of work [Garfinkel] inspires […] [examine] the detailed and specifiable process of producing orders based on shared methods, trust, competence and attention (Rawls 2008, p. 702)

Introduction Garfinkel originally coined the term ‘ethnomethodology’ (EM) in the 1950s to capture his central interest in members’ ‘folk’ or everyday taken-forgranted methods (also called practices) or practical reasoning procedures for accomplishing a social order that constitutes sense. Garfinkel (1974, p. 16) later commented that ‘Ethno’ referred ‘somehow or other, to the availability to a member of commonsense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the whatever’. While Garfinkel’s ‘daunting prose’ (Silverman, 2000: 138) may deter us from reading him first-hand, others, for example Heritage (1984), have offered accessible summaries of his work. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological stance was also subsequently taken up in a unique way by Harvey Sacks (1992; see Silverman 1998) and colleagues in the late 1960s, establishing conversation analysis (CA). Under the auspices of the ‘missing what’, both Garfinkel and Sacks argued that social scientists were missing out the observable and reportable ‘work’. In other words, the everyday ordinary activities of members whereby they make accountable and visible those entities we call, for example, ‘welfare agencies’, hospitals, factories, courtrooms, families and various other kinds of organizations/bureaucracies. In quite diffuse ways, ethnomethodological thinking and ideas have seeped into the management and organization studies field through the work of Weick (1995, p. 11) and Giddens (1984; 230

see Boden 1991). More recently, the social theorist and philosopher Theodore Schatzki (2005, p. 479) – when detailing the parameters of a practice turn in social theory – also contended that his ‘site ontology’ is ‘clearly allied with a variety of micro-oriented approaches to social life, for example, ethnomethodology’. When turning to the more general substantive ‘topic’ in this chapter – strategy-work – ethnomethodology was also briefly referred to by Knights and Morgan (1991) in their Foucauldian based appraisal/critique of corporate strategy and the inherent constitution of subjectivity and other ‘power effects’. If we narrow our attention further onto this handbook’s substantive topic – the doing of Strategy as Practice or strategizing – then EM’s potential contribution was also explicitly voiced by Clegg et al. (2004) and Clark (2004): Strategy should be considered empirically in terms of ethnomethodology: an analysis of those things actually done by the actors themselves in situ as the doing of strategy. (Clegg et al. 2004, p. 27)

Empirical studies drawing upon EM to study Strategy as Practice remain rare however. While ambitious, it is the task of this chapter to indicate why EM/CA is relevant and what it requires of the researcher. To do so, this chapter will offer a selective incursion into the EM/CA canon and deliberately sets aside the diversity of EM/CA (see, e.g., Maynard and Clayman 1991, 2003; also Turner 1974, p. 7) as well as the controversies and debates these traditions have instigated (touched upon in Rawls 2008; Samra-Fredericks 2004a). The chapter is structured as follows: relevant aspects of Harold Garfinkel’s EM and Harvey Sacks’ CA are briefly noted and followed by the reproduction of two snippets of transcribed

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interaction from two studies. They indicate what this intellectual infrastructure offers as well as convey – in the concluding section – the sorts of issues and challenges EM/CA raise for the Strategy as Practice researcher.

So what is ethnomethodology and conversation analysis? Ethnomethodology The ethos that animates ethnomethodological studies of work arises from Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) distinctive stance on social order. The intellectual influences upon Garfinkel include phenomenology and the works of Husserl and Schutz in the 1940s. However, the lesson from phenomenology was to ‘transform everyday categories and objects into activities that constitute them’. So, rather than being a concern for consciousness, it was, for Garfinkel, a concern with ‘embodied activity’ and the everyday ‘practical production’ of worldmaking ‘accounts in the detail of concrete talk and behaviour that participants co-produce’ (Maynard, 2003, pp. 11–12). Substituting ‘world-making’ with strategy making we begin to see what Strategy as Practice researchers would examine in the work of strategists – that is, co-produced embodied activity, concrete talk and behaviour which constitutes social order and sense. Long-standing problems or issues and topics across philosophy and sociology also came to be treated by Garfinkel as members’ situated accomplishments: for example, problems such as efforts to render a ‘theory of action, the nature of intersubjectivity and the social constitution of knowledge’ (Heritage 1984, p. 3) or topics such as trust, reasoning, knowledge, meaning, order, morals, methods, language and competence. Studies of members’ everyday and naturally occurring social interactions are the starting point for illuminating such ‘foundational sociological issues’ (Button 1991; Heritage 1984, pp. 7–36; Maynard and Clayman 2003; Samra-Fredericks and Bargiela-Chiappini 2008). For EM researchers, the central ‘fact production in flight’ (as Garfinkel says; Boden 1994, p. 46) is social order, which is accomplished through those

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complex arrays of taken-for-granted methods and reasoning procedures. This focus on methods and reasoning procedures (and inferential practices) is also one we could more simply express as ‘unearthing everyday skills’ (Silverman 2000, p. 138): this immediately marks out one important connection to Strategy as Practice – that is, interests in the skills for accomplishing strategic effectiveness. If we were to also substitute or rather parse this notion of social order in the light of Strategy as Practice interests, then attention would turn to the ways ‘organization’ and that phenomenon we call ‘strategy’ are accomplished as members draw upon particular methods and reasoning procedures. In so doing, of course, members also integrally accomplish particular social–moral, economic and legal configurations as well as a ‘situated identity’. Further, as the ethnomethodologist Bittner (1974, p. 75) contended, it is an approach where: the meaning of the concept [organization or strategy, etc.], and of all of the terms and determinations that are subsumed under it, must be discovered by studying their use in real scenes of action by persons whose competence to use them is socially sanctioned.

Garfinkel’s proposal, then, was to look at what people are ‘really and actually’ doing as they do what they do and to discover in those actions the ‘structures of practical action’ and the ways they come to make ‘sense’ (Boden 1994, pp. 44–45). EM’s particular notion of ‘sense’ may also add to another growing area of interest within the Strategy as Practice field – that is, sensemaking (Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991; see also Balogun and Johnson 2005). When conceptualizing the practice of strategy as a socially situated accomplishment where ‘sense’ is done, members’ practical reasoning or use of ‘ethno’ methods during interactional sequences is placed centre-stage. It is also a move which not only extends close study of the ways members stabilize a social order or ‘organization’ (or ‘institutions’ such as science or medicine) but also the ways they bring forth objects or phenomena such as the strategy document and ‘Markets’ environment (Samra-Fredericks 2005a, 2010). This summary also begins to indicate that a particular orientation or set of methodological

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commitments characterize the EM-influenced Strategy as Practice researcher. Of these, language is a form of social action and sequential order is pivotal for yielding mutual intelligibility or ‘sense’ or meaning. Clearly it is uncontentious to assert that when we get close to (strategy) practitioners, often all they do all day and every day is talk – something which Mintzberg’s (1973) classic study first highlighted. Sacks and his colleagues’ development of CA has shown just how skilled the work of talking for world-building is. Heritage (1997) later explicitly added that through doing so, we talk an array of institutions ‘into being’.

Conversation analysis Influenced by the ethnomethodological enterprise in the 1960s, Sacks (1992; Garfinkel and Sacks 1970) set out to study the ‘social organization of mind, culture and interaction’ (Schegloff 1992, p. xii, emphasis added) and founded conversation analysis, also later termed talk-in-interaction (e.g. Psathas 1995). It is premised upon recording talkin-interaction and generating transcripts employing a detailed notation system arising from the original efforts of Jefferson. Following Garfinkel’s EM, CA also rests first and foremost on the study of the sequential procedures of talk for reality construction (Sacks 1972, 1992; also Boden 1994; Boden and Zimmerman 1991; Drew and Heritage 1992; Heritage 1997; Silverman 1998). This has often meant beginning with the ‘hallmark’ of CA, namely, the turn-taking system. In CA, such practices or methods are shown to be basic to human sociality (Schegloff 1992). Indeed, while studies of turn-taking are studies of the ways speakers negotiate interruptions and do repair, or how conversations are opened or closed, they are also studies of the practices for accomplishing a social order. The inherent need for commitment and reciprocity also lays support for the point that sequence relevancies ‘turn out to be moral relevancies’ (Rawls 1989, p. 165). This is something CA scholars advance from fine-grained studies of adjacency pairs and/ or dis-preferreds (Sacks 1987; Sacks et al. 1974; Sacks and Schegloff 1979; Pomerantz 1984). In CA, context is also not assumed or taken as a ‘given’, but instead a dynamic creation ‘expressed

in and through the sequential organization of interaction’ (Heritage 2004, p. 223). Two other major developments arising from Sacks’ (1992) seminal work and further establishing vibrant sub-fields of study are: studies of membership categorization devices (MCDs) which explicitly deal with a sociology of knowledge. In earlier work I mentioned the MCD of ‘accountant’ and the activities its deployment performed in terms of displacing the knowledge of another board member and consolidating the view that he lacked ‘strategic thinking’ (Samra-Fredericks 2003). The second development has crystallized into the ‘institutional talk’ programme and is particularly relevant here since it moves beyond the original CA focus on the ‘social institution of interaction’ to studies of the ‘management of social institutions in interaction’ (Heritage 1997, pp. 222–223). When dealing with institutionality in talk, how institutions such as business, law, medicine, education, government/state bureaucracies and so on are accomplished is centralized. Such studies also acknowledge that ‘institutional realities exist “in” and as documents, buildings, legal arrangements, and so on’ (p. 223). In studies of institutionality in talk-in-interaction, the focus, again, is on how – that is, the methods or practical reasoning procedures through which, for example, diagnosis, instruction, decision, advice, counseling, etc. are done, turn-by-turn, and made meaningful and consequential during interaction. As one useful starting point, Heritage (1997; see also 2004) identified ‘six basic places to probe the institutionality of interaction’ once we have audio-/video-recorded naturally occurring interaction. They are: turn-taking organization; overall structural organization of the interaction; sequence organization; turn design; lexical choice; and epistemological and other forms of asymmetry. While conscious of space here, these are briefly touched upon where possible, alongside other relevant features in the next section. In this next section, two illustrative extracts will be reproduced to begin to indicate EM/CA’s potential relevance and contribution. In particular, the ways EM/CA offers one route for explicating the intricate skills, inferential practices or ethnomethods members use, as well as how members learn to strategize, is outlined. The

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crucial question for me has always been – ‘How is that done?’ (Lynch and Bogen 1994, p. 93) and I begin with a brief outline of my research approach. A summary of just five key issues and challenges around doing this form of research is then offered in the concluding section.

Some background Like ‘workplace studies’ (Luff et al. 2000; Hindmarsh and Heath 2000), my research has drawn on EM and CA in an effort to grasp the ‘realtime’ richness and complexity of the work members do as they do it amongst each other. Elevating the ‘how?-question’, the research also adopted social science ‘methods’ based upon Garfinkel’s stance – later summed up by Maynard and Clayman (2003, pp. 175–176) – that we ‘follow the animal’, or in my case, senior managers formally tasked with shaping strategic direction. I have characterized my field ‘method’ as a form of work shadowing or non-participant observation where, over six- to twelve-month periods and across different realized ‘spaces’, I have followed and thus observed but also audio-recorded members’ talk-in-interaction. In some cases, this included video-recordings too (for a more detailed account, see Samra-Fredericks 2004b). Through doing so, analyses of the situated and interactionally coordinated ways members also use embodied resources such as ‘gaze’ and gesture to accomplish their work can be scrutinized as well (Samra-Fredericks 2010). These recordings offer a means for repeated and slow-motion fine-grained study of members’ talk, bodily movements and coordinated use of various tools and technologies. Alongside the visible material ‘world’ of documents, whiteboard screens, computer displays and so on, elusive methods and sequentially derived reasoning procedures for object construction also come within analytical purview. The video-recordings have also assisted transcript generation when three or more individuals spoke in fast succession as well as enabling gesture or gaze to be noted in the transcripts. The audio-recordings are repeatedly listened to first and then transcriptions of the sort reproduced here are eventually generated. It is important to note that

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these transcripts vary from CA orthodoxy since pauses, for example, are not timed to tenths of a second. Two further points need to be made as part of an effort to maintain anonymity and confidentiality. The reproduction of video stills in written research accounts is not undertaken because of concerns around identifying the speakers/company. Second, there are no references to members’ names, the products, services, financial details, technology and so forth included in the transcripts. There is, instead, a [square] bracket noting a broad description therein. I now turn to the two illustrative extracts.

Two illustrative extracts First illustrative example Having entered ‘the field’ to simply see ‘how things are done’, what transpired in one study of senior managers shaping strategic direction across a twelve-month period (Samra-Fredericks 2003) was that I was able to undertake a detailed analysis of their accomplishment of two ‘facts’ – a weakness in strategic thinking in the executive team and an ‘organizational weakness’ in IT capability. Backtracking and through fine-grained analysis of their talk-in-interactions, the ways one member (strategist A in the transcripts, and SA in the chapter text) influenced strategic direction and assembled a form of interpersonal effectiveness was traced. Part of this analysis drew on the CA tradition and moved on to identifying six features/ skills constituting such effectiveness in terms of an ability to: speak forms of knowledge; mitigate and observe the protocols of human interaction (the moral order); question and query; display appropriate emotion; deploy metaphors; and finally put history ‘to work’. However, the point was also made that only through combining these features at a particular point in time–space and given those particular others present, engaged in that specific task, was a form of ‘effectiveness’ accomplished. The following is one of four extracts which were selected: it enables me here to concisely illustrate one of those features and SA’s ‘store’ of ethnomethods. This was his use of questions – deployed at

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Extract 1 [simplified transcription conventions in appendix 1] [ [interrupts] md [ but that’s not policy = strategist a = what I was trying to get at = strategist b = well of course it isn’t but = 5 strategist a = but what I was trying to drive is but what is [ the policy? md [ hang on [name of Strategist C] just let me go in a second = strategist a = and that’s the question that I asked of yourself and [name of strategist C] what is the company policy? 10 strategist b yes strategist a now you defined it for me as (.) company wide activity should utilize the mainframe strategist b yes= strategist a = specific internal department’s special needs can utilize PCs 15 strategist b yes strategist a having accepted that as the policy (.) I’m saying we ain’t working to the policy strategist c [he’s right strategist b [interrupts

the ‘right’ time and in the ‘right’ way. This was shown to assist his constitution of those two ‘facts’ in terms of the weakness. The extract is just one minor move in a series which accomplished such ‘big’ outcomes, a point returned to in the concluding comments section. Returning to Heritage’s six places to probe the institutionality of talk – here, ‘lexical choices’ in terms of ‘policy’, ‘company’, ‘mainframe’, ‘internal department’, ‘PCs’ suggest that we are dealing with – and constituting – ‘organization’ and strategy work/strategizing. There was also an epistemological asymmetry which crystallized as each turn was sequentially – and arguably, skilfully – taken. It is here that the use of questions became central. Questions are from that collection which Sacks and colleagues termed ‘adjacency pairs’ since most often a question prompts an answer in the next/ adjacent turn (or, there is an insertion sequence, ‘holding off’ an immediate answer but which seeks to clarify, etc.). The ability to lodge questions and queries inserts the speaker into the split-second ebb and flow of interaction. Further, as studies of institutional talk have demonstrated, they can also curb or constrain the action possibilities of another. The latter was found to be something SA consistently did and was allied with his use of ‘ethnomethods’ (Garfinkel 1967) such as knowing when and how to ‘let pass, gloss and question’ (Turner 1988).

Empirical studies across the field of CA/institutional talk programme and pragmatics have shown that the use of this basic linguistic resource is a powerful mode of interpersonal control (e.g., Harris 1995; Molotch and Boden 1985). Often, certain members are expected to ask the questions while others should provide answers and through meeting these expectations they constitute the membership category of magistrate/defendant, teacher/pupil, doctor/patient, etc. together with settings such as courtrooms, classrooms and doctors’ surgeries. Institutional representatives have been shown to deprive others of this most fundamental architecture of social structure and reflexively constitute that institutionality in and through such methods. These kinds of empirical studies also reveal just what is meant by the ‘constraining and enabling’ features that ‘social structure’ affords members (Giddens 1984). In this light, EM/CA studies can also easily move onto examining the everyday, mundane, exercise of power and can contribute to critical studies of strategy/management as shown elsewhere (Samra-Fredericks 2005b). Extract 1 is one concise illustration of SA’s employment of series of questions as queries traced across a number of interactional moments. They bore a striking similarity with courtroom questioning where ‘reasonableness’ is conveyed whilst also curbing another’s possibilities for a counter

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move. In these ways, the question was deemed to be skilfully utilized by SA to deprive another (SB here) of the means to configure a social reality even when the contextual norms were not tightly prescribed as in courtroom interaction. Yet, like prosecutors in a courtroom, SA’s questions, queries and statements were presented in such a way that a minimal response was deemed necessary (Dillon 1990). Here, SB was positioned to supply a minimal answer, ‘yes’ (lines 10, L13 and L15) and was deprived of this basic resource to ask a corresponding question or to elaborate. Further, as in courtroom contexts (Dillon 1990) questions were ‘chained together’ to follow a line of reasoning or lead to a ‘particular position’ (Boden 1994, p. 124). In other words, bits and pieces of information were sequentially pieced together to mean something in particular. Each question and answer on its own is arguably innocent, but when chained or ‘sequenced’ in this fashion (and adopting this ‘turn-taking organization’), then inferences are drawn and consequences followed. Here, through this sequencing, the inferential ‘work’ accomplished a ‘fact’ or reality that policy was not being implemented. Moreover, what was also realized – or inferred – was an asymmetry of knowledge which, through subsequent and similar kinds of turns taken across time–space, enabled SA to constitute the ‘sense’ that SB lacked strategic capability. In sum, this extract offers us a glimpse of one fleeting moment which nevertheless accomplished such ‘bigger’ outcomes, piece by piece, turn by turn. What was also simultaneously and interactionally accomplished in the space of seconds was something which we could ‘label’ as a political and morally laden appraisal of another’s competence. SB was positioned to be a part of the problem of non-implementation, while at the same time SA preserved a sense of reasonableness as he utilized the context (including others). Overall, then, through this chaining of questions/queries, timed to perfection, and given this lexeme selection, he gained ‘far more “readability” than a memo or report’. Indeed, he acquired a ‘great deal of interactional “value” packed into a fleeting moment of talk’ (Boden 1994, p. 113). It was a ‘minor move’ which began to lay a ‘sense’ of what had happened and seemingly continued to happen and as a minor

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move laminated onto the next and the next and so on, that ‘fact’ – a weakness in strategic thinking on SB’s part – crystallized. The issue of minor moves and ‘big’ accomplishments is discussed further in the concluding section, but we can note in passing here that what is also simultaneously accomplished is an ‘identified actor’ – here, ‘the strategist’. He or she too is a sequential achievement (Garfinkel [1948] 2006; Rawls 2008), and in the second illustrative extract, a situated identity in terms of a more knowledgeable strategist inducting another into the art of strategizing is glimpsed.

Second illustrative example This second illustrative extract is drawn from a different study where one core task the members were engaged in was developing – writing – the annual strategy document (greater detail available in Samra-Fredericks 2005a, 2010). Retaining the broad question ‘How is that done?’, this second study’s empirical materials – unexpectedly – provided an answer to the question ‘How do strategists learn to strategize?’ The reproduced extract provides a glimpse of how a member instructed another to learn to see as a strategist as they do the ‘work’ of constructing one core object of knowledge – the Market. However, given this chapter’s objectives, the full nature and scope of their talkin-interaction to do this work is set aside: we need only note that this was the first formal occasion where a depiction of their market was deemed to be consolidating. Strategist 1 (S1 in chapter text) is the more senior strategist (a director of strategy) in a large UK company with strategist 2 (S2) being a senior manager in finance. Here, they are approximately an hour into a meeting aiming to refine the draft strategy document: While I purposefully set aside their embodied choreography in terms of gaze and page turns (see Goodwin 1994; Hindmarsh and Heath 2000) to focus on the vocal components, it is important to note that the indexical properties of ‘this’ (line 1), ‘that one’ or ‘that’ (L2, 5, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18), ‘there’ (L10, 12,14), ‘here’s’ (L18) were resolved because of a physical closeness. In other words, S2 was close enough to ‘see’ what S1 was referring to

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Extract 2 strategist 1 so we really need to make this (.) something like that one needs to be about the economic downturn and impact on market structure strategist 2 um [brief silence as both read] 5 strategist 1 what did you say on that (.) you said (.) when you say [name of division] do you mean [Group name]? strategist 2 er yeah [name of company] and the organization, the external market strategist 1 I’d think I’d call that recent trends [quietly speaks as reads] 10 ‘survival’ [reads] it’s another bit that goes in there, I think you’ve got it somewhere else but the urm the dirt cheap asset prices need to go in there strategist 2 yeah I’ve got that in the main body of the report and the competition but yeah we can put that in there as well 15 strategist 1 I think its part of the (.) if you made that into market structure= Strategist 2 =yes= Strategist 1 = what that says is (.) here’s a big consolidation piece [inaudible three words] its (.) consolidation [as he writes]

in the document before them (detailed in SamraFredericks 2010). On another more fundamental level, object construction hinged on the sequential unraveling of a particular ‘this’ and ‘that’. So, through these sequence orders and given the lexemes selected and a shared understanding of the broad task – that is, we’re assessing ‘environment’ and writing the annual strategy document – they came to construct their core ‘object of knowledge’, the Market, in a particular way (L18). At line 18, S1 arrives at a juncture which makes explicit the inferential work carried across the prior turns. S2’s ‘yes’ (L17) had latched onto S1’s prior turn and may have assisted the swift and uncontested move from the ‘if’ (as possibilities) to one which now ‘says’ it is consolidating (L18). Further, given this sequential ‘social organization of referring’ to the range of ‘thats’ (L2, 5, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18), and allied with the selection of particular lexemes which classify phenomena, ‘the words’ themselves become clearer in terms of meaning this and not that. Heritage (1997) referred to lexical choices as one of six places to probe the institutionality of talk, since they do furnish the distinctions which characterize and constitute fields of activity – here, ‘strategic management’. So, a cursory glance beginning at line 2 immediately points to

two major phenomena, ‘economic downturn’ and ‘market structure’. Subsequently, we journey through the vocabulary of strategy, also pointing to the institutional relevancies and character of this encounter given both our and their common-sense knowledges: ‘external markets’, ‘recent trends’, ‘survival’, ‘dirt cheap asset prices’, ‘competition’, ‘market structure’, and ‘consolidation’. These words characterize a recognizable discursive field of activity we call strategizing. It is also where the core distinctions revolve around the Market (Knights and Morgan 1991), itself a pivotal element in ‘environment’ (with other elements being stakeholders such as government, shareholders, the local community, etc.). S1, in selecting these words, in this way, in this order, met background expectancies (a pattern or logic-in-use) which asserts that when ‘economic downturns’ ‘impact on market structure’ (L2–3) and are coded (‘I’d call that …’) under ‘recent trends’ (L9), and then, linked to ‘dirt cheap asset prices’ (L11–12) alongside information on ‘competition’ (L14), it highlights or generates a particular reality in terms of a market – here, as a ‘big consolidation piece’ (L18). Notably too, it is the relationship between the items that constitutes the information for those competent enough to read it (Rawls 2008; Heath and Luff 2000).

Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution

So when ‘recent trends’ and ‘distressed assets’ not reproduced here and so forth are sequentially ordered in this way (and textualized) then it seems that the only recognizable or mutually intelligible object is that of a ‘market’ consolidating. Recalling the specific character of reflexivity in EM, where what is said is always taken in relation to the last, that is, it reflects back on the last (see Boden 1994, p. 46), then, attending to the reflexive sequential chain means that we can begin to detail the ways S1 and S2 constituted the basic order of sensemaking here (Rawls 2008). Crucially, no word is clear on its own. Further, it is through such selection and combining of lexemes and given the sequential order properties that they inherently rendered ‘object[s] as independent of the experience or perception of any one individual’ (Smith 1996, p. 187, cited in Hindmarsh and Heath 2000, p. 529). They concretized epiphenomena as objects seemingly out there. In this case, the object is a market consolidating, albeit momentarily stabilized here. But while this is one minor move, it was a move in a series which ‘fixed’ this description as each next move laminated onto the next and the next. What was also simultaneously accomplished through such talk-in-interaction was instruction of S2 into the art of strategizing or, to add precision, into the subtleties of the sequential relationships enabling him to also begin to make inferences appropriate to their profession and ‘see’ accordingly. The ethnomethodologist Goodwin (1994, p. 606) has empirically demonstrated the ways a member acquires ‘professional vision’, defined as a profession or community of practice’s ‘socially organizing ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group’. From having recorded and transcribed S1 and colleagues’ talkin-interaction, the ‘details’ for assembly of such a ‘vision’ and the ways others subtly acquire it (and hence, do the work of strategizing) become available (Samra-Fredericks 2005a, 2010). While there is limited space to detail all aspects of this realized dynamic, briefly, the CA notion of turndesign – also mentioned by Heritage as one of his ‘six places’ – sensitizes us to the ways particular turns are designed to select particular next

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actions. So, for example, at line 9 where S1 uses the phrase ‘I’d think I’d call that’ (and then, seconds later, ‘I would call that’, ‘I’d call that’ and ‘I’d make that’; see Samra-Fredericks 2010) he invites particular kinds of responses. S1’s usage could not also be simply categorized as a mannerism in terms of his way of speaking and this is substantiated from analysis across a range of settings. When also taking account of where these phrases were spoken and what the talk dealt with, they occasioned ‘learning on the job’. In other words, S1 was subtly instructing S2 to ‘see’ what he ‘sees’. Through this turn design, he also inherently switches ‘positions’ and basically, says ‘if I were you I would do x or y’ as well as inviting S2 in his next turn to do agreeing, or clarifying, or querying, and so on. Moreover, these phrases also simultaneously handled particular interactional contingencies given that S1 was amending or appraising S2’s work: S2 had drafted this current version of the annual strategy document. Simply, S1 also does mitigation through this usage and thereby preserves established relational webs as he continues to do both ‘the work’ and ‘instructs’ another. If we attend to the ways a speaker/practitioner such as S1 subtly marks out their knowledge through ostensibly trivial linguistic forms such as ‘I’d call that’, and when combined with scrutiny of lexeme use, sequential order properties and so on, we do begin to see just how instruction is done and correspondingly how another learns the practice, in situ. One last point is that knowledge of other senior colleagues also tempered what and how they wrote what they did in the strategy plan (elaborated in Samra-Fredericks 2010).

Concluding comments Further commentary on the kinds of detailed analysis of the range of methods and reasoning procedures across the two illustrative extracts is beyond the remit of this chapter. However, I hope that the brief outline here begins to indicate just what EM/ CA offers to those Strategy as Practice researchers interested in advancing our understanding of everyday strategy practice. It does demand a particular

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orientation to the ‘world’ and phenomena where, for example, in the second study we move beyond conceptualizing the strategy plan as a ‘thing’ (object) and/or a ‘given’ feature of organizational settings today. Instead, we attend to the ways it is intricately accomplished during human talk-based processes and how, as part of this, members routinely stabilize – and without a ‘pause’ – those ‘big’ objects such as the ‘Market’ into something known or knowable. As Suchman (1987, p. 57) asserts, the ‘outstanding question for social science […] is not whether social facts are objectively grounded, but how that objective grounding is accomplished’. The first study pursued this in terms of two organizational weaknesses and the second, in terms of the ‘fact’ of a market consolidating. I add, of course, that only when each minor move laminates onto the next and the next, do ‘facts’ or this object – market/environment – become not only mutually intelligible but also begin to exist independently of the experience of individuals. While space also prevented detailed commentary on another inherent accomplishment, it remains important to note that as they talk in this fashion, they also simultaneously realized tied subjective identities as strategists (Knights and Morgan 1991; Samra-Fredericks 2005b) or, in EM terms, an identified actor (Rawls 2008). Like the question posed by Garfinkel (1968, reproduced in 1974, p. 15) about the jurors in his seminal study – ‘What makes them jurors?’ – the question for me has been what makes them ‘strategists’? EM/CA is also one insightful route available to Strategy as Practice researchers if the interest is in: Which skills and knowledge furnish manager/leader/strategist effectiveness as they do x or y tasks? How do they learn to do the work, in situ? How are particular ‘outcomes’ constituted? And so on and so forth. Yet there remain a range of challenges and issues for the Strategy as Practice researcher and five are noted next. First, there are practical challenges: getting access to organizational members doing their work, especially when what they talk about can be highly market sensitive, means that negotiations can be protracted. For example, in the 2003 study, negotiations for access began in early 1987 with entry eventually granted in the early 1990s. Then,

having accessed such rich empirical materials over a period of time, I was faced with finding and investing a lot of time to listen to/view the recordings again and again, and then transcribe and undertake the kinds of detailed analysis glimpsed here (see Samra-Fredericks 2004b). This can be prohibitive too. Moving onto the second – also practical – challenge: while the time invested in fieldwork and analysis can be immense, the selection of just a few illustrative extracts and the allied compression of the fine-grained, wide-ranging analysis into a standard-length journal article is difficult to achieve. It also raises questions such as: On what basis are the extracts reproduced in written accounts selected? In the light of the practical problem of space constraints, it simply makes sense to reproduce those extracts which concisely illustrate as many of the focal analytical features as possible. Space restrictions may also result in a partial account where, for example, in the 2003 study, I focused upon SA’s accomplishments. Hence, the fine-grained analysis of SB’s responses which also assisted the constitution of situated identities and those ‘facts’ was set aside. So too, only six features were discussed. These are all issues the Strategy as Practice researcher will face. However, if the interest is in ‘how’ practitioners/strategists do the work they do as they do it, then they are worth grappling with as best we can. The third issue and challenge concerns the requirement within EM for ‘unique adequacy’ in order to do the analysis. It brings to our attention a difficult and perhaps contentious issue since it seemingly challenges us to acquire the competence of the member in order to be able to describe what they do/see. Because ‘objects’ are not just there but need to be mutually orientated to (Rawls 2008), then what we describe as researchers may not be what a members ‘sees’. This may point to forms of collaborative research with practitioners who do the work while also recognizing that asking them can be insufficient because much of what they do is so taken for granted. Indeed, I have yet to come across a practitioner who reported to me that sitting close to his colleague was crucial for effective task completion or that his or her employment of ‘well’ or ‘but’ – mitigating disagreement and thus

Researching everyday practice: the ethnomethodological contribution

maintaining relations – was something they use on x or y occasions. Yet this is what they use and do, and through doing so constitute effectiveness. As Rawls (2008, p. 716) adds, because we find that ‘the details of practices are not recoverable from accounts’, if we pose questions during interviews, then all sorts of methodological issues arise alongside the more fundamental ‘charge’ that we have not actually accessed the phenomenon – here, strategic practice. So, what can an observer/researcher do? One point of relief is that if we are attending to basic everyday skills (methods, knowledges and so on) as Silverman suggested, then we do have a starting ‘adequacy’. What is also relevant and of assistance is the CA stipulation to demonstrate where in the transcripts members are orientating to phenomena claimed by the researcher. This acutely holds us ‘in-check’. However, this latter issue has also given rise to debates around remaining ‘transcript-intrinsic’ (see Samra-Fredericks 2004a), with others such as Moerman (1988, 1992; see also Alvesson and Karreman 2000) arguing for the need to combine CA with ethnography. There are no neat answers (Perakyla 2004), but CA and allied approaches do demand a form of discipline which constantly returns the researcher (me) to a crucial question – ‘On what basis am I advancing this analytical claim?’ Linked to this is the fourth challenge and issue. While sticking close to what is observable or visibly orientated to by the speakers in the transcript is one hallmark of ‘pure’ CA, we do face a challenge if the phenomena are more elusive (e.g. claims that class or race is ‘present’ and consequential as two people talk, for example) and/or if the phenomena span time–space as was the case for me (e.g. constitution of the two mentioned weaknesses). One practical resolution which also adheres to the EM/ CA theoretical stance is the chronological reproduction of fragments of transcripts (e.g. four in the 2003 study) which also concisely illustrate and substantiate the theoretical claims concerning the linkages between strategists’ talk-in-interaction (micro) and the ‘outcomes’. In other words, each strip of interaction is conceptualized as one layer or ‘minor move’ in a succession, laminating to produce plausible ‘facts’ about those ‘organizational

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weaknesses’. Boden (1994) offered me the two key concepts here: the notion of ‘minor moves’ and ‘laminate’. As reported in the original 2003 study, laminate encapsulated the important concepts of process, time, interaction and outcome. Process and time have been recognized as key issues for empirical research within strategic management and, generally speaking, outcomes are what everyone is interested in and are available for easy expression after the ‘event’. But the real-time interaction in and through which such ‘outcomes’ are accomplished has been routinely ignored. Only through placing interaction centre-stage can the ‘how?’ be answered. What also seeps through here is that the EM/CA traditions defy attempts to carve up the world into micro, meso or macro. I agree with Boden’s (1994, p. 3, emphasis added) opening words, that it is an: irony of language, in my view, and a consequential one at that, that we have come to call [a flexible web of patterned relations] […] ‘structure’: […] few terms are more quickly concretized and reified into a nearly immovable and insuperable object […]. [And] In the study of organizations especially, scholarship has become highly fragmented by virtue of a near obsession with socalled ‘levels of analysis’. Driven almost entirely by considerations that are rooted in methodological constraints rather then empirical evidence, quite a number of talented researchers critique or ignore each other’s findings and theories based on essentially socially constructed, if methodologically tidy, distinctions that are features of data sets and statistical convention rather than properties of the real world.

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggested that social science is engaged in a ‘retrospective illusion’ where, for example, sociologists, ‘having invented structure […] take it to be the preexisting condition of our research’. It is, instead, a part of the sociologist/researcher’s common-sense knowledge (a resource) which builds their discipline. As Boden (1994, p. 5) incisively added, the ‘tiniest local moment of human intercourse contains within and through it the essence of society and vice versa’ (see collection in Samra-Fredericks and Bargiela-Chiappini 2008).

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Finally, there is perhaps an even bigger challenge in the light of the orthodoxy Boden critiques and which Garfinkel’s EM issued to social scientists. This was recently summed up by Rawls (2008, p. 725) who asserted that the EM endeavour is one where: no details can be reduced in the name of theoretical clarity. It is theoretical clarity that must serve the interests of the details. Not positivist, not post-modern, not realist or idealist, not micro or macro – it is a new kind of theory – a different kind of theory – challenging the terms of conventional theoretical debate.

EM and CA studies of work (institutional talk programme) demonstrate that ‘contingent details are theoretically significant’. As glimpsed here, these traditions invite us to access the still elusive nature of a practice being done which inherently and sequentially accomplishes ‘objects’ and social (organizational) order. Only then can the skilled – methodical – and knowledgeable ways members do so be detailed. Their sequential use of particular words and classifications, methods for mitigation, gaze, sequentially ordered referrals to indexicals and ‘this-and-that’, and so on and so forth, is a form of moment-by-moment management of contingent detail for displays of a ‘mutually recognizable’ order. In my case, and without doubt, the ‘fact’ of a market consolidating was an ‘accomplishment of details’ that ‘exhibit order properties in their sequencing’ (Rawls 2008). Tiny details such as the taking of turns, mitigating through ‘well’, question use, selection and location of words, etc. nevertheless, do constitute ‘big’ phenomena. We also come to see why prescription is not forthcoming – given the details and complexity we deal with. Yet, importantly and paradoxically, we retain relevance for practitioners. Examples of studies delivering practical relevance are not hard to find in the EM/ CA canon. For example, Xeroz Parc and other EM informed centres of research are funded by large corporations because they see the value and contribution of fine-grained ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic studies which maintain the ordered intricacies of practices. For me, having previously worked in private and public sector organizations, the absence of details in the literature which I later read as a ‘student’

was curious. One of these was Pettigrew’s (1985) impressive study of ‘continuity and change’ at ICI: it rightly remains a landmark study but it also elicited that pivotal question how? I wanted to ‘see’ Harvey-Jones in action – or more accurately, during interaction. Which methods/skills and forms of knowledges were mobilized by him during his talk-in-interaction with the various members/consultants, so that they all saw the contours of the same object (the environment) that way? EM and allied approaches such as CA offer ‘this prize’ (Rawls 2008). I hope others take up a conversation with aspects of these traditions and, like me, come to be dazzled by what we all do, and do in such utterly taken-for-granted ways.

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(edited by G. Jefferson). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ix–lxii. Silverman, D. (1998) Harvey Sacks, social science and conversation analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. (2000) ‘Routine pleasures: The aesthetics of the mundane’. In S. Linstead & H. Hopfl (eds) The aesthetics of organization. London: Sage, 130–153. Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and situated action: The problem of human machine communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, J. H. (1988) A theory of social interaction. California: Polity Press; Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Turner, R. (1974) (ed.) ‘Introduction’. Ethnomethodology: Selected readings. Middlesex: Penguin Education. Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Appendix – Transcription Symbols (Simplified) [ signals interruption [words in brackets] substitute referrals to names of people, financial figures, products, etc. or the transcriber is unsure of word spoken, noted as (inaudible x words) E::longated sound = signals immediate latching on Italic signals emphasis underlining signals rising intonation Where text is placed in single quotation marks within an utterance, it signals that the speaker was reading out what was written down in the text before them. NB: transcription of pauses departs from the conventions of CA and here are noted as either: (.) signalling a pause of less than a second; Or, (brief pause) signalling a pause of more than a second but less than two seconds.

CHAPTER

16

Researching strategists and their identity in practice: building ‘close-with’ relationships P H Y L JO H N SO N , JU L IA BALOGUN and NI C BEECH

Introduction The Strategy as Practice field has, from its inception, had an interest in innovative research methodology (Balogun et al. 2003). This interest was principally driven by the recognition that empirical studies of Strategy as Practice faced contradictory pressures to on the one hand gain a necessary depth of data yet also sufficient breadth to enable theorizing based on ‘praxis, practices and practitioners’ (Whittington 2006a). The challenge being to collect data that drills deep enough to meet the micro-challenge of the Strategy as Practice agenda in terms of detail on strategic activity (Johnson et al. 2003) but also to enable a sufficient understanding of the linkages between that detail of action and ‘higher’-level outcomes in order to address the ‘so what’ question and theorize beyond the specifics of the particular context under study (Balogun et al. 2007; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Whittington 2007). This chapter contributes to the developing methodological dialogue (Johnson et al. 2006; Denis et al. 2007; Langley 2007; Hodgkinson and Clark 2007) in the Strategy as Practice field. To do so, it builds on the argument advanced by Balogun et al. (2003, p. 197) that Strategy as Practice ‘research can not advance significantly without reconceptualising frequently taken-forgranted assumptions about the way to do research and the way we engage organizational participants’. However, whereas existing reflections on the methodological challenges for Strategy as Practice are typically inclusive (i.e. addressing challenges that pertain to praxis, practices and practitioners), this chapter adopts a more exclusive approach. Whilst maintaining the position

that strategizing occurs at the nexus of praxis, practices and practitioner activity, and that to study one aspect means in some way to study all, it privileges study of the practitioner. Empirical Strategy as Practice research has tended to focus on praxis and practices, or practitioners and the practices they draw on, with much less research focusing on practitioners and their praxis. Yet existing work demonstrates the important, but often overlooked, impact of a strategist’s identity on their strategizing activity (for example, Beech and Johnson 2005; Johnson et al. 2006; Rouleau 2003): understanding of how strategists shape strategizing activity through who they are. This chapter therefore argues that the Strategy as Practice field needs to recognize the importance of identity and that this has significant methodological implications if Strategy as Practice researchers are to adequately study the linkages between strategy practitioners and their strategy work. It demands a ‘close-with relationship’ between the researcher and their research subjects which moves beyond the ‘close-to’ relationship originally called for by Balogun et al. (2003) and that as an approach can also contribute more generally to an understanding of how to meet the ‘drilling-down’ and ‘so what’ challenges of this field. Thus the purpose of this chapter is to explicate a methodology that enables exploration of the interconnectedness of strategists’ identities and their praxis and to consider the research implications this raises. The first part of the chapter offers a brief summary of the developing methodological dialogue within the Strategy as Practice field. It then builds an argument for the particular foci of the chapter on practitioners and their identity, drawing on an 243

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empirical vignette that illustrates the impact of strategists’ identity on their work. The second part of the chapter examines the particular challenges of studying practitioners’ identity in Strategy as Practice oriented work through a more in-depth consideration of what is meant by ‘identity’. It builds an argument for moving to a ‘close-with’ relationship with research subjects. From this, the chapter develops ground rules for research seeking to jointly explore strategists’ identity and their strategic work. It concludes with methodological recommendations based on this analysis.

Researching Strategy as Practice The first journal special issue on Strategy as Practice (Johnson et al. 2003) called for research that focuses on the work of the strategist with the aim of understanding the everyday processes, practices and activities involved in the making and doing of strategy. The aim was to redress the balance in strategy research, which since the 1980s has been influenced increasingly by the research traditions of micro-economics. As a result, most research in the field avoids the exploration of the doing of strategy as a human activity. Consistent with the broader return to practice in many areas of management research, Strategy as Practice seeks to re-engage with the strategic practitioner. It is concerned with ‘strategizing’, and how strategists think, talk, act and feel, but also with the tools and technologies created and/or employed by strategists (be it five forces analyses, Post-it notes, specialized planning and analysis software, or workshops and away-days) and the impact of this activity on strategic outcomes (Whittington 2006a). This focus on re-engagement with the strategic practitioner carries with it implications for research and research methods. Balogun et al. (2003) argue that the need to be ‘close-to’ strategic practice and the practitioner and to be able to trace actions through to outcomes, requires a reconceptualization of the way we do research and the way we engage with organizational participants. In particular, they argue that if researchers want to get ‘close-to’ the practitioner, they need to draw the practitioner in, and that this in turn demands that they do research

that is relevant. Ethnographic approaches and case studies are attractive (and now common in the field) since there is a need to collect data on strategists and their practices within context; this provides the depth. Yet the relevance criterion remains, and changing research contexts (for example, large, multinational and highly diversified, change orientated organizational settings) increasingly require complementary methods providing more breadth and flexibility. In targeting a general Strategy as Practice audience, Balogun et al. (2003) advocated that any research approach needed to: (1) provide evidence that is broad and deep through data that is contextual, longitudinal, collected at multiple levels and facilitates comparison across sites; (2) elicit the commitment of informants because it is interesting and may be enjoyable; (3) make effective use of research time due to the large and varied amount of data required; (4) anchor the questions being asked in the organizational reality (i.e. make it relevant); and (5) go beyond research ‘feedback’ to contribute to organizational needs and provide informants with useful insights. This approach is, in fact, highly suggestive of an action research approach (Eden and Huxham 1996), or insider/outsider research (Bartunek and Louis 1996), where the researcher and the research participant walk the research path together (Calori 2002). Collaboration with those inside the organization can be fruitful in meeting many of these five guidelines for strategizing research since, by their nature, collaborative projects are contextual and, once an insider is engaged, the relationship is often longitudinal. Yet greater, real-time involvement is not a panacea in itself. Focusing on three methods in particular to enable a greater breadth and depth of data – interactive discussion groups, self-report and practitioner research – Balogun et al. also argue that there is a skill extension agenda for researchers: The complications of our research sites mean that individual researchers, even groups of researchers, cannot count on gaining an insider’s perspective on their own. In order to do excellent and insightful research, researchers need to be project managers, skilled negotiators, trainers, co-workers and collaborators as well as writers, methodologists, analysts and theorists. Our

Researching strategists and their identity in practice argument, in sum, is that the logic of strategising requires that we re-conceive our basic identities as researchers. (Balogun et al. 2003, p. 220)

Langley (2007) similarly argues that in-depth and largely qualitative data are central to the development of the Strategy as Practice perspective. In her view, this is a direct result of the nature of the phenomenon itself: dynamic, complex, involving intense human interaction and the need to get close to the phenomenon. She argues for observation to capture the experience of doing strategy, but also interviews and other forms of interaction with research participants to understand the interpretations that people place on these activities, and in addition to both of these, careful attention to collecting strategizing artefacts (e.g. a flip chart emerging from a strategy workshop). These criteria point to a focus on a small number of organizations studied in depth. However, she then moves on to argue that within this there are research choices and dilemmas for the Strategy as Practice researcher. These are to do with epistemological choices and research strategies, sampling and research design; access and data collection; and analysis and theorizing. And in the consideration of these, she echoes the issues raised by Balogun et al. (2003): namely the frequent need by researchers to get access to study that which is often a commercially or culturally sensitive phenomenon (such as strategizing and strategic change); and the need to engage in a trade-off between close proximity to the practice of strategy (and potentially direct) involvement and the independence usually expected from academic researchers. In other words, if the Strategy as Practice field acknowledges strategists as both subjects and experts, how do Strategy as Practice researchers map and maintain a boundary that has high utility outcomes for both parties? Overall, therefore, whilst there is no best way to do Strategy as Practice research, there is a general acceptance within the Strategy as Practice field that the phenomena of interest to the researcher, the researcher’s theoretical and ontological perspectives and preferences, and what the researcher is able to offer to the strategist all do and should affect the approach taken. However, there is another less explicit but possibly equi-present

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shared assumption (that is unmet) at play in the contemporary Strategy as Practice debate. That is, it is generally agreed that getting close to strategic practitioners and their practices is a requirement. Moreover, it seems intuitively obvious that the more intimate the data sought from strategists, the closer the relationship needs to be. Thus, if the phenomenon of interest is more about the strategic practitioner, and aspects of the practitioner such as their identity, then this closeness may in turn militate against the breadth requirement advocated by Balogun et al. (2003), raising an alternative research challenge which is less about enabling breadth and depth and more about getting greater depth than has been typically required by any strategizing research. This is certainly the case for research that adopts an identity lens.

Researching strategizing and identity The importance of identity Recent reviews of empirical research (Balogun et al. 2007; Jarzabkowksi et al. 2007) against the three Strategy as Practice areas (practitioners, praxis and practice Whittington 2006a) as well as methodological commentaries (Denis et al. 2004) have found that research typically only keeps two of these three areas in focus at any one time. There is a tendency to focus on praxis and practices, or practitioners and the practices they draw on, with much less research focusing on practitioners and their praxis. In fact, the understanding of how strategists shape strategizing activity through who they are is underdeveloped. For some strategists this link is obvious. For example, Neal’s Yard sells organic skin and body care and natural remedies. The founder, Romy Jenkins, was a pioneer of natural and organic products and so it isn’t surprising that the business she founded has a mission to transform lives through empowering people to live by the principles of natural health. Equally, it isn’t surprising that the entrepreneur who has taken the business over from her, Peter Kindersley, is an organic farmer. Yet, with the exception of Rouleau (2003), who explores the impact of gender on strategists and their work,

246 Phyl Johnson, Julia Balogun and Nic Beech Box 16.1

Practitioners and their praxis: illustrating the impact of identity reflexively aware) identity work continued and pockets of acceptance of the strategic/cultural change spread, and all of this merged into a consensual position. The CEO-orientated narratives present in the firm at this consensual point in time finally cast him as mature coach leading a changed and high-performing firm. However, the marked narrative pattern during the change period was of an iterative and negotiated nature. The CEO’s attempts to push on with his own self-actualization at times fell on deaf ears dependent on the sensemaking of employees’ groups with regard to the strategic change. If the change was impacting on groups within the organization, while they moved through resistance to acceptance, the CEO had to be the villain even if his behaviour was congruent with an empathic coaching leadership style. Interestingly, this process also occurred in reverse. For example, a seemingly delayed acceptance of a change congruent initiative would draw an exaggerated aggressive behaviour pattern from the CEO. Equally, enthusiastic employee response to strategic success that placed the CEO in the role of organizational hero for his employees triggered an anxiety response from him that he performed as self-sabotage. This forced his employees to re-narrate him in an identity position closer to one he felt comfortable with at that stage of his personal development. There were multiple examples like this of the interrelationship of the CEO’s identity work, the identity projected on him and visible signals of strategic change.

On his entry in the firm, this CEO had a personal agenda for change. His image in the business community had been one where leadership results and strategic outcomes were achieved via ‘alpha-male’ management; in large part he was hired to perform this role. However, as a result of a series of challenges in his private life, his strongly held personal goal was to develop towards a more transformational style of leadership. His strategic goal was to push the firm through a strategic change focused on differentiated growth requiring a new culture: to move from comfortable to edgy. As he used executive coaching to enable himself to move towards a transformational and empathic style of leadership, he was simultaneously implementing his programme of strategic change to shift the firm’s position in the market-place, to double the volume of business and move into a more competitive product line. This involved a significant organizational development agenda including: changing organizational structure, making redundancies, altering the format of the top management team, initiating an externally focused talent management strategy (i.e. making big hires from competitors) and implementing a performance management system impacting reward. As the changes underway in the firm touched and impacted on the employees, the CEO’s own identity work to shift to a more benign style of leading was largely rejected; he was frequently re-typecast as a bully and tempted back into aggressive outbursts. A resolution was achieved over time, as signals of strategic success incrementally emerged, his effortful (and increasingly

there is little research that attempts to explore the impact of a strategist’s (multiple/changing) identity on their strategy work and therefore strategic outcomes. However, Beech and Johnson (2005) show that there is a strong link between the identity of strategists and their strategy-making activities through their focus on identity work during the change of a CEO. Box 16.1 highlights the impact of a strategist’s identity on his praxis, and how through time a reciprocal interaction develops

between the CEO’s identity work and his own praxis: identity shapes praxis, yet the praxis also shapes his identity, and ultimately strategic change at an organizational level.1 ‘Praxis’ is a term whose use has developed over a considerable time in socio-political theory. A 1

It is important to note that these events played out over a six-year period, and have multiple layers of complexity as well as multiple actors and outcomes. We mean to summarize only one vein of analytic interpretation here.

Researching strategists and their identity in practice

brief insight into this development is important here because it shows why there is a strong link between identity and praxis and highlights certain methodological issues. In Aristotelian terms, praxis is the actions of free men in the politicalethical community (Steffy and Grimes 1986), whereas in the Marxist usage it constitutes conscious agential action in resistance to alienating socio-economic conditions (Margolis 1989). Graham-Hill and Grimes (2001) emphasize the significance of meaningfulness in praxis. Action taken to improve the political-ethical community or to resist an alienating context can only be agential if there is deliberate intention to move towards a particular goal, and this goal orientation, together with a community of language users (Wittgenstein 1958), is what renders praxis meaningful. In short, the actors have a ‘local theory’ (Silverman 1970) of what they are doing, what it means and why they are doing it. Hence, praxis is the interdependence and integration of theory and practice (Zuber-Skerritt 2001) in a meaningful way within a social context. Praxis is, therefore, intrinsically linked to identity, and thus identity can provide a route to understanding praxis. People’s purposes, enactment of roles and the meanings they construct within their linguistic communities are fundamental both to how they identify themselves and to their praxis. The question for researchers, however, is how it is possible to understand the praxis of others. This, it is argued below, is not as straightforward as interviewing strategists about the meaning of their actions, nor can it be simply observational research. Rather, it requires an approach that goes beyond talking to or observing strategists, to being with them. This implies a co-inhabitation of a set of meanings and exploration of intended and unintended, conscious and unconscious, actions and consequences. This with line of arguments suggests that a focus on practitioners and their praxis requires a far greater knowledge of and therefore far greater proximity to practitioners than that typically achieved in Strategy as Practice research. Therefore it is perhaps unsurprising that the research to date exhibits a lack of focus on the practitioners and their praxis. Achieving such proximity, both in task and

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rapport, is no easy matter. Hambrick (2007) has recently re-stated this belief, whilst a special issue of the Academy of Management Journal (August, 2007) acts almost as a confessional for the lack of research that is genuinely close to practice. The challenge is to be not just ‘close-to’ practitioners, and able to observe what they do, but also closewith practitioners, in a relationship that enables the researcher to share practitioners’ worldviews and experiences. This takes us close to the Shutzian researcher/researched as ‘we’ advocated by Calori (2002) as the highest utility research relationship in management research. Thus whilst other routes to studying practitioners, for example cognition (Hodgkinson and Clark, 2007), have merit, these approaches typically don’t discuss or meet the ‘close-with’ criterion, and as such lack some of the power we believe can come from the identity approach, with its direct connection to the felt experience of self-knowing (McLeod 1997; Cooper 2003) of the strategist. However, to appreciate the methodological challenge of an identity approach we first need to extend our understanding of identity.

Uncovering and identifying identity Identity has been associated traditionally with individual people, organizations, social groups and artefacts such as products and brands (Parker 2007). The traditional conception is that identity is that which is stable and distinctive over time (Ford and Ford 1994). Hence, one is able to recognize the person in different circumstances, places and times. Social and collective identities have been a focus of research in organization studies for some time (Ashforth and Mael 1989). Many studies of social identity have focused on stability (Gioia and Thomas 1996), however there is now an increasing interest in the dynamics of identities as they impact on organizational members’ interpretations of themselves, others and their social situation. Here, the concern is with such interpretations as they impact on the actions strategists undertake in strategy making and how such actions are subsequently fitted into the self-conception of the strategists. Identity is regarded as both a product of, and a producer of, action and interpretation (Pullen

248 Phyl Johnson, Julia Balogun and Nic Beech

and Linstead 2005). In other words, this conception of identity is neither simply that strategists do what they do because of who they are, nor that who they are is a result of what they do. Rather, the understanding is that people’s identities as strategists develop through interaction, success, failure and being recognized as strategists. Doing strategy and being a strategist are not regarded as a dichotomy but as interlinked. In Strategy as Practice this is regarded as being integrated with praxis, as actions relate to the ‘local theories’ that strategists have of how they could improve the situation and the meanings that underlie the theory–action intersect. One (increasingly prominent) way of researching identity as interconnected doing and being is through focusing on activities that whilst performing an organizational function also establish, maintain or defend an identity. Whilst strategists and leaders are carrying out their everyday practice, they are simultaneously enacting an identity of strategist (Sveningsson and Larsson 2006) within the political constraints and possibilities that such identities impose (Thomas and Davies 2005). The ‘identity work’ literature is typified by a dynamic and social construction perspective on identity. Identity work is defined by Sveningsson and Alvesson (2003, p. 1165) as the processes of ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’. One significant aspect of identity work is the narratives that people produce and retell in organizations. Narrative methods for use in Strategy as Practice more generally are covered in depth by Rouleau (in this handbook) who explains the relationship between life stories and narratives of practice. Here, although through a slightly different angle from Rouleau, this chapter still promotes and uses narrative analysis as a way of getting ‘closewith’ the meanings, interpretations and actions of strategists as they link identity and praxis. The way that people narrate the story of their strategy-making practice intrinsically links the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of strategy practice. Narratives can be analysed to inform the practitioner–praxis foci identified in this chapter

as they highlight the objects and actions to which the strategist directs attention, but in addition narratives also serve to ‘announce and enact who they are’ (Creed and Scully 2000, p. 391). Narrating an experience means that the practitioner (storyteller) has to cast the self and others in roles and account for the limits and possibilities of those roles. Narrative practices are a form of identity work as they construct and represent characters as having particular identities, and then make sense of events on the basis of those identities. Hence, if the sensemaking is coherent it reinforces the perceptions of the validity of those identity attributions. Equally, narrative analysis can offer insight into praxis, or the local theories embedded (sometimes unwittingly) in the everyday practice of strategists. Narrative analysis seeks to uncover the causal attributions implicit within stories, and these relate to attributed agency (Beech and Sims 2007). For example, in the way a strategist relates events, is strategy formed in response to ‘the market’ or is the strategist the primary agent in decision-making? There is also often attribution of responsibility (Gabriel 2004) in which praise or blame are allocated to objects and agents. Therefore, a narrative will typically contain implicit informal theories about how causation operates, who has agency and where responsibility lies in the situation. These informal theories are part of praxis as they are ‘always already’ ‘written into’ practice (Zuber-Skerritt 2001). For example, where causation is regarded as residing in the context rather than the strategic actors, a reactive response to market forces would be the natural outcome. Narrative analysis therefore offers a framework for deconstructing experience with strategists in a way that uncovers the interconnectedness between identity construction, praxis and practice. However, this is not necessarily an easy or comfortable process, and leaves questions as to how these narratives are accessed. Interrogating and revealing deep assumptions and informal theories about why things are as they are can strike at the heart of a person’s overt self-identity. It is this need to uncover such narratives that points to the

Researching strategists and their identity in practice

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DESIGN PRINCIPLES Longitudinal engagement

More than one performance

Access to back stage

DATA COLLECTION Emergence: going fishing

Qualitative and relationship based multi-faceted design: primary and secondary sources

Close-with relationships

PILLARS OF PRACTICE Legitimacy researcher

Relationship / trust building

Positive-growth and actualization oriented

Reflective practice

Drawing inferences

Figure 16.1 Methodological implications

need for more in-depth relationships with practitioners than has previously been suggested.

Moving to ‘close-with’ relationships to access identity The implication of Goffman’s theory of performance (1961, 1969) is that there is always a degree of distance between people, and this in turn has implications for doing identity research. In the research relationship there is a necessary distance between the researcher and the actor in the organization (or research participant). Each has a role and role expectations of the self and other, and interaction between them is framed by the setting. For example, if the research participant is responding to a request to be interviewed about strategy processes, he or she is likely to privilege examples he or she sees as ‘strategic’ and to construct a narrative of the self as strategist. The implication of this is that the interview is a setting for a performance, and the nature of the performance is mediated by the sensemaking that the actor brings to the performance (Alvesson and Deetz 2000). As such, when researching links between strategists and their identity it is necessary to

access multiple performances, which in turn requires a more participatory approach to data gathering (Karreman and Alvesson 2004), creating a ‘close-with’ relationship in multiple times and spaces. For example, the researcher could observe decision-making meetings or potentially take an active role as a facilitator (Broadfoot et al. 2004), but also precede and then follow up on the observed action with one-to-one discussions to build a more complete picture of the two-way linkages between the strategists involved and their actions. The research question is not ‘What are the “real strategy” and the “real strategist” like behind the performance?’ The questions are: Who is the actor being when he or she performs strategy making? And what are the implications of who they are being for what they do, and vice versa? These questions lead to three areas of methodological consideration (see Figure 16.1) that we as authors believe are central to the ‘closewith’ research approach advocated here as key to researching in the practitioner–praxis space. These are developed in the last section of this chapter and are illustrated using the empirical work discussed in Box 16.1.

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Building ‘close-with’ relationships to study strategists and their identity Design principles for ‘close-with’ relationships This chapter has argued that central questions in the practitioner–praxis research space are: Who is the actor being when he or she performs strategy making? And what are the implications of who they are being for what they do, and vice versa? In order to develop insightful answers to these questions it is necessary to develop a degree of closeness with the practitioner that allows the researcher to deconstruct the performance from more than one perspective (Boje 2001). Hence, the researcher needs to be able to enter into the performance and see it from the perspective of different actors. There are some forms of data gathering that are more likely to render this aim possible than others. Broadly, there are three principles or ground rules (see Figure 16.1) that research which seeks to examine the relationship between actors’ identities and their practices need to follow. First, a longitudinal engagement is necessary, as this allows the researcher to perceive the performance(s) over time and in different circumstances such that the consistencies and variances in the way the strategist is during different phases of strategy making, and in the company of different people, can be observed. Second, it is desirable to gather data from more than one type of performance. For example, observation of different types of meetings combined with observation of communication to others about the outcome of these meetings and interviews about the meetings and communication offer the researcher the chance to observe how the actor constructs versions of the self in these different settings. Third, the researcher needs to gain ‘back-stage’ (Goffman 1961) access to the actors through one-to-one meetings to gain appreciation of their personal perspectives separate to the researcher’s observations before, during and after different performances. Dependent on the skills of the researcher, this could take the form of one-to-one informal conversations, or coaching sessions in which the researcher and the strategist are not restricted to either the strategy-making

agenda or the formal research agenda. Even in such back-stage interactions performance is still occurring – in a sense one performs ‘the real me’ – but this performance adds another layer of richness to the multi-performance perspective. These three design principles have implications for data collection (see Figure 16.1). It is the access to the back stage that more than anything creates the need for the ‘close-with’ relationship. Gathering data from more than one type of performance requires a predominantly qualitative approach with a multi-faceted design drawing on both primary and secondary sources of data. Finally, the longitudinal design also involves allowing for the tracking and emergence of changing issues. These implications are discussed in the following section.

Data collection: applying design principles This section outlines how the data for the CEO illustration (see Box 16.1) were collected to demonstrate the links from design principles to data collection, and how this creates research that is both ‘close-to’ and ‘close-with’ the practitioner. The next section then extends this example to distil some general pillars of practice for those wanting to work closely with strategic practitioners. More than one type of performance This research was longitudinal action research spanning six years, and had a multi-faceted design. All the primary data were qualitative and existed in the forms of visual and audio-recordings, observational field notes, case notes from therapy sessions, diarized reflections of the researcher and written outputs from consultancy interventions (e.g. email communications, reports, flip charts, action plans). Secondary data were widely available in the firm once relationships were established. Both primary and secondary data-collection opportunities were episodic, opportunistic and coincided with the firm’s use of the researcher as paid consultant. In this research design, the data were very much the outcomes of the primary research activity which was to be in relationship with a series of significantly agentic individuals involved in the firm’s strategic change. This follows the fundamental assumption underpinning the researcher’s

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professional psychotherapeutic practice2 (Rogers 1961). That is, the relationship is the therapy, not the diagnosis or other interventions the therapist may make. The analogy here would be the relationship is the method, not interviewing or videoing meetings. Accessing back-stage performance: ‘close-with’ relationships3 The research was fundamentally based on a foundation of multiple ‘close-with’ relationships between the researcher and the afore mentioned agentic organizational members and, in each of these relationships, there was a win–win possibility present for both parties. The primary relationship was that of therapist–client between the researcher and CEO. The secondary set of relationships were those of consultant–clients between the researcher and the top management community. The tertiary relationships were based on the shared activity of collaborative reflective interpreters that took place with the researcher and CEO and the researcher and HR directors of the firm: i.e. they made sense of their interpretations together. This last relationship marks the transition from coach/ therapist/consultant relationship to trusted advisor status which is typically seen as crucial for high impact intervention (Maister 1997; Wasylyshyn 2003, 2005). However, a therapeutic relationship is not essential. Similar data could have been collected from one-to-one conversations with research participants in circumstances where the researcher has worked to build a relationship of trust between him/herself and the research participants. The issue is the nature of the relationship developed between researcher and the researched. It is this relationship requirement in particular that extends the research from a ‘close-to’ to a ‘close-with’ relationship. Longitudinal: attitude to emergence ‘going fishing’ The journey towards this set of ‘close-with’ research relationships began with the primary 2

Rogerian Person Centred Therapy. Calori (2002, p. 877) refers to ‘we-relationships’ that allow for the ‘true understanding of human beings’. 3

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client (CEO) and his need to be in a relationship with the researcher to deal with his problem as he was able to articulate it at the time of first contact. For him, his problem was the firm’s management population, and more specifically his top team, being in need of development in order to improve their performance. However, adopting a positive attitude to emergence allowed two other interpretations to emerge, be espoused and then in turn create touch-points for relationships to build beyond the primary client. In this case, a ‘fishing’ meeting with the company chairman allowed him to articulate that the CEO was the problem and a ‘fishing trip’ to a top team meeting allowed the team to articulate that the senior managers and the organizational culture were the problem. This allowed the top team members to begin their client–consultant relationship to solve their problem (the senior managers and the culture) and the CEO to form his client–therapist relationship to solve the chairman’s problem (him) as well as his own (his team). Having a positive attitude to the emergence of opportunities and the creation of touch-points to relationship build can result in wasted or unproductive fishing trips where nothing emerges. This can be mitigated but is ultimately an unavoidable part of this style of management research. This echoes the views of Denis et al. (2004) that the researcher’s attitude to ambiguity and surprise is an important mediator of successful and unsuccessful research of this kind.

Pillars of practice for ‘close-with’ relationships In order to first build and then maintain the types of multiple ‘close-with’ relationships described in the illustrative research context used here, several general pillars of professional research practice need to be under active management. Legitimacy This issue is illustrated by the exchange of articles between Whittington (2006b) and Hodgkinson and Wright (2006). The position of the management academic as a legitimate relationship partner for senior managers is not always straightforward. In

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the illustration presented here, it was very clearly the responsibility of the management academic to have a legitimate offering in terms of the actualization of the individuals worked with or their strategic goals and, moreover, to be skilled in the execution of that offering. In this case, the grounds for legitimacy were professional qualification, and practice of and continuing professional development as a psychotherapist alongside several years of mentored consultancy practice in the organizational development arena. Whilst not all academics will have legitimacy stemming from a professional qualification such as that of a therapist, there are other practices they should be able to draw on or develop from their academic practice to provide legitimacy. These include, for example, their knowledge of managerial practice in areas such as strategy formulation and strategic change, executive development and workshop facilitation skills. In order to work in a ‘close-with’ relationship with practitioners, where the strategic practitioners gain value from open dialogue with the academic and vice versa, an academic must expect to offer some expertise that furnishes legitimacy or there is no basis for a relationship. For a close-with relationship this legitimacy will need to extend far beyond the commonplace quid pro quo of access for feedback. Relationship building with trust Trust is needed to facilitate a research relationship. In the example discussed here, this was actively and explicitly worked on by the researcher and accepted (i.e. by committing time and patience) as a significant part of building the ‘close-with’ relationship. Clearly, anonymity was a large part of this whilst confidentiality was not necessarily always needed. As an example, the early part of relationship building is almost always all about the purposeful negotiation and testing of trust by both parties, irrespective of the espoused purpose of their meeting. And this is true even in less intensive data-gathering methodologies, such as focus groups (Balogun et al. 2003) or interviews, where there is a desire for those researched to be completely open. In the example here, trustworthiness was continually tested by the subtle pushing of boundaries as well as overt challenges to the researcher: e.g.

‘Well I suppose that you’ve already been told this haven’t you?’ as well as ‘I guess you are primarily working for the CEO here and so I have to watch what I say to you don’t I?’. Researchers effectively have to prove themselves by honouring any commitments they make to confidentiality, anonymity and Chinese walls and therefore accept their role in occasionally having difficult conversations. For therapists this is part of their professional practice, but it should also be part of the professional research practice of all management academics wanting to build close-with relationships. The researcher must also be alert to inadvertently breaking their commitments by, for example, realizing that repeating verbatim what certain individuals say, even if they are not named, could give away who said what by the words used and the phraseology. This requires an awareness of organizational politics, high levels of intrapersonal empathy and a recognition that research based ‘close-with’ relationships are typically not the same as consultancy relationships. So ‘close-with’ researchers ought to be asking difficult and complicated questions but in professional and safe ways. To invoice or not to invoice is a question that arises from any discussion of trust in the building of ‘close-with’ relationships. To be in a relationship as a consulting academic ought to mean the expectation on the client’s part of an invoice for professional services. However, whilst the presence of an invoice creates one form of legitimacy it disrupts another: the right to ask difficult and, to the client, at least potentially non-relevant questions as a professional researcher. But access is often granted free in exchange for academics providing something of use and this usually creates the sense for the researcher of being under no obligation to respond to pressure to break commitments they have made to individuals. Our suggestion is the careful consideration of the counter-point which is the potential impact on the legitimacy element of the ‘close-with’ relationship when making this decision. Positive-growth and actualization orientated The third pillar of practice illustrated by the notion of ‘close-with’ research is the strict necessity that any interventions made by researchers must be

Researching strategists and their identity in practice

positive-growth and actualization orientated. So in the research described here there was a primary concern for the development of the clients and the clients’ organization (Wasylyshyn 2003, 2005), akin to the principle of the medical practitioner ‘first do no harm’. Ultimately, the researcher has to be interested in the practitioner and their organization for its own sake as well as for research outcomes: to care about managers. Calori talks about needing to enjoy the time and commitment offered when working with practitioners (2002, p. 878). This need for an interest in managers as practitioners and as individuals might not be apparent in early relationships but, as relationships develop, researchers must expect that the practitioners with whom they are engaging will want to use some of the time they spend with the researcher to reflect on and develop their own practice. The researcher must enter into such relationships recognizing and expecting this. However, there should be an element of mutual growth and learning, although the learning might not be around the same issue. Whilst the learning will almost inevitably be around their personal practice and growth for the practitioners, the learning might be around generic practice, or theoretically informed insights about the phenomenon of study, for the researcher. Researchers must also recognize the risk involved in this type of research, as some relationships don’t work out and therefore don’t deliver. Mention is made of this above when referring to ‘fishing trips’. Another research site similar to the one presented in Box 16.1 was being researched in a similar way in the same time period by the same researcher. The CEO–therapist relationship simply didn’t jell. No ‘close-with’ relationship emerged to obtain the depth of data needed to theorize about the CEO’s identity work and strategic change. It would not have had a positive outcome for the CEO for the relationship to be pursued so the opportunity was passed over to another colleague. In this way potential high-value research opportunities have to get turned down as well as accepted. Reflective practice The research design just described rightly reads as a complex psycho-social political scenario. It is not at all straightforward (again we point to

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the Whittington (2006b)–Hodgkinson and Wright (2006) exchange) and, for that reason, requires execution that includes reflective practice on the part of the researcher. For instance, being in multiple ‘close-with’ relationships and in multiple roles within the same context requires the researcher to be very aware of the nature, purpose and therefore boundaries of each of those relationships. This is connected to the trust issue raised above. Active reflection and boundary management are in fact the catalysts for action. That is, being aware of a boundary or principle allows for decisions around what is sayable and doable to be well taken. Reflective practice was achieved in the research setting discussed here using professional therapeutic supervision, consultancy mentoring and academic co-author dialogue. A further level of reflective practice was used in the analytic interpretation of events. In this way, the researcher writes themselves into their own analysis (Roos 2004). Reflective practice is thus a generic requirement of researchers working in ‘close-with’ relationships. Drawing Inferences to meet the ‘so what’ Challenge As with any collaborative research (Balogun et al. 2003), there is an onus on the researcher to move beyond reflection and link back to theory to address the ‘so what’ question. This is partly aided through reflective practice by the researcher, but is also about how data analysis is used to draw inferences from the data collected, and in the case of research conducted through ‘close-with’ relationships this will, of course, be inductive theory building. The linkage previously discussed between narratives and identity provides one means of analysis, since the analysis stage can draw conclusions together through narrative. Narrative analysis (Boje 2001; Gabriel 2000) is therefore one means to this end. The stories strategists tell of strategy making (and its social environs) are constructed from identity positions and have implications for the construction of identities. This analysis is complicated by the fact that one of the significances of the identity positions is that they entail certain legitimacies (Alvesson and Willmott 2002). For example, in particular settings

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‘voice’ will be granted to, and acknowledged in, certain identities. We see this in Box 16.1. At the outset of the story, the board regarded the role and issue identities of the CEO as legitimate, which gave him the space to push through certain actions. They were less prepared for the personal identity as it emerged. The more empathetic self would probably be acceptable outside the workplace, but once it started to impact within work, a conflict of legitimacy arose. It is, however, such complex analyses that enable the researcher to draw inferences against existing studies in identity and Strategy as Practice to develop understanding about how ‘who strategists are’ affects what they do and vice versa.

In conclusion: lessons of ‘close-with’ relationships for Strategy as Practice research? The chapter has focused on exploring how to advance innovation in Strategy as Practice research methods by considering in more depth how to research the strategic practitioner. The central argument is that an identity perspective can enable researchers to better study the links between strategic practitioners and their praxis, and that this in turn necessitates a ‘close-with’ relationship with research participants, and therefore a certain methodological approach. Whilst the particular methodological approach described here is a therapeutic relationship, this chapter is not arguing that this is the only approach that can be used to study strategic practitioners more closely, or that this is the only way of getting at practitioner identity. Rather, this example is used to derive a generic methodological approach to access identity through narratives captured from longitudinal engagement, multiple performances and back-stage access to the strategic practitioner as a person separate from their organizational role identity in a researcher/researched ‘closewith’ relationship. More generally, if the Strategy as Practice field is to extend the study of strategic practitioners and their praxis, this requires a greater closeness of relationship than is more typical in Strategy as Practice research to date.

Furthermore, this chapter argues that these conclusions are a logical extension of much that is written about methods for Strategy as Practice research. Figure 16.1 proposes a linked set of criteria that Strategy as Practice research needs to meet if it is to genuinely achieve Calori’s highest utility management research. However, there are two particularly important aspects to the illustration we have drawn on to develop this figure that should be noted: (1) the creative insight on method it provides and (2) the extent to which reflexive rigour is required to deliver this style of work. This chapter has also drawn on a particular illustration of praxis in and around a strategic change, but equally the identity approach can be used for in-depth exploration of strategy work such as strategy workshops and away-days or boardroom strategic debates and decision-making. The focus could be on one strategist involved in this work, such as the CEO, or multiple strategists. Similarly, the identity lens can be used to study those strategic practitioners who sit outside top management teams, such as middle managers, and their strategy work in the strategy-making process. It is also important to reconnect the conclusions to the discussion in the first part of the chapter and offer reflections that are more widely digestible to the Strategy as Practice community. The research agenda under discussion in this chapter has been the better understanding of practitioners in their praxis of strategy making. As the chapter argued earlier, fundamentally, the praxis and the person mutually implicate each other and so one cannot be understood fully without the other. The discussion has focused on research efforts that seek to hold both the practitioner and their praxis in focus at the same time. This clearly would lead to criticism of more distant forms of research per se. But over and above that, this chapter is also arguing for a mindset shift to move Strategy as Practice research from a concern with the production of research that is close to practice to one that prioritizes being closewith practice. The significant point in this chapter is the profound importance of relationship building activity and the end result of making an impact. In order to deliver ‘close-with’ relationship orientated research that does deliver practitioner impact some or all of the following lessons must

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be learned within the Strategy as Practice community. First, there is a need to critique, develop and extend our identities as researchers. In order to be in a ‘close-with’ relationship there must be more substance to a researcher’s engagement than their research questions. Such demands may be beyond the capabilities of a doctoral student, but the challenge for those working in the field is to pay personal and professional development attention to that throughout an academic career. Second, there is a shift in terms of our attitude to the linearity of the research process. It certainly needs to be longitudinal, but also, because of its relationship-centricity, this type of work follows diffuse lines of causality in the collection and analysis of data, is erratic as opposed to consistent in terms of activity and almost certainly moves forward and backwards in time. This requires longterm relationships, which is both demanding and potentially in contradiction to the pressures academics face to get in, get data, get out and publish. The former pushes academics more towards a ‘smash and grab’ raid approach. This leads to the third and final point. There is a need for moral and ethical reflection by researchers active in this area. That is, if there is not a genuine interest in and concern for the management practitioners and their practices under exploration then the research opportunity should not be taken. Note, each of the three lessons are fundamentally about the researcher as the research tool and not about a set of methods and techniques. The Stratergy as Practice community now faces the challenge of how to facilitate this form of slowpaced researcher development in today’s highdemand, high-expectation, high-paced academic environment. We don’t argue that this is necessary for all types of Strategy as Practice research, but it is more likely to be true for those in the field who want to place the practitioner as central to their research agenda, as opposed to practices or praxis. References Alvesson, M. & Deetz, S. (2000) Doing Critical Management Research. London: Sage. Alvesson, M. & Willmott, M. (2002) Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing

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256 Phyl Johnson, Julia Balogun and Nic Beech Eden, C. and Huxham, C. (1996) Action research for the study of organisations, in S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, & W. R. Nord (eds) Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage Publications, 526–542. Ford, J. D. & Ford, L. W. (1994) Logics of identity, contradiction and attraction in change. Academy of Management Review, 19(4): 756–786. Gabriel, Y. (2000) Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, Fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2004) Narratives, stories and texts, in D. Grant, C. Hardy, C. Oswick & L. Putnam (eds) The Sage Handbook of Organizational Discourse. London: Sage, 61–78. Gioia, D. A. & Thomas, J. B. (1996) Identity, image and issue interpretation: Sensemaking during strategic change in academia. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41: 370–403. Goffman, E. (1961) Encounters. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. (1969) Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Graham-Hill, S. and Grimes, A. J. (2001) Dramatism as method: The promise of praxis. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 14(3): 280–294. Hambrick, D. (2007) Upper echelons theory: An update. Academy of Management Review 32 (2): 334–343. Hodgkinson, G. P. & Clarke, I. M. (2007) Exploring the cognitive significance of organizational strategizing: A dual-process framework and research agenda. Human Relations, 60(1): 243–255. Hodgkinson, G. P. & Wright, G. (2006) Neither completing the practice turn, nor enriching the process tradition: Secondary misinterpretations of a case analysis reconsidered. Organization Studies, 27 (12): 1895–1901. Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. & Seidl, D. (2007) Strategizing: The challenge of a practice perspective. Human Relations, 60(1): 5–27. Johnson, G., Melin, L. & Whittington, R. (2003) Micro strategy and strategizing: Towards an activity-based view? Journal of Management Studies, 40(1): 3–22. Johnson, P., Balogun, J. & Beech, N. (2006) Unlocking interlocking cycles of strategy practice and identity work. British Academy of Management Conference, Belfast, 2006.

Karreman, D. & Alvesson, M. (2004) Cages in tandem: Management control, social identity and identification in a knowledge-intensive firm. Organization, 11(1): 149–175. Langley, A. (2007) In search of rationality: The purposes behind the use of formal analysis in organizations, in G. Johnson, A. Langley, L. Melin & R. Whittington. Strategy as Practice. Research Directions and Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 121–136. Maister, D. (1997) Managing the Professional Service Firm. New York: Free Press Paperbacks. Margolis, J. (1989) The novelty of Marx’s theory of praxis. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 19(4): 367–388. McLeod, J. (1997) Narrative and Psychotherapy. London: Sage Publications. Parker, M. (2007) Identification: Organizations and structuralisms, in A. Pullen, N. Beech & D. Sims (eds) Exploring Identity: Concepts and Methods. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pullen, A. & Linstead, S. (2005) Introduction: Organizing identity, in A. Pullen & S. Linstead (eds) Organization and Identity. London: Routledge. Rogers, C. (1961) A process conception of psychotherapy, in C. Rogers On Becoming a Person. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 125–196. Roos, J. (2004) I Matter: Remaining the first author in strategy research, in S. Floyd, J. Roos F. Kellerman & C. Jacobs (eds), Innovating Strategy Processes. Oxford: Blackwell, 252–262. Rouleau, L. (2003) Micro-strategy as gendered practice: Resisting strategic change through the family metaphor. Paper presented at the 19th EGOS Colloquium, Copenhagen. Silverman, D. (1970) The Theory of Organisations: A Sociological Framework. London: Heinemann Educational. Steffy, B. D. & Grimes, A. J. (1986) A critical theory of organization science. Academy of Management Review, 11(2): 322–336. Sveningsson S. & Alvesson, M. (2003) Managing managerial identities: Organizational fragmentation, discourse and identity struggle. Human Relations, 56(10): 1163–1193. Sveningsson, S. & Larsson, M. (2006) Fantasies of leadership: Identity work. Leadership, 2(2): 203–224.

Researching strategists and their identity in practice Thomas, R. & Davies, A. (2005) Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: New public management and managerial identities in the UK public services. Organization Studies, 26(5): 683–706. Wasylyshyn, K. (2003) Executive coaching: An outcome study. Consulting Psychology Journal, 55(2): 94–106. (2005) The reluctant president. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 57(1): 57–70. Whittington, R. (2006a) Completing the practice turn in strategy research. Organization Studies, 27 (5): 613–634. (2006b) Learning more from failure: Practice and process. Organization Studies, 27(12): 1903–1906.

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(2007) Research that makes a difference, one way or another, in G. Johnson, A. Langley, L. Melin & R. Whittington. Strategy as Practice. Research Directions and Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 218–221. Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zuber-Skerritt, O. 2001 Action learning and action research: Paradigm, praxis and programs, in S. Sankara, B. Dick and R. Passfield (eds) Effective Change Management through Action Research and Action Learning: Concepts, Perspectives, Processes and Applications. Lismore, AU: Southern Cross University Press, 1–20.

CHAPTER

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Studying strategizing through narratives of practice L I N DA RO U L E AU

Until now, most papers associated with the Strategy as Practice perspective have been based mainly on longitudinal case studies drawing on ethnographic methods. While these methods provide a complex set of historical and contextual data that are obviously necessary for understanding practices, they tend to concentrate on the organizational level, thus leaving unclear the way managers and others draw on their explicit and tacit knowledge when they are strategizing. Only a few works from a practice perspective have utilized specific methodological tools that are truly appropriate for querying the essence of managerial agency in strategizing (Samra-Fredericks 2003; Balogun and Johnson 2004, 2005). The development and institutionalization of the Strategy as Practice perspective needs to draw on methodological tools that are more focused on action in order to understand how managers and others actually ‘do’ the strategy. Biographical methods constitute a set of pertinent qualitative methods of inquiry for carrying out in-depth studies of strategic practices. Aiming to gather information on the subjective essence of a person’s life or part of that life, biographical research focuses on individuals who are asked to reflect on their experiences in order to document change processes that might or might not be related to life transitions (Goodley et al. 2004). To better understand how managers and others act and interact, what knowledge they rely on and what skills they use when they are strategizing, biographical methods constitute a relevant methodological option offering multiple variants (biography, life story, autobiography, life history, and so on). This chapter proposes to study strategizing by collecting data through a specific kind of biographical method, namely narratives of practice. Narratives of practice are specific life stories that focus on work experience and professional 258

trajectories (Bertaux 1997, 1981). As with any biographical method, narratives of practices allow the researcher to dig into the ‘life-world’ of particular actors, such as managers and others, in order to capture the taken-for-granted streams of routines, events and interactions that constitute their social practices (Denis et al. 2004). I use narratives of practice to study how middle managers deal with organizational restructuring. By telling their own story of the organizational restructuring they have gone through, middle managers bring together beliefs, events and sense of self to express their lived experience of this major strategic change. This chapter comprises four parts. First, it will provide an overview of what narratives of practices are. Second, the chapter will explain why narratives of practice constitute a relevant methodology for gaining an in-depth look into the world of managers and others who are strategizing. Third, it will draw on some results and illustrative data extracted from a previous study involving middle managers dealing with the restructuring of their organization. Fourth, the chapter will conclude by discussing the challenges of using narratives of practice to study strategizing.

Narratives of practice as work life story Adopting the Strategy as Practice perspective in research involves using methodological tools to understand how managers and others strategize in the course of their day-to-day activities. All biographical methods such as life stories, self-portraits, autobiographies, biographies, individual or collective life stories, and so on, meet this requirement in two ways. First, biographical methods provide a sequential account of the interactional stream of experience that allows the researcher to capture

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what has been said and what has been done by the manager who is telling his story. Second, biographical methods capture the specific theories in use by managers and others that fall within and are relevant to their practical experience. By recounting what works and what does not, they draw on their experience to generate what can be called practice-based theories. In management, the reconstruction of the life stories of successful executives and entrepreneurs (Iacocca, Sloan, Welch and others) has been widely exploited. Indeed, when successful senior executives or entrepreneurs tell their stories, a part of those accounts is of a public nature and contributes to maintaining specific visions and interests that can secure the corporate image with the multiple stakeholders (Schoenberger 2001). Since the end of the 1980s, however, the genre has been undergoing a renewal. The biographical method is gaining in importance and several authors working in different sub-fields of management are adopting it (Farrell 1992; Pedler 1992; Bouchikhi 1993; Sims 1993; Kimberley and Bouchikhi 1995; Kisfalvi 2000; Brott 2001; Cohen and Mallon 2001; Valkevaara 2002; Shamir and Eilam, 2005; Cohen 2006; Crowley-Henry and Weir 2007). However, few strategy authors have taken an interest in this methodological option. One exception is Balogun (2003), whose works are based on the creation of semi-structured diaries that, as a selfreporting method, is seen by some people as a variant of the biographical method (see also Balogun and Johnson, 2004). This chapter proposes to look at narratives of practice, a specific biographical method, that certainly appears to be one of the most relevant methods for studying how strategizing is done. As Bertaux (1997, 1981) explains, narratives of practice are in some ways a life story focused on a part of this life, either professional, social, political or other. Narratives of practice that focus on work life are sometimes also referred to as work or career stories (Valkevaara 2002). Moreover, narratives of practice include a longitudinal perspective (Atkinson 1998). Each work life story is the result of the temporal schema structuring the trajectories of the individuals who are telling their stories (Bertaux and Kohli 1984). Every narrative

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of practice has a beginning, a development and an end. Through the accounts that managers and others give of the events they have chosen to relate, they share a part of their experience of the past at the same time as they situate themselves in relation to the future. Narratives of practice result from the construction through time of a relationship between a researcher (the narratee) and a subject (the narrator) telling his work story. In fact, the production of narratives of practice, like any variant of the biographical method, involves several meetings with the narrators (Mann 1992). For one thing, this establishes a deeper relationship with the other person, on which depends the wealth of the data that are collected. For another, the people who are telling the story have the chance to reflect on what they said and to prepare for the next interview, usually being aware of the theme in advance. These multiple encounters also give researchers the chance to return to certain points that remain obscure. Narratives of practice are in fact the result of a narrative co-construction whose authenticity and consistency – two fundamental criteria of the biographical method according to Atkinson (1998), the third being related to the integrity of the researcher – depend on the bonds of trust, the way the researcher and the subject engage each other in this narrative process. In this sense, the narrating is an event in the work life as it is part of the construction of that life (Essers and Benschop 2007). And it is the same for the researcher; the hearing is both about the life told and constitutive of it and the researcher’s life. The work as it is told constitutes both the subject and the researcher. Even though narratives of practice are centred on individuals, it does not mean that managers and others are considered perfect rational agents, as the neo-liberal ideology claims. Rather, narratives of practice are about the subjective interpretation of what happens at work. Indeed, the narrator’s stories are subject to reinterpretations every time they are told and retold. Moreover, when people are telling their work life story, they try to encapsulate it in a coherent and structured account in order to make sense of it to themselves and to the researcher. According to Bertaux and Delcroix (2000), even though there is a distance between work life as it is

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experienced and work life as it is told, the subjective account that people give cannot be separated from the way they live their work. The way managers and others live their work influences the way they talk about it. Therefore, narratives of practice provide an ‘experiential truth’ of the narrator’s work life. And it is this experiential truth, more than the complete and accurate real account of events, that the researcher is looking for when he is using narratives of practice in order to improve his understanding of how managers and others are strategizing. Given the subjective nature of narratives of practice, it might seem that they constitute an acontextual research method, since they are based on gathering information from personal interpretations. However, when managers and others recount their stories, these stories are necessarily rooted, explicitly or not, in different levels of analysis (Chamberlayne and Spano 2000). In fact, in the narrative act, the individuals who tell their stories do so by positioning themselves in their sociohistorical context (Apitzsch and Inowlocki 2000). Throughout their account, managers will refer to the context of the organization and society, to the structure of the industrial sector they work in or to the socio-professional category they belong to. They do so by evoking meaningful scripts and templates or sometimes unconscious working rules they think are appropriate to the situation they are talking about. This allows the researcher to capture the contextual dimension which is discursively part of the story. Of course, the researcher needs to be aware of the fact that the narrators, consciously or not, refer to contextual discourses available to them and which allow them to render their story acceptable both for them and for the researcher. As for the biographical method in general, narratives of practice are used to promote reflexive thought, or even the individuals’ empowerment vis-à-vis their professional practices (Atkinson 1998; Bertaux and Delcroix, 2000). By telling their own stories to someone else, the individuals contribute to clarifying their interpretation of events, and this review of their experience allows them to take a step back from their action. Narrating one’s own work life story constitutes a reflexive act that changes the self and changes life (Rouleau 2003). Part of the reality construction occurs in the

meaning that people develop while speaking. As an act of reflecting on oneself, narrating one’s own work experience procures a sense of personal satisfaction and might illuminate actions in the future. In addition to these distinctive features, it must be added that the biographical method, like narratives of practice, offers multiple possibilities for collecting and analysing data. The research design can take a variety of forms and fit into broader methodological procedures. Several researchers use the ethnographic approach and the life story approach conjointly. That is what Cohen (2006) did, for example, when he combined two methodological approaches, multi-sites ethnography and multi-generation life story interviews, to study the patterns of knowledge transmission between workers in a globalization context. In addition, the data from the biographical method can also be used as secondary data. For example, Bouchikhi (1993) used six biographies of successful entrepreneurs, produced for purposes other than those of his research, to propose a constructivist analytical framework explaining the success and the performance of these entrepreneurs. And though most of the time biographical data are treated qualitatively, they can also be the object of structural analyses that draw on quantitative analytical methods involving content analysis and co-occurrence analysis (Atkinson 1998). Finally, the biographical method can even be used in the framework of comparative research approaches at the international level. This is the case of the SOSTRIS (Social Strategies in Risk Society) project, the objective of which was to understand global social transformations by taking into account the diversity and the complexity of individual trajectories (Chamberlayne and Spano 2000). This project brought together researchers from seven European countries (England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and Sweden) all using the biographical method (Centre for Biography in Social Policy, Sociology Department, East London University, England).

Narratives of practice and strategizing Beyond these characteristics that make up the biographical method, narratives of practice appear

Studying strategizing through narratives of practice

to be a relevant and innovative methodology for understanding how managers and others are strategizing. By being focused on the individuals who are telling their stories, narratives of practice allow access to the level of analysis that is typical of this perspective. Moreover, the contextual nature of the method allows us to understand how strategy is accomplished and performed in social relationships and affiliations that go beyond the managerial end-purposes of the strategy. A Strategy as Practice perspective invites researchers to conceive strategy as any social practice, that is to say as it is contextually anchored in a set of social, political and economic relations (Hendry 2000). Because managers and others tell their story using frames and conventions that seem appropriate to the cultural and organizational norms of their situation, narratives of practice allow the researcher to understand the situated, discursive and interactional nature of the strategy formation. The narratives of practice method is intensely interested in the ‘practical’ accomplishment of social actors able to engage in the production of organizational life, and therefore adopts a position that recognizes the skills and competencies of individuals as well as their social embeddedness (Crowley-Henry and Weir 2007). Strategizing is done on a daily basis at the boundary of organizational activities, that is, where the individuals meet people (clients, partners, suppliers, etc.) from their environment (Rouleau 2005). Therefore, the Strategy as Practice perspective aims to understand how managers mobilize the explicit and tacit knowledge relative to their firm’s positioning in its environment. As ‘reflective practitioners’, in Schon’s (1987) terms, when managers tell their stories, they will also reveal a part of the linguistic and relational skills they used in the course of their action. In addition, through their stories, they will say what tools and models they used to exercise their capacity for action. By recounting events, what they did concretely, the managers reveal part of the stock of interpretive procedures they draw on when they are relating to others (Atkinson 1998). Through the choice of events that they decide to recount or not to recount, they partly reveal the shared knowledge in which their practices are entrenched (Goodley et al. 2004).

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Finally, the Strategy as Practice perspective invites strategy researchers to understand how all the actors of the organization, managers or not, contribute to strategy formation (Johnson et al. 2003; Balogun et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007). In social sciences, the biographical method made it possible to open new research fields by giving a voice to those people (e.g. immigrants, farmers, tradespersons, and so on) who were typically excluded from the official history, the history that was interpreted in favour of the interests of the dominant classes. In the same way, narratives of practice can enable us to give back a voice to middle managers, lower managers and all the actors belonging to the various sub-groups inside or around the organization who are generally not considered in traditional strategy research (Whittington et al. 2003; Denis et al. 2004). Of course, researchers using narratives of practice face numerous methodological challenges, but this approach is both sufficiently rich and complex to analyse in detail how managers strategize. In fact, it is a methodological approach that, as Table 17.1 shows, adequately meets the five criteria that Balogun et al. (2003) have selected for identifying appropriate methods for research on strategizing. The narrative of practice is a research method that allows the collection of complex data focused on questions of concern to managers and that maximizes researchers’ time and resources. As well as being a very undemanding method for the organization and providing access to high-quality interpretative data, it allows researchers to gather a wide range of empirical evidence to reveal strategy formation at the micro-level. In addition, narratives of practice encourage managers to be reflexive and at the same time require a more intense form of commitment on the part of researchers, elements which Balogun et al. (2003) identify as being very important criteria for selecting methods for the Strategy as Practice research. Of course, the researchers’ ability to explore the world of the narrators’ management activities through narratives of practice finally depends on the researchers’ skills for entering into contact with the other, establishing a relation of trust and considering themselves as partners in the research rather than outside observers.

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Table 17.1 Narratives of practice according to Balogun et al.’s (2003) criteria For strategizing research, a method should:

How narratives of practice meet these criteria

Provide broad and deep data collection

–data based on a temporal schema –data embedded in a context –data that can be compared –data that can be gathered from individuals belonging to all hierarchical levels

Elicit full and willing commitment from informants

–very undemanding method for the organization –satisfying method for participants

Make the most effective use of researchers’ time

–data-collection time concentrated during meetings –analysis develops from meeting to meeting –permit collection of a wide range of empirical evidence (practices, events, discourses, representations, etc.)

Anchor the questions being asked in the organizational realities

– sensitive to organizational issues –take into account what interests the narrator

Provide useful results

–permit participants to take stock of their actions –permit participants to think about their professional trajectory –favour the development of a relationship of trust with the researcher that can lead to subsequent collaborations

Middle managers’ narratives of practice In order to convince readers of the relevance and usefulness of narratives of practice for understanding how strategizing is done in practice, this section presents some results and data of a study based on narratives of practice. The research aim was to study the identity trajectories of middle managers who had experienced an organizational restructuring. Restructuring here refers to major transformations at the levels of organizational structure and corporate strategy (McKinley and Scherer, 2000; Rouleau 2000). In the next few lines, I first show how the data were collected and analysed. Then, the case of Mary will be used to present four sets of activities underlying different types of practical knowledge that middle managers draw on to deal with a restructuring. Organizational restructurings are critical moments in the evolution and modernization of firms (Pettigrew et al. 2001). In this sense, they are periods of mutation that are promising for the renewal of managerial action. Consequently, I decided to explore the transformation of the identity representations of middle managers who carried out the restructurings. Fifty-eight narratives of practice with middle managers working in the private (23), public (18) and non-profit (17) sectors were conducted in order to better understand

how they were experiencing or had experienced the restructuring of their organization. The middle managers I met were recruited through ‘expert opinion’ (personal contacts, and MBA class and an arrangement with a firm specializing in executive career management). To facilitate the aggregation of data, each participant was asked to suggest some names of people who had gone through the same restructuring, thereby producing what Bertaux (1997, 1981) called ‘clusters’ of narratives of practice. These micro-groups were needed in order to grasp a part of the contextual complexity in which their action took place. While the cross-referencing of the events provided an outline of the context, the different ways of recounting the events revealed the meaning each middle manager gave to them. As mentioned above, it is usual to meet the narrator several times when researching through narratives of practice. In this research study, the narratives of practice were constructed from at least three meetings with each participant. From the beginning, the managers were informed of the objective of each of the meetings, which allowed them to think about the next meeting and prepare their accounts. In the first meeting, the managers narrated their career path. This meeting allowed them to recall the past while providing a set of elements to facilitate the interpretation of the

Studying strategizing through narratives of practice

Approaching the restructuring as a life crisis (individual knowledge)

Mobilizing networks (relational knowledge)

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Convincing others (socioorganizational knowledge)

Dealing with unintended consequences (professional and technical knowledge)

Figure 17.1 Activities of middle managers in organizational restructuring (underlying types of practical knowledge)

current reality. The second meeting focused on the present and was entirely given over to the narrative of the restructuring itself. The third meeting dealt mainly with their career forecast, that is, their own future as well as the future of the company after the restructuring. In general, the meetings lasted from ninety minutes to two hours. In several cases more than three interviews were carried out, because the interviews on the restructurings sometimes required two meetings. In most cases, the interviews took place at the same time as the restructuring and were spread out over four months. In this way, approximately 300 hours of interviews were collected. To facilitate the data transcription step and to reduce the costs, I proceeded in two stages: first, the best narratives of practice (fifteen) were transcribed in full, and then syntheses or mini-cases of the other narratives were written. Data analysis was also done in two ways: (1) by coding the information on the basis of factual categories pertaining to the manager and the restructuring (e.g. biographical data, operations of the company and the sector, steps and events in the restructuring, consequences of the restructuring on the manager’s work, activities carried out in

the framework of the restructuring, competencies and types of knowledge mobilized, etc.); and (2) by extensively analysing the narratives of practice. This step involved first bringing out the identity representations (e.g. ability to act on the situation, search for legitimacy, meaning given to the action, etc.) in the managers’ narratives. Next, a repertory of activities and representations was constructed for each narrative. Through this listing, it was possible to identify a certain number of contradictions. It is in these contradictions conveyed by the narrators that their practical intelligence is tacitly operating (Wengraf 2000). The in-depth analysis also made it possible to see how middle managers perform their roles throughout the organizational restructuring. The repertory of activities and representations might also be used to detail the practical competencies they draw on in the restructuring. Four different sets of activities were identified. Each of them is founded on a specific type of practical knowledge (Figure 17.1). These activities can be stated as follows: (1) approaching the restructuring as a life crisis (individual knowledge); (2) convincing others (socio-organizational knowledge);

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(3) mobilizing networks (relational knowledge); and (4) dealing with unintended consequences (professional and technical knowledge). In order to illustrate how these activities were practically performed, the case of Mary will be discussed. Mary is a nurse and she had been working in the same health care organization for twenty-five years. For many years, she had held the position of director of nursing in the long-term care department. With the restructuring, she became coordinator of nursing in the day surgery unit and was also in charge of patient services.

Approaching the restructuring as a life crisis (individual knowledge) The difficulty in restructurings is that middle managers find themselves at the centre of a set of contradictory tensions that destabilize the way things are usually done. In Mary’s case, she was collegially managing her teammates. With the restructuring she became the coordinator of a unit resulting from the merger of two teams with different cultural backgrounds. Suddenly, and through no desire of her own, she found herself at the head of a recomposed team whose operating rules were not clear and were somewhat conflicting. While she was still ‘grieving’ her forced transfer, she was asked to implement a new beneficiary service philosophy. Tensions were high in the merged team, especially since the reorganization called into question the nursing profession. Thus, this middle manager found herself immersed in a situation that she knew would be difficult to solve in the short term. Based on the interviews conducted, it seems that some managers who were wrestling with such dilemmas came through better than others. The difference partly resided in their ability to use the stock of knowledge they had stored up in the course of their prior individual experiences. In fact, those who acted as if they were dealing with another ‘life crisis’ seemed to come through much better than the others. Having already experienced difficult situations, they drew upon difficult key past events in their lives to act and react to the ambiguity provoked by the restructurings. In the narratives of practice produced, several middle managers mentioned having lived through

major life crisis events (for example, the death of a father, a divorce, the illness of a loved one, etc.) that to a greater or lesser degree contributed to orienting their professional trajectory. When in their initial meeting middle managers mentioned having experienced a major life crisis event, the subsequent interview on the restructuring took a narrative form similar to the one used in the preceding interview to recount that difficult time. This was observed in three out of four cases in which middle managers had mentioned such an event in the first interview. In other words, the narrator symbolically positioned his narrative as if the restructuring was nothing but another ‘life crisis’. For example, if he had experienced this challenge as a ‘victim,’ he also positioned himself as a victim in his narrative of the restructuring. On the contrary, if he had played a central role in a personal life crisis situation, his narrative of the restructuring was that of a hero. In Mary’s case, she became responsible for her family at a very young age, and this seems to have determined her professional trajectory. She says: I am the eldest in a family of six children, my parents divorced when I was quite young. At fourteen, I took over the role of mother of the family, since my mother was at work. I had to take care of the others, it was the beginning of my apprenticeship. […] Since the age of fourteen, I’ve always worked to pay for my studies, to be independent. I had to take on my responsibilities at a young age. That’s how I became a nurse. It’s also why I’ve always been very methodical, planning to organize the future. It’s difficult to take care of others if you’re not able to take care of yourself.

Therefore, her central plot in her narrative of practice for telling about her professional life is based on motherhood. It is also in these terms that she talked about the restructuring: We used to be like a little family and suddenly everything changed. I was a stranger to half the girls. We didn’t see things the same way. I had to live with them. We had to learn to respect each other. It was long and I had a hard time, but now, things are better. Maybe we’re becoming a blended family.

In telling how she approached her work throughout the restructuring, this middle manager draws on metaphors and conventions that speak for her

Studying strategizing through narratives of practice

(family, motherhood, respect, and so on), and by so doing she is also expressing what she means when she is talking about work, restructuring and life in general. For her, strategizing has to be accomplished through symbols and activities that are meaningful to her and that guide her in life, that is to say through her practical knowledge of what life is.

Convincing others (socio-organizational knowledge) In a restructuring, translating the new strategy, that is, the new direction the company is taking, poses a difficult problem for a number of middle managers. In fact, in a restructuring, middle managers are called upon daily to translate the new direction in terms that can be understood by their colleagues and even by the people with whom they are in contact outside the organization. Thus, middle managers have to create meaning by using the ‘right words’ and by creating effective images of the change that will allow them to capture the attention of the other and if necessary influence the person with whom they are interacting (Rouleau and Balogun 2008). Rather than talking in strategic terms, they have to use ordinary language and shared meaning to effectively translate the main issues. According to one middle manager, ‘there are several ways to present a change, you have to choose the one that you think will please, and that will be the most credible to the person you are talking to’. For several middle managers, this skill depends in part on the ability to make their comments fit into the socio-organizational codes that will make sense for the other. For example, using the seduction mode when addressing women, creating enthusiasm and magic when speaking to journalists, playing on nationalistic feeling to convince investors to promote economic development by investing in small firms are all ways to draw on social codes during day-to-day interactions and encounters to convince the other that there are certain elements of the change that are positive in the long term. In the restructuring, Mary has to convince the nurses with whom she is working to tell their patients that day surgery is as good as, and even

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preferable to, in-hospital convalescence, when they know that their patients prefer to stay in the hospital. And this is not an obvious situation since the nurses themselves are convinced that the new rule is a budgetary prerogative rather than the result of a real concern for patients. So, she says: I know what they think. I can’t change that. What I say to my girls is: let’s give them the administration a chance. But we won’t change the way we give care. In this hospital, we always said that care was important, what counts in the end is how we do it, what happens on the floor.

This comment shows that Mary is a compromising person. She tries to convince the nurses by drawing on their team spirit and her relationships with them (my girls). In so doing, she is drawing on her practical knowledge of the social codes that constitute them as a team. However, by evoking the hospital culture and reassuring them about their autonomy in their job, she refers to organizational codes and she positions herself as a protector of their professional identity, thus reaffirming that despite the message she conveys to adopt the new rules, she is mainly on their side.

Mobilizing networks (relational knowledge) In a restructuring, the social network, the strong ties as much as the weak ties, constitutes a firstorder resource. This network arises from an exchange negotiated among several people such as colleagues, subordinates and people from outside the company. This negotiated exchange takes the following form: ‘I am doing such and such for you but you owe me one.’ This is the way to thwart or to use the formal rules of the organization or to create flexible ties between structural interfaces that otherwise would never encounter each other. In the restructuring, Mary has to adapt to a different care logic and she has to use her own networks in order to be able to rebuild a new team spirit. In this vein, Mary relates: With the restructuring, I often felt at a disadvantage. I had always worked in long-term care, so working in day surgery, in the beginning I wasn’t sure, it was another world. I was lucky I wasn’t

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alone, when I had a problem, a girl who I did not understand and with whom I had difficulty, I knew who to see to find a way to work with her or to protect myself. In general, when I have a problem, I go see the people I know, I learn a lot from them.

In a restructuring, it is these internal and external networks that allow middle managers to adequately play their strategic role. And when these networks are destabilized for a moment, they take on an even more critical importance. In the same way, the long-standing knowledge of the day-to-day anecdotes and rumours about the organization that are central to the organization’s cultural cement constitute indispensable practical knowledge to advance a priority file and, of course, to ensure that the work is done on time. The appropriate use of one’s network at the right time can be as helpful as the practical knowledge indispensable for activating it.

Dealing with unintended consequences (professional and technical knowledge) Even though they may have been very carefully planned, restructurings almost always entail a set of unexpected consequences (technical problems, changes in customers’ habits, etc.). These often degenerate into conjunctural crises that have the effect of brutally emphasizing the failures and the contingencies of the ongoing restructuring. These crises can also be intensified by uncontrollable events that occur simultaneously in the environment (e.g. holiday periods, disastrous climate conditions, etc.), thus creating emergency situations that enormously complicate the course of the change. During these difficult periods, management cannot always act effectively since it is itself undergoing reorganization. It is often the middle managers who have been in the organization for some time who are left to solve the problems. Their professional and technical knowledge as well as their work and organizational experience sometimes enable them to pinpoint a technical detail that can make all the difference. This situation happened to Mary and here is how she tells the story:

One day, there was a fire in the chronic care wing. Files were missing, they were overwhelmed. The new director didn’t know what to do. It was a free-for-all in the unit. I said: I’ll go, I did it for twenty-five years, I know several of the patients, I’ll get it running again; it won’t take too long. Not everyone agreed but it really helped them, it enabled them to avoid problems. The DG thanked me several times.

In this quote, we can see that because Mary had worked in long-term care for many years, she was able to efficiently deal with the situation. Moreover, when experienced middle managers are able to resolve a crisis in the course of the restructuring, as Mary did, they become the ‘heroes of the day’ with senior management. So for a moment, they receive some recognition from their superiors while they are paying the costs of the ongoing restructuring. This dual dynamic of negation/recognition impacts their identity as middle managers, that is to say the way they position themselves in relation to their subordinates and superiors. For example, in her narrative of practice, Mary demonstrates that while she was previously focused on the wellbeing of the patient, her new responsibilities led her to define herself through her ability to control and dispatch the work throughout her team. Despite the fact that this identity change seems to be difficult, as was also the case for most of the other middle managers I met, she nevertheless supports the restructuring by drawing on her practical knowledge through the set of activities described above.

Challenges of using narratives of practice The use of narratives of practice to better understand the transformation of middle managers’ identity in restructurings illustrates that it is a method that offers multiple possibilities for exploring how strategizing is accomplished in practice. By being reflexive, by requiring greater closeness between practitioners and researchers and by producing complex and in-depth data, narratives of practice constitute an innovative methodological agenda. Nevertheless, three major challenges await

Studying strategizing through narratives of practice

researchers who use narratives of practice to study strategizing. These challenges have to do with sampling, data collection and data analysis. The first challenge related to the use of narratives of practice, and more largely the biographical method, concerns choosing the people who are invited to tell their stories (Goodley et al. 2004; Rosenthal 1993). On one hand, researchers have to find people who possess the basic characteristics they are looking for. On the other hand, they have to find people who have something to say. This becomes more complicated when researchers are considering using narratives of practice in a perspective recognizing that strategy is not uniquely the domain of top managers. While everyone has an interesting story to tell, not everyone has the same ability to narrate his own story, to step back from the events that mark the life of an organization. For example, researchers must avoid people who recount one event after another and who might use this experience as a platform they would not otherwise have. Even though narratives of practice facilitate access to data, since they are based first and foremost on the individual’s goodwill rather than the organization’s, it is nonetheless risky to use the narratives of practice approach with people whose narrative skills cannot be evaluated beforehand. Thus, researchers may find it pertinent to pair this method with other data-collection procedures in order to increase the quality of the narratives of practice (e.g. organizational ethnography, collective interview, personal documents, etc.). It must be remembered that in terms of narratives of practice, it is not so much the number of narratives but rather the depth of the data collected that counts. The second challenge is linked to the fact that narratives of practice are reflective discourses that are retrospectively performed. By nature, narratives of practice are based on the key stages of the person’s work life story. Apart from a few cues from the researchers at the start to ask the narrators to tell a segment of their story, it is preferable to leave people free to organize their discourse as they choose. Incidentally, the story produced is not strictly speaking at the level of the practical conscience so researchers must make sure to guide their narrators to relate what they said and what they did rather than let them wander and

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reflect on their actions. In other words, researchers constantly have to bring the narrators back to their actions, what they did and what they said. Narrators will always have a tendency to theorize about their action and, for the sake of social desirability vis-à-vis their interviewers – who are linked to business schools or universities – to use established and proven management models. Here, vigilance is indispensable, and we emphasize once again that researchers have the responsibility to regularly bring the narrators’ story back to the level of facts, what happened, what was said. That is the only way to ensure privileged access to the practical knowledge that the individuals drew upon when they strategized. This access will then depend on the researchers’ data-analysis strategies. For instance, the researchers will have to find ways to bring out the manner in which the narrators deployed their tacit competence, for example, by constantly comparing and contrasting the themes that emerge from the discourse produced in the whole framework of the story in order to interpret the hidden meanings of that story. The third challenge concerns the fact that narratives of practice are first and foremost a method in which individuals plot and make sense of their own story. Thus, the contextual dimension, though always present in the narrative, is not always apparent to the person who is outside the story being told. Researchers must provide themselves with the analytic means to locate and bring out the contextual elements contained in the narrations. This obviously requires the researchers to have a profound preliminary knowledge of these contextual elements. To facilitate the task, they can conduct some collective narratives of practice, or they can plan to cross-reference the narratives during data analysis. Finally, it is important to triangulate the data gathered in order to reinforce the researchers’ knowledge of the context in which the stories they are examining were produced so that they can meet this challenge, which is typical of all the variants of the biographical method. These challenges are far from being unsolvable. But they require creativity, rigour and the researchers’ profound involvement in the design research. Among other things, triangulation of data sources allows the researcher to cope with these challenges.

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For example, official records may facilitate a good sampling, help the researcher to refocus the interview when necessary and corroborate information. Finally, the researcher should never forget that the quality of the data collected through narratives of practice depends on the authenticity of the relationships lived and experienced with the subject. In other words, what is told, heard and interpreted in narratives of practices arises out of the intersubjective connection between the researcher and the subject. Such relationships might be impeded by psychological processes such as identification from the subject to the researcher or transference from the researcher to the subject. Even though the researcher is never fully protected from orienting the story and interpreting it through his own unconscious representations and desires, it is necessary to design the research in ways that will allow him to introspectively distance himself from the whole process.

Conclusion This chapter looked at narratives of practice as thematic life stories focused on work experience. It argued that narratives of practice provide a complex set of interpretive data relevant to better understand how managers and others strategize through their daily activities. By looking at data collected from a previous study involving middle managers dealing with a restructuring, this chapter illustrated how middle managers draw on their explicit and tacit knowledge in order to accomplish their strategic role. As with any methodological tools, narratives of practice comprise some strengths and weaknesses that will now be discussed. The first strength of narratives of practice as a methodology for studying strategizing is that it really enters into the subjective account of what managers and others ‘do’. The second is that it provides fertile data that can be used by Strategy as Practice researchers to develop typologies of practices and skills deployed by managers, to formulate propositions and even to propose theoretical models of strategizing. The third strength is that the wealth and the depth of the data gathered are such that they can serve to explore multiple

research questions around strategizing. While I was studying the transformation of middle managers’ identity in organizational restructuring, these data might also be used to look at the ways they performed their strategic role, as was done in this chapter. Finally, this method is particularly useful for exploring problems and questions for which data might be difficult to obtain. For example, given that restructurings generally occur in a conflictual context, the use of narratives of practice has greatly facilitated access to data. The major criticism of narratives of practice is that they make generalizing difficult, while the quality of the data depends on the depth of the relationships between the researcher and the subject. As stated earlier, another weakness is the difficulty of selecting and finding a good storyteller. Finally, as with any other qualitative study, they generally provide an abundance of data that needs to be carefully and relevantly reduced and coded so that analytic headway can be made and thus really contribute to advancing the research on Strategy as Practice. Like any research method, narratives of practice are more suitable for advancing some agendas than others. Here, two main Strategy as Practice research perspectives might be considered. First, narratives of practice might be relevant for research concerned with the knowledge, skills and emotions used by managers when they are strategizing. For example, strategic leadership, the role of people in strategic innovation and work identity in strategic change might be very convenient topics to be explored through narratives of practice. Second, given that the biographical method has been used for researching people traditionally marginalized by researchers, narratives of practice might also be a good way to explore how managers and people who are not generally associated with strategy research contribute to the making of strategy. Beyond middle managers, it might be interesting to use narratives of practice to look at how consultants, lower managers, boundary workers and institutional entrepreneurs strategize in their daily activities. In short, for the researcher, studying strategizing through narratives of practice is an enriching experience, while for the subject, narrating one’s

Studying strategizing through narratives of practice

own story can be an insightful and empowering one. When I conducted narratives of practice with middle managers, several of them testified to the reflective benefits they gained from the exercise. Managers rarely have the opportunity to talk about themselves, what they do, who they are and what they think, and this is even truer in a restructuring. Some of them called me after the interviews in order to let me know that this experience was the beginning of a reflection that led them elsewhere in their career.

References Apitzsch, U. & Inowlocki, L. 2000. Biographical analysis: A ‘German’ school? In P. Chamberlayne, J. Bornat, & T. Wengraf (eds), The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: 53–70. London: Routledge. Atkinson, R. 1998. The Life Story Interview. London: Sage. Balogun, J. 2003. From blaming the middle to harnessing its potential: Creating change intermediaries. British Journal of Management, 14 (1): 69–83. Balogun, J., Huff, A. & Johnson, P. 2003. Three responses to the methodological challenges of studying strategizing. Journal of Management Studies, 40 (1): 197–224. Balogun, J. & Johnson, G. 2004. Organizational restructuring and middle managers. Academy of Management Journal, 47 (4): 523–549. 2005. From intended strategy to unintended outcomes: The impact of change recipient sensemaking. Organization Studies, 26 (11): 1573–1602. Bertaux, D. 1997. Les récits de vie. Paris: Nathan. 1981. Biography and Society: The Life Story Approach in the Social Sciences. London: Sage. Bertaux, D. & Delcroix, C. 2000. Case histories of families and social processes: enriching sociology. In P. Chamberlayne, J. Bornat, & T. Wengraf (eds), The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: 71–89. London: Routledge. Bertaux, D. & Kohli, M. 1984. The life story approach: A continental view. Annual Review of Sociology, 10: 215–237. Bouchikhi, H. 1993. A constructivist framework for understanding entrepreneurship performance. Organization Studies, 14 (4): 549–571.

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Brott, P. E. 2001. The storied approach: A postmodern perspective for career counselling. The Career Development Quarterly, 49 (4): 304–313. Chamberlayne, P. & Spano, A. 2000. Modernisation as lived experience: Contrasting case studies from the SOSTRIS project. In P. Chamberlayne, J. Bornat, & T. Wengraf (eds), The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: 321–336. London: Routledge. Cohen, P. 2006. Re-doing the knowledge: Labour, learning and life story in transit. Journal of Education and Work, 19 (2): 109–120. Cohen, L. & Mallon, M. 2001. My brilliant career? Using stories as a methodological tool in careers research. International Studies of Management and Organization, 31 (3): 48–68. Crowley-Henry, M. & Weir, D. 2007. The international protean career: Four women’s narratives. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 20 (2): 245–258. Denis, J.-L., Langley, A. & Rouleau, L. 2004. Studying strategizing in pluralistic contexts: A methodological agenda. Paper presented at EGOS Conference, Ljubljana, 1–3 July. Essers, C. & Benschop, Y. 2007. Enterprising identities: Female entrepreneurs of Moroccan or of Turkish origin in the Netherlands. Organization Studies, 28 (1): 49–69. Farrell, P. 1992. Biography work and women’s development: The promotion of equality issues. Management Education and Development, 23 (3): 215–225. Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Clough, P. & Moore, M. 2004. Researching Life Stories: Method, Theory, Analysis in a Biographical Age. London: Routledge. Hendry, J. 2000. Strategic decision-making, discourse and strategy as social practice. Journal of Management Studies, 37 (7): 955–977. Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. & Seidl, D. 2007. Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective. Human Relations, 60 (1): 5–27. Johnson, G., Melin, L. & Whittington, R. 2003. Micro-strategy and strategizing: Towards an activity-based-view. Journal of Management Studies, 40 (1): 1–22. Kimberley, J. R & Bouchikhi, H. 1995. The dynamics of organizational development and change: How the past shapes the present and constrains the future. Organization Science, 6 (1): 9–19.

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Kisfalvi, V. 2000. The treat of failure, the perils of success and CEO character: Sources of strategic persistence. Organization Studies, 21 (3): 611–640. Mann, S. 1992. Telling a life story: Issues for research. Management Education and Development, 23 (3): 271–280. McKinley, W. & Scherer, A. G. 2000. Some unanticipated consequences of organizational restructuring. Academy of Management Review, 25 (4): 735–753. Pedler, M. 1992. Biography work for organisational learning: Strategy or destiny? Management Education and Development, 23(3): 258–271. Pettigrew, A. M., Woodman, R. W. & Cameron, K. S. 2001. Studying organizational change and development: Challenges for future research. Academy of Management Journal, 44 (4): 697–714. Rosenthal, G. 1993. Reconstruction of life stories. Principles of selection in generating stories for narrative biographical interviews. The Narrative Study of Lives, 1 (1): 59–91. Rouleau, L. 2000. Les restructurations d’entreprise: Quelques points de repère. Management International, 5 (1): 45–52. 2003. La méthode biographique. In Y. Giordano (ed.), Conduire un projet de recherche: 134–171. Paris: Management & Société. 2005. Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day. Journal of Management Studies, 42 (7): 1413–1443. Rouleau, L. & Balogun, J. 2008. Exploring middle managers’strategic sensemaking role through practical knowledge. Trajectories, Paths, Patterns and Practices of Strategizing and

Organizing, JMS Conference, Saint Anne’s College, Oxford, 23–25 September. Samra-Fredericks, D. 2003. Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction. Journal of Management Studies, 40 (1): 141–174. Schoenberger, E. 2001. Corporate autobiographies: The narrative strategies of corporate strategists. Journal of Economic Geography, 1 (3): 277–298. Schon, D. A. 1987. Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Shamir, B. & Eilam, G. 2005. What’s your story? A life-stories approach to authentic leadership development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16: 395–417. Sims, D. 1993. The formation of top managers: A discourse analysis of five managerial autobiographies. British Journal of Management, 4 (1): 57–69. Valkevaara, T. 2002. Exploring the construction of professional expertise in HRM: Analysis of four HR developers’ work histories and career stories. Journal of European Industrial Training, 26 (2–4): 183–196. Wengraf, T. 2000. Uncovering the general from within the particular: From contingencies to typologies in the understanding of cases. In P. Chamberlayne, J. Bornat, & T. Wengraf (eds). The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: 140–164. London: Routledge. Whittington, R., Jarzabkowski, P., Mayer, M., Mounoud, É., Nahapiet, J. & Rouleau, L. 2003. Taking strategy seriously: Responsibility and reform for an important social practice. Journal of Management Inquiry, 12 (4): 396–409.

PA RT IV

Application Variations

CHAPTER

18

Institutional change and strategic agency: an empirical analysis of managers’ experimentation with routines in strategic decision-making G E RRY JO H N S O N , S T UA RT SMI TH and BRI AN CODLING

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Stuart Smith who died in 2007.

Introduction One of the key issues in Strategy as Practice research is the relationship between institutionalized practice and the activities of strategists as institutional actors (Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington in this handbook). There is also increasing interest by institutional theorists in how institutional actors engage with and contribute to processes of institutional change – work which is reviewed in what follows. This chapter therefore brings together a concern raised by the Strategy as Practice perspective with those interested in the micro-foundations of institutional forms. The specific focus is the extent to which institutionalized routines persist and to what extent and how they are changed by strategic actors’ experimentation with such routines throughout a period of major institutional change.The chapter does this by first briefly reviewing the literature on the role actors play in institutional change and, in particular, their engagement and experimentation with institutionalized routines. There follows an explanation of the ethnographic nature of the methodology employed in the research. The findings of the research are then presented in terms of an analytic account of how strategic actors influence changes in routines

within a series of episodes and sub-episodes that were part of the institutional changes resulting from the privatization of British Rail (BR) in the 1990s. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the theoretical insights arising from this analysis that helps explain how what strategic actors do affects institutional forms.

Theoretical framing Institutional change and strategic agency Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) distinguish between research on institutional theory that has been concerned with processes of institutionalization in general and the more neglected concern with what they refer to as a ‘practice perspective on institutional work’ (p. 219). Further they acknowledge that, insofar as there is research on how actors influence institutional forms (typically referred to by institutional theorists as institutional entrepreneurship), it is mostly about the characteristics and conditions that produce such institutional entrepreneurs rather than what they actually do. They seek to remedy this by reviewing such research that does exist explaining the work of institutional entrepreneurs. This survey reveals that, insofar as such research exists, it is in the main about how institutional forms are established and maintained rather than how they are changed. The concern here on how the activities of institutional actors 273

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influence institutional change is therefore a largely neglected area of work. Institutional theorists have, however, offered some relevant explanations of how actors engage with and contribute to institutional change. They may be exposed to multiple institutions or ‘open fields’ (Dorado 2005) and consequent contradictions and tensions between them (Clemens and Cook 1999; Kostova and Roth 2002) that may galvanize change as differences between institutionalized groups are played out (Greenwood and Hinings 1996). Whilst such change may come about through variations in behaviour (Giddens 1979, 1984; Barley 1986), it is also in conditions of such contradiction or uncertainty that influence and choice by such actors with regard to institutionalized practice is likely to be greatest (Goodrick and Salancik 1996; Beckert 1999). In this context Dorado, drawing on Emirbayer and Mische (1998), argues that agency will take different forms along temporal dimensions. It will be routinized (for reasons we later explain, we prefer ‘habitual’) when the past is dominant or the organizational field closed, but increasingly proactive as fields open up, become more ambiguous or an inevitability of future change is perceived. This perception of future states will differ. Developing fields could be ‘transparent’ when there are several institutional referents and the field is substantially institutionalized or ‘hazy’when the field is perceived as highly unpredictable, complex or volatile (Dorado 2005). In circumstances where fields do open up, knowledgeable actors (Sewell 1992; Seo and Creed 2002; Johnson et al. 2000) bring to bear social and political skills to influence change by manipulating institutional logics (Seo and Creed 2002), routines (Maguire et al. 2004) or rhetoric (Suddaby and Greenwood 2005) to resolve competing ‘logics of action’ in transforming institutions (Holm 1995; Bacharach et al. 1996). Seo and Creed (2002) suggest that this move from habitual conformity depends on the extent to which actors personally experience such multiple institutional templates in ways that (a) lead to personal ‘misaligned interests’ and (b) awaken a consciousness that reduces the ‘perceived inevitability of institutional arrangements’. Both Seo and Creed (2002) and Johnson et al. (2000) also

note that in such circumstances actors experience a ‘duality of scripts’. This is likely to give rise to more conscious ‘sensemaking’ (Dorado 2005), script processing (Seo and Creed 2002) or ‘theorizing’ (Greenwood et al. 2002), drawing on scripts from different institutional arenas (Abelson 1981; Greenwood and Suddaby 2006) and gives rise to experimentation (Seo and Creed 2002; Clemens and Cook 1999). In such experimentation, actors pay attention to competing institutional templates to the extent that resources, power or influence are dependent on them and to the extent that they experience reciprocal behaviour to their experimentation (Johnson et al. 2000).

Institutional change and experimentation with routines As Feldman and Pentland (2003) acknowledge, routines1 are generally regarded as ‘repetitive, recognisable patterns of interdependent actions’ (p. 95). As we go on to show, this does not necessarily mean they are fixed, but it is likely to mean that they are in some ways and more or less institutionally specified or bounded. In other words there are likely to be institutionalized expectations of routinized behaviour. In this sense routines are a useful and relevant analytic and conceptual bridge between institutional forces and the activities of individual strategic actors. Actors act within and are constrained by such routines. However, some institutionalized routines are more mutable than others (Feldman and Pentland 2003), not least because they may contain internal contradictions (Fligstein 1997; Clemens and Cook 1999; Thornton 2002; Seo and Creed 2002; Greenwood and Suddaby 2006). Strategic actors may also face different institutional expectations, as we show below. So they do not enact institutionalized routines automatically. They must make sense of them, and in so doing they may modify them (Feldman 2000, 2004), not least by attaching new practices to existing routines (Maguire et al. 2004; Feldman and Pentland 2003). 1

It is because we are centrally concerned with routines in Feldman’s sense and wish to avoid confusion, that we refer to Dorado’s ‘routine agency’ as ‘habitual’ in what follows.

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Other organizational fields; hazy or transparent

Experimentation by actors

Institutional template

Artefacts and ostensive routines

Past orientation: ‘habitual’ agency

Performative routines

Present or future orientation: sense making or strategic agency

Figure 18.1 A model of actors’engagement with institutional change

Routines embody institutionalized structure both in terms of systematized ‘artefacts’ (Pentland and Feldman 2005) and in their abstract or ostensive form (Feldman and Pentland 2003). As such they can be conceived as representing the takenfor-granted routinized norms identified with the prevailing institutional arrangements and, as such, the micro-templates for institutional behaviour. However, performative routines as ‘the specific actions taken by specific people at specific times when they are engaged in an organizational routine’ (Feldman and Pentland 2003, pp. 101–102) are a central concern of the Strategy as Practice agenda. Figure 18.1 brings together the explanations advanced so far. However, the figure fails to take account of the multitude of decisions and initiatives in an organization that accompany institutional change and which take place over time. In what follows we take the explanation further. We examine events and decisions as they unfold over time to explain them in terms of the framework represented in Figure 18.1. In doing so, however, we seek to better understand the role played by experimentation through improvisations manifest in performative routines and how these relate to

past, present or future orientations of managers (Dorado 2005). In this way, our purpose is to better understand the role played by managers in influencing institutional change.

Methodology Our study was undertaken in a context of institutional change over a period of three years. In this chapter we revisit data from a longitudinal field study that took place from 1994 to 1997 within what was then British Rail as it went through a transitional period of privatization. The managers involved were faced with regulated change to the long-established institutional template of a public sector controlled railway but without a clearly institutionalized alternative (see below). In their chapter on methodology, Johnson et al. (2007) ask: ‘How do we research strategy practice empirically?’ and argue that ‘The simple and most obvious answer to this question is that we must go out and look’ (p. 52). Our data gathering took the form of direct observation by the third author, as fieldworker, over a three-year period, together with extensive access to documents relating to

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Fieldwork observations

E P I S O D E S

Timescale

Year 1

Privatiz -ation timetable

Preparation for vesting

Steel billet terminal

Staff relation -ships

Capital expenditure proposal

HR audit

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Subsidiary Company within BR

Planning permission Local contract HR report

Customer relation -ships

Special provision Leasing proposal

Sale

Grant application Shortterm Lease

Local negotiation

Customer service contract

Figure 18.2 Episodes observed

decisions and related discussions, supported by clarificatory interviews in a business unit of what was then British Rail. The focus was on the executive management team of the business unit that was undergoing preparations for privatization. All management meetings relating to the privatization process and many other meetings were observed as were more informal discussions. It was therefore possible to witness decisions as they were made and as they played out over time. Data gathered took the form of extensive field notes of observations together with artefacts such as meeting agendas, papers, budgets, etc. Field notes were written up immediately after observations. In all over 475 hours of field observations (in the main) and interviews were carried out. Since the focus here is on experimentation with routines, the emphasis is therefore on our accounts of this. We have avoided the temptation to rely on managers’ accounts because our phenomenon of interest was the changes in routines, not managers’ accounts of these. Indeed, more generally, we argue that, if the phenomenon of interest for Strategy as Practice researchers is behaviours, then the closest they can get to those behaviours, the better. A first level of analysis of our data revealed a series of key issues that surfaced and were

addressed in the period of privatization. In effect these were key episodes (Hendry and Seidl 2003) in that they had a beginning in which action was initiated and an end by which there was usually a resolution. However, since some of these episodes played out over years, we were also able to identify component ‘sub-episodes’ for analysis, providing a basis upon which we could examine distinct periods of activity. Figure 18.2 shows the episodes and sub-episodes that we focus on in this chapter. It is important to understand our approach to the analysis of our data and, in particular, the role played by prior theory, since this study is framed by our concern with micro-aspects of institutional theory. The field notes drawn up by the third author were made without reference to or knowledge of the explanatory models provided earlier in this chapter. Though inductive, our analysis of these data did then bring to bear the background theoretical understanding set out above. Inductive analysis has come to be almost synonymous with grounded analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1968), but even those who advocate the avoidance of formal theoretical propositions or hypotheses, recognize that it is impossible to begin with ‘a clean theoretical slate’ (Eisenhardt 1989, p. 536). In fact our approach to

Institutional change and strategic agency

analysis resembled Feldman’s approach in analysing routines (Feldman 2000) and corresponds, in effect, to ‘analytic induction’ as advocated by Robinson (1951). The analysis was informed by our broad research question, in this case to gain an understanding of how regulatory change was played out by the strategic actors involved and their impact on the resultant institutional changes. There then followed an extensive and iterative exploration of the data to consider (a) the extent to which and how those data confirmed or deviated from existing theory and (b) if they required additional explanation. In doing this the fieldwork researcher, drawing on his observations, acted as data ‘informant’ to the other two researchers in a search for theoretical explanations. In this way the research questions and insights were refined and theoretical explanations developed. In this chapter, then, the reader is reliant on the reporting by the researcher of events that took place. This is not unusual in ethnographic research. It is one reason why such research is often written up as monographs. Whilst inevitably the constraints of a paper – or in this case a chapter – reduce the extent to which it is possible, the obligation on the researcher is to make the accounts of events rich enough to be meaningful and credible. It is not possible to provide an account of all the decisions and changes we observed in the three years of the study. We have chosen to analyse three episodes and the constituent sub-episodes that occurred over the three years from a business unit referred to here as FreightCo: one of three bulk freight operations established as operating units vested as separate companies within BR. Figure 18.2 summarizes the time periods over which these occurred. What follows is an account of the episodes together with our analysis using the concepts and language from the theoretical framing discussed above. These show how the managers involved engaged with, enacted and modified institutionalized routines in the context of the institutional change prompted by privatization, initially with reference to the dominant BR template, but increasingly with reference to, at first hazy, but increasingly transparent alternative templates. In our subsequent discussion we then revisit these

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accounts to advance further theoretical explanations of the way in which performative routines take form in experimentation that contributes to institutional change.

Background to the privatization of British Rail Since the 1940s, when the whole rail system in the UK was nationalized within British Rail, it was vertically integrated, from heavy manufacturing and engineering through rail operations to computer services and travel agency. Like its industrial customers such as electricity generators, coal mining and steel producers, which were also nationalized, it was inextricably linked to government policy, financial subsidy and political constraints on capital expenditure, with much of its operations highly regulated either by legislation or by centrally determined procedures. BR had become a highly institutionalized public sector organization. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the major rail freight customers (electricity, coal and steel) were privatized. Between 1994 and 1997 BR was then split up into sixty separate passenger transport, freight and railway service enterprises. During this period all of these were legally constituted, vested as private companies and sold to the private sector. The explicit aim of the then Conservative government was to achieve a more competitive, customerfocused operation: in effect to break the institutional mould. In the interregnum between full public ownership and private ownership, the businesses remained in public ownership, though knowing they were likely to be privatized. Whilst BR remained responsible for effecting the transition to private status, the businesses were responsible for the management of operations of rail services and the preparation of the companies for sale to private bidders. During this time the BR business units were still subject to the institutional forces of the public sector and, in particular, the institutional template sustained by the BR board. However, the process of privatization inevitably exposed the management teams of the soon to-be-sold companies to alternative institutional

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templates, which were markedly different in being market based and took form in the demands of powerful buyers and competition, as well as a reconstituted set of relationships within the railway’s organizational field. In effect, this was a situation of institutional duality (Kostova and Roth 2002) by government edict.

Tracking institutional change: strategic agency and evolving routines In this section we trace and explain the transformation of FreightCo from a nationalized public sector organization to its imminent private sector status. In so doing we focus on the way in which the managers of the business engaged with the routines which formed and defined the relationships with their parent body, with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. We show how, over time, those routines evolved to represent a quite different organizational field within which FreightCo was located. These changes took place over a period of four years. A year elapsed between the division of the BR bulk freight business into three companies, substantially on geographical lines, and FreightCo becoming a separate legal entity. A further three years passed before the three companies were reunited within a multinational private sector company. In this time episodes occurred which form the basis of our analysis.

The first year: habitual agency In the period between BR forming the operating company and FreightCo becoming a separate legal entity, the executive team of FreightCo largely enacted routines embedded in their BR public service heritage whilst the BR board managed the process of privatization on behalf of the government. For example, in preparation for FreightCo becoming a separate legal entity, its executives were required to install a new operational infrastructure, independent of central BR, in order to cope with everyday necessities such as invoicing. They did not have management information systems, a customer database or their

own accounting and invoicing (all of which had been previously handled by BR centrally). All the new basic management systems were defined and set up by BR so as to facilitate alignment of their businesses during the period prior to privatization whilst they were subsidiaries of BR. Although these were systems associated with their impending private sector status, they were enacted by FreightCo executives in conformity with the templates laid down in BR. Moreover, during this year, in addressing other significant issues to do with the development of FreightCo, both parties adhered to the formal procedures in BR’s ‘Red Book’. This laid down the systems for the financial management of BR operating units, the procedures for how they should engage with BR Centre, the frequency and timing of such engagement and the limits on executive authority on expenditure. In effect, the Red Book was an artefact (Pentland and Feldman 2005) representing BR’s codified or prescribed routines for such relationships. In terms of Figure 18.1, during this period the behaviour of both the BR board and the executive team of FreightCo (FCET) was that of ‘habitual agency’ as they continued to conform to a public sector institutional template. It was in the following two-year period that significant changes in FreightCo and its organizational field took place. These changes can be conceived of as a series of episodes each of which changed the nature of that field. Here we examine three such episodes as shown in Figure 18.2. The first spans the four years of the study and concerns the problems of renovation of one of FreightCo’s rail terminals. The second concerns changes in the management of staff over the first three years of the study. The third relates to the renegotiation of a contract with a major customer in year three and is indicative of the shifts in the behaviour of strategic actors that had taken place by then. Overall the picture emerges of a gradual but substantial move away from central control of the rail system to greater local independence of decision-making with regard to relationships with key stakeholders. The analysis of the three episodes shows how this took place in terms of the interaction of strategic actors with the routines that defined those relationships.

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Renovating the steel billet terminal: from habitual agency to strategic behaviour. Part of FreightCo’s business consisted of the rail/ road transportation of large steel billets. These were unloaded at an old terminal (originally a nineteenth-century canal dock) using a crane installed in the 1950s. As a result of the terminal flooding and complaints from the customer, British Steel (BS), about restricted throughput, FreightCo’s engineering director reported on the state of the terminal to the management meeting, explaining that the terminal suffered considerable wear and tear from the heavy nature of the goods involved, that subsidence was endemic, flooding a problem and that substantial maintenance had been required on the crane both to maintain operations and to meet new regulations on safety. Initial capital expenditure proposal The FCET decided the terminal needed to be renovated to improve throughput and quality. To this end they decided to put forward a capital proposal to the freight director of BR, requesting funds to replace the crane, repair and resurface the road network, erect a waterproof storage and handling area and demolish the adjacent canal basin. They justified this on the basis of the need on strategic and safety grounds to preserve the long-established business with the customer and the FreightCo finance director prepared a capital expenditure proposal in line with the Red Book. The proposed expenditure fitted within the remit of the BR freight director, so technically he did not have to submit it to the BR board for approval. It had also been signed off by the BR chief accountant and the director of health and safety, so ensuring that it complied with required BR standards. The managers of FreightCo were therefore conforming to a BR expectation that in this period of change all significant decisions would be referred to the BR board. In terms of Figure 18.1, agency was habitual and orientated in the past. The BR freight director passed the proposal to the BR board, recommending that they approve it. Since he had the authority to approve it himself, this was contrary to expectations, including those at BR head office, who had signed off the proposal.

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We do not know the BR freight director’s motives in improvising the performance of the ‘Red Book’ routine in this manner; again it may also have been a desire to show he was conforming to the expectation to centralize responsibility on the BR board. However, the BR board rejected the proposal on the grounds of shortage of capital and suggested that maintenance be continued to ensure safety considerations and policy were upheld, saying that it was not their brief to commit large amounts of capital expenditure prior to privatization. The FCET accepted this decision, surmising that BR board could ‘see the bigger picture’ or that they were ‘under government pressure’. The BR freight director’s decision to refer the proposal to the board was also not questioned. On the face of it, the public sector institutional template seemed to prevail in the eyes of FCET and agency continued to be rooted in the past. However, arguably in the light of what happened subsequently (see below), the BR board’s actions may have alerted them to the ambiguity and politicization of the interim period prior to privatization, and sensemaking processes (Dorado 2005) were being awakened. As a result of the BR board’s decision, the FreightCo commercial director reported to BS, the customer, that they had been unable to get approval for funds to carry out the renovations of the terminal and were therefore unable to resolve the problems by that means; an outcome with which the customer voiced disappointment. Planning permission Given the ongoing problem, at a subsequent FreightCo management meeting the engineering director suggested and the FCET agreed that they apply for permission from the local government authority to demolish the canal basin, so solving the long-term problem of flooding and reducing difficulties in maintaining and operating the terminal. This did not, in itself, question the authority of the BR board; though the board had signalled a reluctance to commit resources to resolving the problem. However, in terms of Figure 18.1, the managers’ behaviour might be seen as informed by the executives’ current experience of growing customer dissatisfaction, and hence their sensemaking of a hazily seen unfolding market dominated

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organizational field, rather than the norm of management compliance to BR routines. The consultative routines that were part of the planning permission application led to objections from historical preservation societies, industrial historians and others. The result was that the application for planning permission was rejected. The subsequent appeal by FreightCo under the planning permission procedure in turn led to questions being raised in the UK House of Commons by local Members of Parliament and the BR board having to help draft replies for government ministers. The appeal was turned down. In Dorado’s terms the FreightCo managers’ sensemaking behaviours had inadvertently convened other actors’ resources in creating leverage on the BR board. As a result of the failed planning permission, a local Member of Parliament suggested to the FCET that, instead of demolishing the canal basin, they should apply to what was then the EEC for a grant for the preservation of the industrial heritage and extension of the modern canal network. Without consulting with the BR board or head office managers, the engineering director applied for such a grant. This was far from habitual behaviour in line with Red Book procedures and, like the application for planning permission, can be seen as performative improvisation as he sought to make sense of the ‘hazy’ interim situation prior to privatization. The reciprocal encouragement of the local Member of Parliament no doubt helped legitimate such experimentation. Special provisions As a result of what FCET assumed to be the publicity and consequent visits to the site by dignitaries, the BR board said that they would look favourably on a proposal for the specific water and road network problems to be addressed as ‘extraordinary items of maintenance’ under special provisions laid down in the Red Book. The requisite forms were completed, approval obtained within two months and the improvements effected by the FCET over the winter period. Evidently the BR board were themselves prepared to improvise the performance of Red Book procedures when it suited them.

By this time FCET were interacting more frequently and more independently (of BR Centre) with actors in the more peripheral regions of their organizational field (e.g. Members of Parliament and the EEC) and were experiencing reciprocal behaviour from them. In this way FCET had convened resources that impacted on the core actors in their organizational field (i.e. the BR board). The extent to which this had been done wittingly was unclear but during this period there were increasing suggestions about mobilizing external help (e.g. local government councillors, Members of Parliament, union officials) to ‘loosen central purse strings’. Local contract Contracts with BS had been negotiated centrally by BR with more detailed operational arrangements handled locally. In the course of these operational discussions the local BS management suggested to the FreightCo commercial director that they would be prepared to place an order over and above normal tonnage specified in ‘The Contract’, guaranteed for a period of three years at a premium price to reflect the extra handling equipment required. Otherwise the operation would be under similar terms and conditions as the head office contract. In that the BS purchasing director elected to go directly to the FreightCo commercial director, he prompted a major performative improvisation in the ostensive routine governing commercial relations between BS and BR. Faced by the initial uncertainty and ambiguity of the unfolding commercial relationship with BS and the hazily perceived opportunities on offer, FCET managers’ sensemaking behaviours predominated, although as the opportunities became more transparent these seem to have graduated into more strategic responses. The FreightCo managers welcomed the BS proposal, although they expressed concerns that achieving extra throughput at the depot would be difficult even if the new arrangements to combat water and the resurfaced the roads were in place. The FCET directed the engineering and finance directors to find a route to employ improved handling equipment as soon as possible in order that the additional throughput could be handled. Their proposed solution was a leasing agreement.

Institutional change and strategic agency

Leasing proposal To meet the extension to the BS contract, the FreightCo managers made a further special case to the BR board, as provided for in the Red Book procedures for entering into lease agreements. They proposed back-to-back arrangements for three years with the cost of leasing a crane and other handling equipment set against the extra tonnage guaranteed from BS. The proposal showed a return on funds employed at four times that specified as the minimum in the Red Book and over three times that forecast on recently approved expenditure proposals from other parts of the BR Group. The BR board rejected the scheme as being too expensive, pointing out that ‘contract negotiations’ with BS were the prerogative of BR centrally in the person of the BR director of freight. Clearly the BR board was concerned to maintain the structure of the existing organizational field and their actions in performing the Red Book routine (i.e. refusing approval) prevented FreightCo from reciprocating BS’s advance to shift the routine governing commercial relationships to a local level. At this stage, whilst the FreightCo managers were beginning to make sense of the emerging market template that would structure their relationship with customers, they were unwilling or unable to extricate themselves from the habitual, residual BR public sector template. They were prepared to reciprocate BS’s advances to restructure the routines governing commercial relationships between themselves, but unprepared to abandon the routines governing their relationship with BR head office. FCET were instructed to advise BS locally of the BR board decision. This they did at the next meeting with BS only to be asked to receive a delegation of inspection from BS head office the following week. Over dinner with the FCET, the senior member of this BS delegation expressed his disappointment that the extra throughput would not be forthcoming: Clearly this is a local matter. Without local enterprise it is clear from our inspection and past results that we are already working at the edge of what is practical – maybe we will even have to cut back if the weather is bad or equipment degrades further. There is no possibility of negotiating any central

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modification to ‘The Contract’, I’m afraid, so I shall leave it to your good local relationships to sort this out for the mutual benefit of both parties (Conversation reported by FreightCo Commercial Director)

Here, then, we see a major customer making overtures to FCET to reciprocate and experiment in anticipation of opportunities that are still hazy in the restructuring their organizational field. Short-term lease The FreightCo finance director reported to the next management meeting that he and the engineering director had agreed a way forward. Leases under one year were exempt under the Red Book provisions: they had uncovered a means of experimenting and significantly improvising upon BR formalized routines. Hence, it was possible to have the equipment installed immediately by a contractor. The latter would charge a monthly fee based on extra throughput achieved. The details were approved by the commercial director, the extra tonnage agreed with BS by an ‘operational modification of Local Conditions of Custom & Practice’ in order to avoid any ramifications affecting ‘The Contract’ and a contractor employed to install the necessary equipment speedily. By ignoring the BR board’s directive that all such negotiations should take place centrally and by finding a lacuna in the Red Book procedures so as to enable them to take a local decision to lease equipment without BR head office approval, they improvised a major slippage in the commercial relationship routine between BS and BR. It was experimental behaviour that also gained from the added legitimization of senior BS managers (i.e. ‘meeting customer needs’). The FreightCo managers had shifted from the position of being ‘neutral’ actors being pulled in conflicting directions by the competing institutional templates (Figure 18.1) to actively embracing the emerging market template and paying lip-service to the residual public sector template. In Dorado’s terms the temporal focus of their agency had shifted from the ‘past’ BR template to the ‘present’ emerging market, and their improvisations from being bound by the habitual to more strategic behaviour. In addition

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BS’s attempts to restructure inter-organizational arrangements appeared to convene resources to jump-start FCET’s experimentation in changing the BR institutional template. A postscript During the internal audit carried out for ‘due diligence’ prior to the sale of FreightCo on privatization, the BS agreement and the handling arrangement were examined. It transpired that the contractor had an option to continue the lease for three years or for the period when BS were moving extra tonnage through the FreightCo depot, whichever was the shorter. This was ruled by both the internal and external auditors to be a non-observance of the Red Book regulations. Both the finance and engineering directors of FreightCo were sent home on ‘gardening leave’ whilst the privatization sale was completed. The day after the new owners took control, both were reinstated along with congratulations as to their ‘entrepreneurial spirit’.

Negotiating staff relationships in an evolving organizational field HR audit Prior to the process of privatization, HR was managed centrally. In preparation for splitting BR into separate operating companies the BR personnel director had commissioned consultants to design an HR audit to enable operating companies to survey staff capabilities and expectations as part of preparations for their sale. The FCET enacted the BR procedure for dealing with ‘suggestions’ from BR directors by placing it on the FCET meeting agenda. The ensuing debate resulted in them agreeing to do the survey when time permitted, but with some reluctance given all the other pressures of the first year preparing for vesting and sale. The survey took six months and the analysis three months, resulting in a one-year time span before the results were published. The team had complied with the BR Directors ‘suggestion’ but with an element of improvised delay. HR report The FreightCo personnel director produced a report that was sent to the BR personnel director

at the same time as to the FreightCo board meeting (further evidence of the enduring public sector template). The report’s conclusions revealed a transparent opportunity for a restructuring of FreightCo human resources through considerable simplification and reorganization, better use of resources and for removing lines of demarcation, reducing overstaffing, increasing flexibility and reducing bureaucracy whilst also enhancing the career expectations of staff. During the year it took for the audit results to become available, the FreightCo managers’ temporal orientation seemed to have shifted to the present and future, not least because of their increasing pressure from and involvement with customers, who themselves were exercising choices in staffing. Their own perceived opportunities in this regard were becoming more transparent. The BR personnel director did not respond to the report. However, the FreightCo managers wanted to realize the benefits envisaged in the report by implementing a programme of retraining and redundancy. Since no resources were available and such a programme required negotiation with the unions, currently the prerogative of BR Central personnel department, they approached the BR personnel director for his support. The procedure for influencing BR HR policy was through the personnel advisory group, chaired by the BR personnel director who invited the FreightCo personnel director to present a paper arguing the FCET case to the group. According to the FreightCo personnel director the response to the presentation was ‘the systematic demolition of the paper by members of the advisory group’. The BR personnel director then wrote to the FreightCo MD: ‘Local negotiations on such matters would have grave consequences across the BR Group which must be avoided at all costs in the run up to privatisation’. The FreightCo MD saw this communication as unusual: the BR personnel director would not normally notify in writing because it would not normally have occurred to him that the FreightCo MD would have done anything different. The fact that the FreightCo MD interpreted it as the BR personnel director treating him differently; i.e. accepting that he might do something different, had symbolic significance, in effect flagging the divergence in

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interests and emerging schism between the old and imminent institutional templates. At the FreightCo board meeting the FreightCo managers discussed whether they should reply to the letter and decided not to, agreeing they would not do anything to overtly challenge the BR board.

leveraged by the convening of inter-organizational actors (i.e. the unions) as sensemaking and then strategic behaviours were made possible by more transparent opportunities emerging in the restructured organizational field.

Local negotiations

Reframing customer relationships: strategic agency at work

A few months later national union officials requested of BR head office personnel department that they visit locally with the BR freight businesses. This was agreed on the basis that it was the continuation of meetings previously held centrally to sort out short-term operational matters outside the centrally agreed contractual wages and conditions agreements. Nonetheless, this does appear to be a performative slippage in the established routines governing relations between the unions and BR hitherto. At this meeting with FCET the union officials expressed their willingness to grapple with the local issues of productivity, redeployment and retraining, whilst accepting that some redundancy was a necessity for effective handling of staff career expectations. On the FreightCo MD’s advice the national officials agreed to take this up with the BR personnel department. By now it was year three. The MD had learned to recognize the differential power of strategic actors in shaping the emerging organizational field and consequently the union’s enhanced ability to influence the restructuring of routines in line with the market template. He was encouraging improvisation, in this case by the unions but also in the interest of FreightCo, on the basis of the reciprocal behaviour of the unions. A month later the FreightCo personnel director was able to report that, not only had the previous edict been rescinded, but that an allocation of the central budget for retraining and redundancy was immediately to be made available to FreightCo to enable the implementation of their programme. The intervention of the unions had influenced the BR personnel director to improvise on the established routine for the centralized control of budgets and allocate part to FreightCo. However, BR insisted that conditions of pay and employment continued to be the responsibility of head office until privatization was accomplished. In Dorado’s terms, the resources for jumpstarting these organizational changes had been

A large recently privatized electricity utility had a contract with BR to haul coal from the mines or docks to its power stations. At the end of year two, they informed BR that they could do this themselves, for a proportion of their sites, and proceeded to buy locomotives and employ their own drivers. For this customer the opportunities from their own earlier privatization had evidently become more transparent and they were engaged in strategic behaviour to leverage their resources. BR centrally held the contract, however, and threatened the company with legal proceedings, worsening what were already tense relationships. Customer service contract FreightCo’s commercial director reasoned that health and safety considerations would require extensive training and retraining of the electricity utility’s drivers and other personnel such as wheeltappers and guards. He also anticipated that ebbs and flows of supply would result in peaks where extra quantity would be required at short notice at premium prices to the supplier that had a good relationship and could respond quickly. He therefore negotiated an ‘emergency peak shaving’ contract to haul freight when required at short notice in return for a regular stand-by fee plus an incremental cost based on tonnage actually moved. The latter figure was three times larger than the usual price ‘per tonne’ in the central contract owing to the ‘disturbance’ involved. He also offered to train the customer’s drivers for a commercial training fee, using FreightCo’s training and simulation facilities. By these means on behalf of the FCET he restructured a significant part of the contract negotiation routine between BR and one of its customers. Although this had been a response to the emerging organizational arrangements, FCET had proactively enacted

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slippage in established routines, ignored the BR board and initiated changes in routines in line with an increasingly transparent market template. The customer’s actions had invited the commercial director’s reciprocal experimentation in restructuring their inter-organizational arrangements. The BR personnel director tried to stop the training, but the FreightCo MD persuaded him that it was necessary because of the health and safety risks of having poorly trained train drivers on the track. In so doing he ‘pulled the BR health and safety card’, a core aspect of the BR template. By now FreightCo managers, as strategic actors, were behaving in terms of their perception of increasingly transparent future relationships with powerful customers and using BR norms and routines to enact wholly different market arrangements.

Discussion Our purpose in this chapter has been to explore how, and to what extent, managers adhere to or amend institutionalized routines in a period of institutional change and, in so doing, affect the outcome of such change. We have argued that routines are a useful focus for our analysis for two reasons. First, because routines provide a useful basis for understanding micro-aspects of institutional change. Second, because, whilst they are the fabric of institutional form, managers engage with them on a more quotidian basis and, as such, they also relate to managerial practice. This link between institutional form and routines further highlights that, just as the nature of routines have both the potential for change and for stasis (Feldman 2000, 2004; Feldman and Pentland 2003), so too does the inherent structure of institutions (Sewell 1992) if the rules and norms as manifest in such routines are considered as the fabric of institutionalization. Here we consider how the evidence from the accounts of the episodes extends the theoretical explanation at the beginning of the chapter to help advance the understanding of institutional change in terms of managers’ experimentation with routines. In this endeavour, the model developed at the beginning of the chapter and encapsulated in Figure 18.1, whilst helping the understanding of

micro-processes of institutional change, can be extended by a finer-grained attention to managerial action. In what follows we first acknowledge that our explanation has to take into account the undoubted influence of regulative changes and therefore the relationship between a top-down and bottom-up explanation of institutional change. We then examine more carefully the nature of what we term cumulative experimentation and propose how it takes form in terms of the manipulation of routines. We conclude by relating our findings to the Strategy as Practice research agenda.

Top-down and bottom-up Change We recognize that the institutional change and recreation of the organizational field we examined was substantially because of top-down regulative changes through government action. The overall architecture of this reconfiguration ended up largely as it was intended. However, it was not just powerful actors such as government that played a part. Managers were agents of change in shaping the detail of the eventual institutional forms and the nature of the transition. The interplay between regulative and normative forces was also evident in the privatization of BR. The government rationale and action to restructure the rail system were explicit. They argued that structural change was necessary for the purpose of achieving behavioural, indeed cognitive change. They effected changes in the rules governing the constitution and architecture of the field and thus legitimized the entry of players with different institutional histories and interpretive schemas. The normative influence of the established British Rail culture embedded within the organizational field was also undeniable and took form, not least in the way in which long-standing rail practices persisted and were preserved despite the diminishing role of the BR board, which saw its role as ensuring a conformity to the privatization process by BR companies. We argue, however, that the normative influences and institutional routines of the past came to take on a different role as time progressed; indeed that, as they shifted from the taken-for-granted to the explicit, they came to be

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a basis of the cumulative experimentation initiated by institutional actors.

Cumulative experimentation Dorado’s (2005) explanatory model is useful in terms of both temporality and the role of institutional actors. At first FreightCo’s managers’ temporal orientation was to the past and their behaviour habitual (Dorado’s ‘routine’). Insofar as change occurred, it was through ‘accumulation’. It was as their temporal orientation shifted to the present and then the future that we see them becoming more proactive. As time moved on, opportunities, initially opaque, moved from hazy to more transparent. This went hand in hand with the roles played by institutional actors’ improvisation or experimentation. Change was stimulated through ‘convening’, as strategic actors from different institutional backgrounds began to collaborate in a developing network and ‘leverage’ comes later as the strategic actors, including FreightCo managers, deliberately manipulated institutionalized routines. However, helpful as this patterning is, of itself it tells us little about the nature of the managerial activities within their institutionalized contexts. Moreover, many of the categories of political action described, for example, by Fligstein (1997) were evident in the episodes of change we have described. It is therefore necessary to consider experimental behaviour as political action. What is missing is the explanation of the links between institutional change and political behaviour in terms of institutional routines. Regulative and normative forces may prevail because powerful forces act to ensure they do; but they do not necessarily prevail because of unquestioning conformity to them. They provide the framework within which meaning is constructed and action is taken. Managers as institutional actors may continue – may have to continue for purposes of legitimacy – to act in terms of institutional routines as they have existed. However, those routines may also prevail because managers choose that they should; or may choose to employ such routines for their own purposes of experimentation.

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The distinction between the institutional artefacts – such as the Red Book – and ostensive and performative routines (Pentland and Feldman 2005) is useful here. In our case, examples of performative routines were progressively more improvised as deinstitutionalization proceeded. In terms of institutional artefacts and the ostensive routines associated with them, we see different ways in which individual actors, or groups, engage with them. A pattern emerges in which, initially, strategic actors ‘play within’ established routines, but escalate plays with or outside those routines in response to ‘market’ context (Greenwood and Hinings 1996) until change occurs. An important factor explaining this appears to be whether or not they accept them as given. We argue that there are two dimensions here. The first is whether they take as given the legitimacy of the institution itself: in the case of FreightCo, the extent to which managers took as given the legitimacy of the public sector institutional template within which, in regulative terms, they were supposed to be acting. The second is the extent to which the (ostensive) routines of that institution are raised to consciousness and seen as potentially questionable. These dimensions, whilst related, are not the same. In the first year of our study there was little evidence of the legitimacy of the public sector institution being questioned, and its routines were accepted and responded to. For some time after that, although the FreightCo managers were beginning to question that legitimacy, they adhered to institutional routines. And even when they went further in their experimentation, it was well into the later period of our study before they appeared to question fundamentally the legitimacy of the institution, even when they were quite consciously ‘playing with’ its routines in performative terms. We identify four modes of acting (or playing) on this basis that help explain the cumulative experimentation witnessed in FreightCo (see Figure 18.3) associated with varying levels of agency in Dorado’s terms. The conforming mode accepts the legitimacy of the institution and its routines, as set down or as inherited, and seeks to engage appropriately within this framework. This was exemplified by the behaviour of the FreightCo managers in the first year of privatization. Here compliance is based on

Gerry Johnson, Stuart Smith and Brian Codling Low

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Figure 18.3 Performative modes of improvising old institutional routines

the legitimacy of the regulative or normative institutional frameworks. There may – or may not – be personal acceptance of the ‘rightness’ of such routines, but they are accepted and enacted as part of what is normal or required. The extending mode stretches the boundaries, norms and routines of the institutional framework by introducing extensions or amendments to institutionalized routines, but still within the legitimacy of the established institutional structure. Such extensions, however, depend on taken-for-granted norms and routines becoming explicit, such that they might be seen as open to change. This is likely to be a function of those norms being at least specified and perhaps questioned by strategic actors from other organizational fields. Initially this may take the form of what Dorado (2005, p. 386) refers to as accumulation, where ‘the uncoordinated actions of countless actors probabilistically converge’. However, as the reciprocal behaviour of these actors becomes apparent, experimentation becomes more deliberate. We see this, for example, in the applications for planning permission and the EEC grant, and the FreightCo managers’ apparent encouragement of the unions to intervene with the BR board. In Dorado’s (2005) terms, here leverage is occurring, by which she means that politically skilled actors mobilize support and acceptance.

However, the more such questioning grows, as ‘convening’ in Dorado’s (2005) terms develops across organizational fields, the more the nature of the institutional template and its routines are apprehended, the more it is likely that the legitimacy of both will be questioned. We propose two forms of performative action here: We see strategic actors ‘bending’ rules. Here institutionalized routines may still be employed, either because they are seen as legitimate in themselves or because they are seen to have utility for the purposes or ends of the actors themselves as they question the legitimacy of the institution. We see this clearly in the way FreightCo dealt with the customer service contract, for example, and in their handling of the initial leasing proposal with BR board. Finally, ‘subverting’ is where the strategic actors more or less consciously seek to undermine prevailing institutionalized routines (Goffman 1961; Holm 1995) for the purpose of challenging the legitimacy of the institution itself. The independent establishing of the short-term lease to deal with the freight terminal is an example. In the episodes we reported earlier there appears to be a progression here. Figure 18.3 attempts to capture this but is too neat. The progression from initial conforming, to extending to bending and

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eventual subversion was not linear, but rather tentative and iterative. However, as this occurs we do appear to see an escalation of the awareness of strategic actors of their capacity to exercise influence by so doing, as noted by Fligstein (1997). It is this escalation that we term cumulative experimentation. The above captures the institutionalized nature of strategic actors’ experience, allowing for routines to be taken for granted, or conformed to but also allowing that they may become or be seen as explicit, in this sense objectified, and over which managers as agents may exercise choice. Indeed, central to our argument is that for managers to influence the processes of institutional change, the taken-for-granted nature of institutionalization needs to be rendered explicit and challenged such that the cumulative experimentation we observe may facilitate and promote this. In this sense, for deinstitutionalization to occur, the reverse cognitive processes must exist to those that led to institutionalization in the first place. The process whereby social constructions become objectified into social facts is reversed. Social facts are rendered visible to strategic actors so that they can be challenged, changed or overthrown, and thereby the process of change is open to influence and agency and the context to social reconstruction. The taxonomy in our model helps articulate how this occurs. To use the metaphor of a game, it is only through the institutional template being seen as ‘a game’ rather than ‘the game’ that alternatives become accessible. Ability to succeed in challenging or resisting existing institutional forces, as Oliver (1991) argues, will be affected by their associated resource dependencies; however, willingness to influence them is dependent on them being experienced as open to question. Our model shows how this might happen.

Conclusion This chapter has taken up a dual challenge. First, that posed by Johnson et al. (2007) to explore links between what managers do in practice and institutional effects and their outcomes. Second, that posed by a number of institutional theorists,

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to explore the micro-processes of deinstitutionalization. To do so it has utilized previous theoretical contributions to the debate on institutional change to build a theoretical model and examine the explanatory power of that model in relation to a process of deinstitutionalization within the rail system of the UK. That study has not only shown the explanatory power of that model, but has allowed a finer-grained explanation of the part played by the bottom-up enactment of institutional change. In particular, it has shown how slippage from a dominant institutional template takes form in increasingly agentic ‘cumulative experimentation’ by managers. Further, it shows that this experimentation with routines is not random but may be dependent on a number of key factors. These include the shifting of temporal orientation from past to future, thereby raising to consciousness a duality of institutional templates, the exposure of strategic actors to alternative templates through interacting with other organizational fields, and their experiencing of reciprocal behaviour to their experimentation. Further, it has shown that such experimentation is likely to take form in the extending, bending and subverting of institutional routines again dependent on those factors. Indeed, such routines become centrally important in explaining institutional change. We have shown how the mutability of routines embedded in institutions can, as Feldman argues, be both the basis of conformity and the source of change. In the context of institutional theory, this is of some interest. Institutional routines are typically considered as forces for conformity, legitimacy and isomorphism. In line with Feldman’s (2000, 2004) arguments, here we also see them as offering the potential for change. They are the basis upon which experimentation may occur and provide a basis upon which processes of institutional change can be considered, conceptualized and observed. We further argue that this manipulation of routines is not random. Rather it is influenced by the strategic actors’ contact and involvement with other organizational fields and the extent to which they are opaque, hazy or transparent (Dorado 2005). However, we are able to go further to show just how this occurs. We show that, initially, such contacts are tentative and may give rise to no more

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than the questioning of the efficacy of routines or the legitimacy of the institutional template. We also show, however, that as time progresses, contact with other fields increases and the inevitability of the exogenous shock becomes more immediate, there is a hardening acceptance of an alternative template and a consequent increasing questioning and eventual subversion of existing ostensive routines.

Implications for Strategy as Practice A central concern of Strategy as Practice research is to explain the links between what people do as they strategize and the outcomes of their strategizing activities (Johnson et al. 2003, 2007). Typically, this may be at an organization level examining the links between strategizing and organizational processes or organizational strategies. However, here our concern has been the effects on institutional forms and the wider organizational field. In so doing the research flags up a number of implications for those interested in Strategy as Practice. First, for the researcher, if the aim is to look at the effects of strategizing, then there is a need to go beyond the consideration of how to collect and examine data on the activities of strategizing. There is also the need to trace through the implications of those activities. This highlights the importance of selecting a research context in which it is possible to identify such effects at organizational or institutional levels. It also highlights the likelihood that such observation needs to be longitudinal in nature. It may well take time for such effects to take form. Whilst we are aware of the limitations of our research, we hope that it illustrates these lessons for researchers. Whilst it is a case study of relatively limited scope, nonetheless the context of the research had significant benefits in seeking to provide insights into a practice perspective on institutional change. It was clearly a context of major institutional change. We were also able to observe the activities of managers as strategic actors and trace their effect on organizational and institutional routines in the context of top-down institutional change over time. Nonetheless, in relation to the

Strategy as Practice agenda, we also acknowledge that still finer-grained understanding of the processes we observe would be valuable. Here, we are conscious that our focus has been on the managers’ experimentation with routines. In this sense such experimentation is reported as ‘outcome’. It would be valuable to go further and explore more specifically just how such experimentation might be triggered and enacted in the drama of organizational life that plays out in organizations. There are also implications here for the practitioner, which in turn may further inform Strategy as Practice research agendas. Certainly our findings support those who argue for the significance of an upward influence on strategic outcomes (Balogun and Johnson 2005; Floyd and Wooldridge 1996). It also points to what amounts to a political agenda for the practice of strategy. It suggests ways in which substantial influence may be accomplished by: (a) recognizing and critically appraising the origins of what generally may be taken-for-granted routines; (b) pushing the boundaries of those routines – here we described this as extending, bending and subverting; and (c) building alliances of influential stakeholders in so doing. In the face of highly institutionalized pressures for conformity, the chances of managers as strategic actors making a difference may, then, critically depend on their ability to raise to consciousness that which is normally taken for granted, and their preparedness to exert the political influence that they have at their disposal in the form of organizational routines. REFERENCES Abelson, R. P. (1981) ‘Psychological status of the script concept’. American Psychologist 36(7): 715–729. Bacharach, S. B., P. Bamberger and W. J. Sonnenstuhl (1996) ‘The organizational transformation process: The micro politics of dissonance reduction and the alignment of logics of action’. Administrative Science Quarterly 41: 477–506. Balogun, J. and G. Johnson (2005) ‘From intended strategies to unintended outcomes: The impact of change recipient sensemaking’. Organizational Studies 26(11): 1573–1601.

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CHAPTER

19

Unpacking the effectivity paradox of strategy workshops: do strategy workshops produce strategic change? RO BE RT MAC IN TO SH , D ONALD MACLEAN and DAV ID SE ID L

Introduction The recent turn of strategy research towards practice-based theorizing (Balogun et al. 2007; Johnson et al. 2003, 2007; Whittington 1996, 2006) has increased interest in the everyday micro-activities of strategy practitioners. Strategy, it is argued, is better conceptualized as something people do rather than something that firms in their markets have. The interest in what managers actually do has a long tradition in the field of strategy process, starting with the seminal studies of Mintzberg (1973). Yet, in contrast to earlier research on organizational practices (Dalton 1959; Kotter 1982; Mintzberg, 1973), which emphasized the informal side of managerial work, the Strategy as Practice approach – whilst acknowledging the importance of emergence – calls for a reappreciation of the role of formal strategic practices. As Whittington (2003, p. 118) argued, formal practices deserve our particular attention for two reasons: not only are they pervasive phenomena in organizational life – a large part of organizational activity is in some way concerned with formal practices – but they also inflict considerable costs on the respective organizations. Responding to such calls, several researchers have looked into the organizational effects of various formal practices such as different administrative routines (Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002) or strategy meetings (Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008), discussing their role in organizational strategizing. More recently, attention has begun to centre on the role of strategy workshops as a particular

formal strategic practice. Strategy workshops can be defined as specific events which take place outside the normal schedule of business meetings in an organization and which focus explicitly on strategy. A survey of 1300 UK managers established that strategy workshops were a common occurrence in modern organizational life (Hodgkinson et al. 2006). The survey indicated that some 90 percent of such workshops last two days or less and that 73 percent take place away from the organization’s premises. Hendry and Seidl (2003) argued that the separation between workshop activity and the usual day-to-day activities enables the participants to step out of their established routines and mindsets in order to reflect critically on the organization’s strategic orientations. Various studies have drawn on Doz and Prahalad’s observation that organizational transformation ‘usually requires stepping out of the existing management process – since these processes are set to sustain the “old” cognitive perspective’ (1987, p. 75) to develop the view that strategy workshops enable strategic change. This has fuelled interest in how participants experience such workshops (e.g. Schwarz and Balogun 2007). Bourque and Johnson view strategy workshops as highly ritualistic (2007), and others have argued that strategy workshops do not always have positive outcomes (Hodgkinson and Wright 2002) or that they are virtually meaningless (Mintzberg 1994, p. 108). Johnson and colleagues (Bourque and Johnson 2007; Johnson et al. 2006) explain the perceived effectiveness of strategy workshops by what might be termed the effectivity paradox 291

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of strategy workshops, since they argue that ‘the very separation and anti-structure that [strategy workshops] foster may hinder the transfer of ideas and plans back to the everyday work situation’ (Johnson et al. 2006, p. 27, emphasis added). In one sense then, strategy workshops might actually inhibit strategic change. Johnson and his colleagues use a vignette of a single strategy workshop to illustrate the point that, despite the explicit intention to follow through the actions agreed at an off-site strategy workshop, in fact little happened after the workshop. This finding, however, is in contrast to the results of a study by Schwarz and Balogun (2007), who reported on workshops that had substantial effects on the strategic directions of the organizations involved. Thus, it appears that some strategy workshops get around the effectivity paradox. A potential explanation for this difference emerges from a closer examination of these two studies. While Johnson and his colleagues refer to one-off workshops, the study by Balogun and Schwarz involves series of workshops. Nevertheless, no systematic analysis of the differences in outcomes between one-off workshops and sets of workshops has been conducted as yet. Against this background, the present study aims to explore the effectivity paradox in different workshop settings. We address the following research questions: Do strategy workshops that are explicitly set up to bring about strategic change actually fulfil that goal? If so, under what circumstances? Also, are the differences between ‘one-off’ and ‘serial’ workshops posited above, borne out by empirical results? The chapter has three sections. In the first section, we explain the empirical research design and method of analysis. In the next section we present our empirical findings, distinguishing three groups of organizations: first, organizations in which the strategy workshops have led to lasting strategic change, second, those in which they had only a transient effect, and third, those in which they have led to no (or hardly any) effect. Comparing the data, we identify critical aspects of workshop design and practice. In the final section we will discuss our findings and their contribution to the field of Strategy as Practice.

Research design and method of analysis The empirical material discussed in this chapter was collected as part of a research programme that involved a network of firms operating in the UK. The research draws on a study of ninety-nine strategy workshops conducted by a total of ten organizations over a five-year period. In all of those cases, the express intention of the workshops was to effect some significant and lasting change in the organization’s existing strategy in terms of observable phenomena such as the nature of the products or services offered, the segments or customers targeted, the mission and scope of the organization, the managerial structures and processes used in the organization, etc. The first and second authors of this chapter acted both as facilitators and action researchers in these workshops. The organizations that participated in the research were drawn from a range of small and larger private sector firms and a variety of public sector organizations. Some of the larger multinational organizations were not UK-based. In those cases our research was conducted with UK-based subsidiaries. All of the smaller private sector firms and the public sector organizations were UK-based. A research network, which included senior managers from each organization, was set up as a backdrop to the strategy workshops for those organizations that took part. It was arranged that members of the network would meet bi-monthly to share experiences and discuss findings from the research, as they became available. Our study was longitudinal since the network ran over a five-year period. Over that period, strategic change processes varied from changes in ownership, to mergers and re-engineering projects. Tables 19.1 and 19.2 provide an overview of the ten organizations, the workshops conducted and contextual factors which affected the processes of strategic change. Given our focus on strategy workshops and their effectiveness, we chose to adopt a research design which drew both on more traditional scientific approaches, labelled ‘Mode 1’, and more engaged research approaches, labelled ‘Mode 2’ (Gibbons et al. 1994; MacLean et al. 2002; Nowotny et al. 2001; Tranfield and Starkey 1998).

Unpacking the effectivity paradox of strategy workshops

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Table 19.1 Background data on each organization Organization

Case overview

Contextual factors

Baker A

A family owned firm, Baker A had operated successfully for most of its eighty-year history. However, recent trends in the market had led to a decline in sales as customers began to shop in large supermarkets (which Baker A did not supply) instead of small local shops (which were Baker A’s primary distribution channel). The firm recorded a substantial financial loss for the first time, and as a result pursued a change programme to reduce costs, introduce new products and penetrate new markets. This change process occurred over an eighteen-month period.

The gradual changes in consumer behaviour were accentuated by the BSE crisis in the UK. This had the effect of destroying demand for meat-based products which, at the time, represented 40% of the company’s turnover.

Univ Serv E

This large, non-academic unit in the administration of a long-established UK university sought to transform its working practices when informed that its services might be under consideration for open tendering in the near future. Being responsible for the maintenance of the university’s estate, the organization employed several hundred staff, ranging from cleaners to architects and chartered surveyors. The process extended over thirty months.

Potential outsourcing of services, as part of a value-for-money drive in the public sector in general and in the university’s senior management team in particular.

Health Org B

Provided a form of quality assurance service to the rest of the National Health Service in Scotland. A small core team of staff was augmented by a much larger group of reviewers and a specific range of health services were audited on a rolling basis. During an audit, one member of the core staff would work with a team drawn from the group of reviewers and this audit team would visit a particular site for a one-week period. Health Org B felt the need to transform the way it operated in the light of the changes in its operating environment. This process extended over twelve months.

The need for reform was prompted by changes in the political system (as a new Scottish parliament was established) and the fact that a new health inspectorate was set up, which covered a far broader range of health services.

Sign Up

A small independent manufacturer based in the UK and selling signage exclusively to the local market. The owner and founder of the business was approaching retirement and wanted to hand the business over to his employees. Recent attempts to professionalize the sales force had proved somewhat difficult and the firm recognized the need to tackle potential markets beyond its immediate geographical territory. The process lasted three months.

An impending change of ownership, prompted by the decision of the owner and managing director to retire.

Gas Works

An SME that manufactured testing equipment for the gas industry wanted to expand its current activities, growing in both size and scope. The incumbent management team felt that the business was being stifled by a relatively dormant layer of middle managers. The intention of the programme was to adopt a proactive and participative approach to the management of the firm, so as to increase its capacity to tackle new products, technologies and markets. The workshops ran over a three-month period.

Dissatisfaction with a relatively stagnant market position, despite the absence of real commercial or financial pressures to change.

Engineer Co

Engineer Co is a UK-based subsidiary of a US engineering firm that manufactures complex products for the energy industry. Originally an independent company founded in the nineteenth century, it was now under increasing pressure from its US parent to improve performance in financial terms or run the risk of disposal and possible closure. A new MD was appointed and he instigated a change programme that ran over a period of twenty-four months and was aimed at restructuring the business and restoring profitability.

Trading difficulties had been exacerbated by exchange rates, which effected the firm’s competitiveness in export markets. The key trigger, however, was the appointment of a new MD.

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Table 19.1 (cont.) Organization

Case overview

Contextual factors

Eng Consult

A small, independent group of highly qualified structural engineers who offered consultancy services to major clients in the construction of large-scale infrastructure such as bridges, dams, etc. The firm had been the subject of a management buy-out when the founder reached retirement age. Now, a few years into the new ownership of the firm, the management team felt a strong desire to develop new markets as well as change the culture of the business. The process lasted fourteen months.

A recognition that the head office (in London) was not financially viable unless it attracted major new business or reduced costs, or both. At the time of the study, losses in the London office were being offset by profits from overseas activities.

CommuniCo

This study took place within the UK division of a global IT services organization which employed over 100,000 staff worldwide and had an annual turnover of $15 billion. Several years of rapid expansion had come to an end, and as the business stabilized there was increasing pressure to reduce costs in order to maintain the kind of margins that shareholders had come to expect. The change process studied related to the development of new ways of delivering a key-service contract. The new contract was to be arranged on a rolling basis, valid for three years but revised every year. Two workshops took place over a three-month period.

The driver for this change process was a corporate plan to improve productivity and profitability. This was generated by the ‘head office’ and operationalized by the various divisions.

Electronix A

Electronix A supply a variety of components for use in a range of electronic devices. This US-based organization had decided to establish a manufacturing plant to service the European mobile phone industry. The change process studied here concerned the establishment of a new manufacturing facility. A single workshop was held, which lasted for one-and-a-half days.

Whilst the initial trigger for change was external (i.e. the decision by the parent company to establish a new site), ongoing changes, once the plant was opened, were driven internally.

Pharma Co

A sales organization which sold and distributed pharmaceutical products to the health sector in the UK. The head of the sales operation wanted to see a far more dynamic approach to market development. The intention was to transform the culture of the organization. A single workshop was held over two days.

Relatively poor performance in comparison to key competitors who were now actively targeting markets and customers of Pharma Co.

Such combinations have variously been suggested in order to counterbalance the limitations of each individual approach (Huff 2000; Huff and Huff 2001). Applying Mode 1, we followed an approach based on the multiple-case method used by Brown and Eisenhardt (1997), which derived from Yin’s earlier work (1984). Each of the ten organizations considered here was treated independently and a narrative account (Tsoukas and Hatch 2001) was prepared for each, describing both the organizational change(s) and the strategy workshop(s) that had been conducted within the organization. This formal research process might be described as ‘research on’ practice and, given the key role played by the academic researchers, is closer to Mode 1 than Mode 2. However, each of these narrative

accounts was subsequently shared within the wider network of firms participating in the study (subject to confidentiality agreements drafted to protect any commercial or other sensitivities). This meant that the study incorporated a high degree of reflexivity (Alvesson 2003) because researchers and managers from other firms could comment critically on each of those accounts of strategic change and workshop experience. This resulted in the reflexive and iterative development of the narrative accounts and a deeper, more theoretically informed examination of the cases to which they referred. To complement Mode 1, we conducted additional research, applying the more highly engaged Mode 2 which we might describe as ‘research with’ practice. Since Boje (1991) observes that context is essential for interpreting narratives that occur in

Whole

Part

Whole

Whole

Part

Whole

Whole

Part

Whole

Part

Univ Serv E

HealthOrg B

Sign Up

Gas Works

Engineer Co

Eng Consult

CommuniCo

Electronix A

Pharma Co

Whole/part of organization?

Baker A

Organization

Single workshop

Single workshop

Initial workshop with follow-up workshop

Three-day workshop plus two shorter workshops

Annual two-day workshops plus intermittent shorter workshops

Weekly, then fortnightly workshops

Weekly, then fortnightly workshops

Six-weekly workshops

Monthly workshops

Monthly, then fortnightly workshops

Strategy workshops

Table 19.2 Overview of data set

Off-site

Off-site

Off-site launch, then on-site follow-up

Off-site launch, then on-site

Two off-site workshops, followed by on-site workshops

Off-site launch, then on-site

Off-site launch, then on-site

Off-site launch, followed by alternating pattern of on- then off-site

Off-site

Off-site launch, then on-site

Location(s)

1

1

2

3

4

6

7

9

32

34

Number of workshops

Two days

One-and-a-half days

Two days (off-site), three hours (on-site)

Three days (off-site), half-day (on-site)

Two-and-a-half days (off-site), one day (on site)

One day (first workshop), then two hours

One day (first workshop), then two hours

Two days (first workshop) then half-day workshops

Typically three hours

Ranged from three days (off-site) to two hours (on-site)

Typical duration of workshops

2 days

1.5 days

3

14

24

3

3

12

30

18

Elapsed duration (number of months)

Senior management team

Directors and senior managers

Senior management team

Owners–directors

Directors plus change team (made up of middle managers) from month twelve

Middle managers

Owner–director plus all organization staff (total of nine)

Senior management team

Senior management team plus union representative(s) from month five

Owners–directors plus management team

Participants

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organizational settings we believed our research needed to afford us the opportunity to participate in the organizational setting in order that we might contextualize the narratives we were examining. We were sympathetic to Hill et al.’s call for an increase in the use of research modes that require ‘closeness to, even involvement with, the objects of study’ (1999, p. 144). In our research of the ten organizations studied, two of the authors also played an active role as contributors by leading the strategy workshops that we were studying. This is a form of action research that raises a familiar debate about the relative advantages and disadvantages of such a dual role. Some question whether the access and insight gained comes at the cost of increased potential for bias and non-generalizability. Action research has a long history in the field of management studies (see Reason and Bradbury 2001). Eden and Huxham, however (1996, p. 78), report that it can be difficult for action-oriented approaches to become accepted by researchers on the grounds that they are ‘not science’. At the same time, one might argue that recurring criticisms of management research as ‘irrelevant’ (e.g. Susman and Evered 1978) can be attributed to a reliance on traditional scientific methods, which are based on maintaining an objective distance from the research subject. In view of the above, our ‘combined’ approach is an attempt to respond to both sets of criticism by incorporating, at least to some degree, the ‘best of both worlds’. The data presented in this chapter is drawn from ten sets of strategy workshops conducted with ten separate organizations over a five-year period. These workshops ranged from one-off events (with Pharma Co and Electronix A) to a series of workshops that ran for thirty months (with Univ Serv E). In total, the study examined ninety-nine workshops. The duration of the individual workshops ranged from two hours to three days. In those organizations where workshops involved more than one meeting, we introduce the term ‘elapsed duration’ to denote the total length of time between the first and the final workshops in the series. In all ten cases we interviewed a minimum of three managers from each organization. In most cases we interviewed the entire management team and in two cases all members of the organization.

That is to say that, in addition to the study of ninety-nine strategy workshops, we conducted a total of sixty-three individual interviews during the study. Our direct involvement in both the research and the strategy development processes within these ten organizations also afforded us the opportunity to collect a wide range of other primary data, as well as secondary data, in the form of company documents, reports, minutes, field notes, flip-chart records produced during the workshops, etc., and to attend key management meetings (i.e. regular meetings held as part of the ongoing operation of an organization). Just as importantly, our use of an engaged form of research gave us and our co-researchers a shared sense of the narrative backdrop which renders the interpretation of data meaningful in ways which would not be possible from an external perspective. We believed that the combined effect of our research activities allowed us to develop a level of familiarity with the organizations concerned and that this would not have occurred using exclusively Mode 1 approaches. Given the longitudinal nature of the study, data analysis was an ongoing process that was led by the academic researchers but also involved the practitioners in the network at every stage. The procedure was consistent with that set out by Eisenhardt (1989), in that the construction of the individual narrative accounts initiated the within-case analysis. The focus of this within-case analysis was to establish the nature of the strategy workshops that had taken place. As each new narrative account became available for circulation amongst network members, cross-case analysis began to occur and this involved all network members. Once the first few cases were in circulation it was possible to pair cases, compare them and generate insights which were in turn refined as new narratives became available. Each new narrative was dissected and compared to other similar and dissimilar cases already in circulation. The focus of the cross-case analysis was to establish whether strategic change was currently taking place or had been effected in each of the ten participating organizations. The presence of managers from each of those organizations during that time was invaluable, bringing richness, depth, genuine reflexivity and new insights to the process

Unpacking the effectivity paradox of strategy workshops

of theory development. In many ways this was far more helpful than engaging other researchers to cross-check and validate our findings. Obviously, in a chapter of this scope, there is a limit to the qualitative detail we can present for each case. However, fuller reports can be found elsewhere (interested readers can refer, for example, to MacIntosh and MacLean (1999) or MacLean et al. 2002 for more detailed individual accounts, and to MacLean and MacIntosh 2002 for a more detailed account of the research network from which the cases were drawn.

Research results: critical aspects of workshop activities In our analysis of the ten cases we first considered the extent to which the workshops had been ‘successful’ in terms of initiating strategic change. To that end, we asked each host organization to define ‘success’ at the outset. Those statements provided a comparatively clear set of criteria, which we subsequently asked the organizations to use in evaluating the effectiveness of the strategy workshops. Such criteria ranged from processual observations (e.g. more participative decision-making in Health Org B), to specific performance improvements (e.g. increase productivity by 25 percent in Baker A), to organizational issues (e.g. a change in ownership in Sign Up). Many organizations set more than one stated objective before they began their change process. For instance, Health Org B hoped to introduce new areas of activity to its portfolio, as well as more participative behaviour at senior levels. In our review of the data we focused on four characteristics of the self-reported outcomes, which are presented in Table 19.3. First, we considered the elapsed duration, which we defined as the elapsed time between the beginning of the first workshop and the end of the final workshop. Elapsed duration ranged from one-and-a-half days for the single workshop held with Electronix A, to thirty months in the case of the series of workshops held with Univ Serv E. The values of elapsed duration have been grouped in the categories long, medium and short. Second, where more than one workshop was

297

arranged by the same organization, we noted the frequency of each workshop. This frequency was described as high when the intervals between sessions spanned no more than four weeks. Moderate frequency indicates that sessions took place every five to nine weeks, whilst low frequency indicates that ten or more weeks passed between consecutive sessions. Third, we took into account the organizational scope of the workshops. The aim of some of the workshops was to achieve change in one part of the organization (as in the case of Univ Serv E), whilst others were aimed at inducing change in the organization as a whole. Furthermore, while some workshops featured high levels of autonomy (e.g. in the case of Sign Up) the autonomy of others has been described as lower because strategic decisions made in the course of the workshop had to be ratified or negotiated elsewhere (as was the case with Gas Works). Finally, we considered the participants in the workshop(s). As stated in Table 19.2, these were typically the directors and senior managers of the organizations concerned, and occasionally middle managers (e.g. Gas Works). In Table 19.3 we have distinguished between high and low levels of seniority according to whether senior managers were or were not involved in the workshops. The descriptive categories of participants, organizational scope, autonomy of the workshops, frequency of the workshops, and elapsed duration between sessions offered a set of dimensions on the basis of which it was possible to compare cases and correlate workshop characteristics with selfreported outcomes. Referring to the criteria set out by the organizations, only three of the ten cases produced outcomes which satisfied the initial objectives of the workshop(s). In terms of successful self-reported outcomes, the shortest elapsed duration of a workshop that achieved strategic change was twelve months (in the case of Health Org B). In all cases, the frequency of the meetings never fell below what we have defined as ‘moderate’ level (e.g. Health Org B met every six weeks). In terms of the scope and autonomy of the organization or unit concerned, successful outcomes were achieved both in the cases of entire organizations (e.g. Baker A) and of parts of organizations (e.g. Univ Serv E), but in all successful cases the level of autonomy was

Baker A

Univ Serv E

Health Org B

Sign Up

Engineer Co

Eng Consult

CommuniCo

Gas Works

Electronix A

Pharma Co

1

1

2

2

2

2

3

3

3

Organization

1

Group

Short

Short

Medium

Medium

Long

Long

Medium

Long

Long

Long

Elapsed duration

Single workshop

Single workshop

High

Moderate

Low

Low

High

Moderate

High

High

Workshop frequency

Part of organization and moderate levels of autonomy

Whole organization and high levels of autonomy

Part of organization and low levels of autonomy

Part of organization but high levels of autonomy

Whole organization and high levels of autonomy

Whole organization but moderate autonomy

Whole organization and high levels of autonomy

Whole organization with only minor restrictions to levels of autonomy

Part of organization but high levels of autonomy

Whole organization and high levels of autonomy

Scope and autonomy of unit concerned

Table 19.3 Critical aspects of workshop activity and self-reported outcomes

High

High

Low

High

High

Only initially high

High

High

High

High

Seniority of participants

Failed to achieve stated aims

Failed to achieve stated aims

Failed to achieve stated aims

Some initial change but failure to achieve stated aims

Some initial change but failure to achieve stated aims

Significant early success but eventually reverted to former pattern

Some initial change but failure to achieve stated aims

Strategic change achieved

Strategic change achieved

Strategic change achieved

Self-reported outcome

Unpacking the effectivity paradox of strategy workshops

high. Univ Serv E, for example, managed to effect strategic change within its own domain but the unit concerned was only one part of a larger organizational system that did not participate as a whole in the change process. However, the divisional management team that participated in the workshops held with Univ Serv E had high levels of autonomy, which meant that those concerned could set their own strategy with reasonable degrees of freedom. Although there was support and enthusiasm for the change process in the wider university, this did not translate into active interest in, or control over, the changes that took place with Univ Serv E. Perhaps those high levels of autonomy are attributable to the fact that the division in question offered specialist building and maintenances services that required particular skills and did not overlap with the rest of the organization in terms of content. Similarly, Health Org B was an autonomous unit set within a broader network of related but distinct organizations in the NHS. Considering the ten cases in the light of our data, we can begin to build tentative explanations for the success or failure (in terms of effecting desired change) of strategy workshops. First, our data suggests that a series of workshops is more likely to succeed than a one-off event. Echoing the findings of Johnson and his colleagues (2006), our results show that one-off workshops did not produce strategic change. On the basis of the three cases where the participants reported achieving the desired change, one could argue that there is a correlation between success and elapsed duration of workshop activity: each of the three successful workshops lasted at least twelve months. Other cases in our data, however, indicate that elapsed duration may be a necessary but insufficient condition for success. Eng Consult and Engineer Co ran workshops that lasted fourteen and twenty-four months respectively but did not achieve the desired outcomes. In both cases, early successes (the development of new services at Eng Consult and restructuring of the business in Engineer Co) did not produce the desired strategic outcomes in the longer term. Neither of the organizations which ran one-off workshops (Electronix A and Pharma Co) reported successful outcomes.

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Similarly, the frequency of workshops seems to be significant. Our data show that none of the organizations with a low frequency of meetings achieved a successful outcome. Moreover, cases where more than ten weeks elapsed between sessions proved problematic. Those involved in lowfrequency workshops reported that each of the workshops was individually successful and that the respective organization ‘remained committed to making the process work’ (according to the director of Eng Consult). Yet continuity and follow-through seemed more difficult in those cases and the self-reported outcomes indicated a failure to achieve the initially stated objectives. In an interview about the workshops conducted with Engineer Co, one business unit director commented ‘I like the workshops. But we seem to spend most of our time figuring out why we were so excited last time we were working on this stuff [the workshop agenda], then a bit more time figuring out why things haven’t moved on, then finish off the day fixing a date in the middle distance again’. Combining frequency of meetings and elapsed duration gives an indication of the total amount of workshop activity (see Table 19.2). Baker A and Univ Serv E both combined high-frequency workshops with a programme of long duration. However, comparing workshops held in Health Org B with those in Sign Up reveals a more subtle dynamic. Both involved similar numbers of participants per workshop (eight in Health Org B and seven in Sign Up) and a similar number of workshops (nine and seven respectively). Thus, Health Org B and Sign Up had roughly equivalent numbers of people involved in similar numbers of workshops for the same total length of time. Sign Up’s failure to achieve strategic change might be attributed to the fact that the workshops ‘came too thick and fast’ (according to a sales manager with Sign Up). Within Sign Up there was real time pressure to achieve a change in ownership of the firm because the incumbent owner–director was keen ‘to conclude a deal by summer time’ (according to the MD of Sign Up). The project took place in April and the resulting compression of the sequence of workshops, compared to Health Org B, appears to have been counter-productive.

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The seniority of the participants in the process also appeared to have some effect on the outcome. The labels senior manager, director or senior management team can mean different things in different industries or in different countries. In Table 19.2 we have used the terminology that the organizations themselves used to describe those who participated in the strategy workshops. In most cases, participants were described as ‘senior managers’ or ‘directors’ and this appeared to mean that these were the most senior staff in hierarchical terms. However, the board of directors in a private sector firm such as Engineer Co was equivalent to the senior management team of a public sector organization such as Univ Serv E where the label ‘director’ was less common. Those who sent middle managers (i.e. somewhere between first-line supervision and directors or senior managers) to the workshops did not achieve successful outcomes, perhaps because it is not easy for middle managers to execute actions which were agreed in the course of workshops. Our data corresponds to that of Hodgkinson et al. (2006) in that only a minority of the workshops we studied involved middle managers. Univ Serv E, which involved more junior staff and union representatives, achieved its objectives but these participants were introduced as the workshops progressed and were not involved at the outset. The ten cases described here can be grouped into three sets with positive (Baker A, Univ Serv E, Health Org B), transient (Sign Up, Engineer Co, Eng Consult, CommuniCo) and negative (Gas Works, Electronix A, Pharma Co) self-reported outcomes. We shall now consider in more detail examples from each of these groups in order to enhance our understanding of the ways in which the descriptive characteristics of the workshops (e.g. nature of the participants, frequency, etc.) affected the contents and consequences of the workshops.

Exploring successful workshops Of the successful cases, i.e. those where the workshops were followed by strategic change in line with the original aims, we will examine Baker A, a family-owned business that faced difficult trading

circumstances for the first time in its eighty-year history. The owners–directors of the business approached us with a request to help effect a culture change within the organization. The initial aspiration of the programme was framed as ‘creating a learning organization […] where some of our managers actually begin to manage instead of the four of us [the four owners–directors ] having to do everything […] and where we begin to see some new products and new markets being developed – because it’s pretty clear that our traditional markets won’t sustain us’ (the MD of Baker A). Initially, Baker A did not specifically request a strategy workshop; the idea of a workshop developed during early diagnostic conversations held with the organization. Similarly, the idea of running a series of workshops was only framed during the first, off-site, workshop. In fact, the workshops took place in three distinct phases and the design for each phase was specified as the previous phase drew to a close. The first phase of the process centred on a three-day, off-site workshop attended by the four owners–directors, and focused on reviewing the espoused strategy of the firm, the motivations and ambitions of its four owners–directors and the stated ambition to transform the firm into a learning organization. This led to phase two, which consisted of a series of three workshops that involved the whole management team and which mimicked what was seen to have been a successful workshop format in phase one with the directors. During this second phase, three project teams were established to deal with three related but distinct tasks: restructuring the firm, improving productivity and developing new products and markets. Also, during the second phase, third parties provided additional input on topics specified by the workshop participants (for example, the product development team expressed the desire to ‘know more about marketing’, so we arranged for a seminar on marketing techniques for that team). Thus, the content of the workshops was not prescribed and fixed at the outset. Instead, the need to cover certain themes emerged in the course of the workshops, and expert input was accordingly sourced to meet those needs. In the third phase, the entire management team of Baker A (a total of eighteen staff members)

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was divided amongst the three project teams and each project team was led by one of the ownerdirectors. Each project team then held regular workshop sessions outside scheduled business meetings. These sessions were minuted and produced action points that provided a highly visible accountability framework. The managing director oversaw the progress of all three project teams and, in particular, monitored progress towards the specific targets each had developed. It is perhaps worth pausing at this stage to consider the significance of the accountability framework mentioned above. Minutes of meetings, including agreed actions, were posted on a public notice board in order to keep the whole of the company’s staff up-to-date with the project’s progress. Every workshop started with a review of developments that were compared to previously agreed actions and a discussion of unexpected developments that had occurred in the interim. This was followed by some reflection on what could be learned from such events. At the outset we were prominent in ensuring that this practice was adhered to and promoted by the directors – particularly to ensure that the directors themselves completed actions agreed in the previous session and taking them to task if this wasn’t the case. Gradually, responsibility for this practice migrated to the team members with the aid of ‘ground rules’ that they had developed to ‘keep them learning’ (the quotes are from the members of teams at Baker A). The key point here is that the workshops had to be linked with day-to-day practices in the organization and were planned with this specific aim in mind. For example, one of the teams held workshops relating to the theme of production improvements and the outcomes of these strategy workshops were fed back into regular weekly production meetings within the business. Thus it was possible to link the strategy workshops to the ongoing conduct of business through actions that were agreed in the workshop setting and communicated to the wider business setting. An action-theoretic perspective would point out that there is only one organization. Hendry and Seidl describe ‘strategic episodes’ (2003) as self-contained, but this example gives some insight into the relationship between

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an episode and the day-to-day conduct of members of the wider organization. In many ways there should be nothing surprising about the above practices; they may well be regarded as common sense or sound project management. What might be significant, however, is that they draw attention to the fact that the successful workshops were embedded in a strategic-development project that was managed as a series of interlinked activities combining workshops, normal business and strategic development. This was also the case in the other two projects that delivered results in accordance with the initial aim: in both Healthcare Org B and University Serv E, workshops started with a review of actions and unexpected changes that had occurred since the last session, with a view to ‘keeping things on track’ (quote from a director of Univ Serv E) and learning from experience. This is in stark contrast to the somewhat more confusing experience reported earlier by the director from Engineer Co, where the workshops were held six or twelve months apart and the lack of continuity was reported as a key blocker by the majority of the workshop participants. In all three cases where the self-reported outcomes were positive, the workshops were a means to an end in a high-profile transformation project; they were not an end in themselves. The broader project provided both a context and a mechanism for ensuring that the workshops were linked to business operations. The workshops themselves had an informal atmosphere and, partly because of the longitudinal nature of our research project, in each case we developed strong ties both with the business and with the individuals concerned. A recurrent difficulty in Baker A was that the MD would intervene on the shop floor when it came to operational issues and at one point we convinced him to get his work clothes embroidered with the legend ‘I shouldn’t be here’, so that colleagues could remind him of his commitment to allow his managers to manage. This too demonstrated a senior level commitment to enact in the workplace practices that were agreed in the workshops; in this case, the content of the workshops or strategic episodes were transferred to the wider organization via the MD’s work clothes. In the course of the workshops, Baker A posted a financial loss for the first time, as a result of

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the BSE crisis in the UK. Nevertheless, work on new product development and new markets eventually produced a significant rise in turnover (25 percent), a return to profitability and increases in productivity (20 percent). During the same period, HR practices improved and development plans were introduced, focusing on the individual learning and development needs of members of staff. These changes both in organization structure and in training and development processes were taken by those involved as indicative of a broader culture change within the organization. It is also perhaps worth noting that a ‘crisis’ – in this case a financial loss, and thus a threat to survival – may have emphasized the importance of the project in which the workshops were embedded: in this project a great deal was at stake. Indeed, in the other two successful cases, one organization (Health Org B) was under threat of being absorbed by another civil service agency (this may explain the desire of Health Org B to move away from bureaucratic modes of organizing) whilst Univ Serv E was the subject of rumours that its entire operation might be outsourced. Elsewhere we have used dissipative structures as an analogy to highlight and explain the role of environmental stress, crises and instability in strategic change (MacIntosh and MacLean 1999).

Exploring transient success in workshops Of the seven researched firms that did not achieve their stated goals in the longer run, there were some where eventual disappointment was preceded by positive signs in the early stages of our project. Four firms (Eng Consult, Engineer Co, Sign Up and CommuniCo) offered extremely positive reactions to the initial workshops. This highlights the value of longitudinal research because, in those particular cases, the self-reported diagnosis in that early stage was that the change process had been successful. As facilitators, we found such positive feedback about the workshops welcome, but eventually we had to accept that this short-term optimism was in fact illusory. In Sign Up, the process was deemed to be working effectively up until about the halfway point of the project. In Engineer

Co and Eng Consult, initial changes subsequently produced ‘a sense that we have reverted to type’ (quote from a production director with Engineer Co). In all four cases, the conclusion was eventually reached that the organization had not achieved its objectives. In the case of CommuniCo, the launch workshop went extremely well – even the participants themselves evaluated the workshop as ‘absolutely first rate’ (according to a senior manager of CommuniCo), but in the follow-up workshop three months later, it became apparent that the workshop had not effected any strategic change in daily organizational life. Once the participants had left the workshop and gone back to their daily routines, they found it difficult to transfer the content of the workshop to the organization in much the same way that Bourque and Johnson might have predicted (2007). We will now consider the case of Engineer Co, where it could be argued that the failure of the workshops to deliver the stated objectives was rooted in their intermittent nature (the same also applies to Eng Consult). The successful cases dealt with a rolling agenda of change-related issues by means of a series of regular workshops, whereas in these two cases there were six- or twelve-month gaps between sessions. The participants in these workshops did see them as related events and had a sense of follow-through, but the long pauses in the strategic conversation had a stultifying effect. Engineer Co was also an established business and had been operating for over a hundred years. The firm had transferred ownership to a US-based corporation some years earlier and the firm’s management team was now accountable to a corporate strategist from the US headquarters who consequently had some influence on the strategy of Engineer Co. This influence had been stronger during recent years as performance had been below corporate norms. As in the case of Baker A, the stated intention of the workshop(s) had a cultural dimension and focused on improving performance. The management team expressed a similar desire for ‘a radical transformation project, to break with past ways of thinking about the business and to begin to reinvent our future’ (from an interview with the MD of Engineer Co). The MD

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of Engineer Co was more focused in his request than his counterpart at Baker A and he specifically suggested setting up an off-site strategy workshop to kick-start the process of change within the firm. However, unlike Baker A, here the frequency of the sessions was low (Table 19.3) and our role as facilitators was channelled through the MD to a greater extent, ostensibly because of travel logistics (he would come and see us, as opposed to us visiting the firm). We thus met with the other members of the senior team infrequently. This project too used a clear accountability framework, but it may have been that the project’s overall velocity or momentum was lower than that of successful cases because of the infrequent meetings of the team. Moreover, whilst it is difficult to quantify this observation, the quality of the relationships that were built among the members of the team and, in particular, between ourselves and the practitioners, was discernibly different – cordial and business-like in the case of Engineer Co, but friendlier and more personal in the successful cases. Thus, more robust relationships perhaps allow franker and more probing exchanges on the one hand, and a greater degree of mutual understanding of everyone’s concerns on the other. Also, after the initial round of workshops, the senior management team (the directors and heads of the Strategic business units) handed ownership of the change project to a ‘change team’ drawn from the middle-management layer of the firm. The intention was ‘to allow us, the senior guys, to focus on running the business whilst the change team [would be] freed up to change the business’ (in the words of Engineer Co’s MD). In reality, members of the change team were somewhat confused about their remit and did not feel that they had the authority to change aspects of the organization’s structure, the product range or the markets served. Instead of focusing on the originally stated intention of full-scale transformation, the strategy workshops began to focus on operational issues under the strapline ‘better, faster, cheaper’. This served to signal that the outcome of changes within the firm should produce e.g. better organizational arrangements, faster production techniques and cheaper product designs than before. The resulting

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improvements, such as reductions in operating costs, were welcome but seemed to indicate that ‘[we] had lost the bigger picture’ (according to a finance director with Engineer Co). This illustrates a phenomenon which was common in the second category of cases, where some change was effected, but not on the scale or of the scope initially envisaged. The project was carefully planned, but after it had been launched the senior players of Engineer Co, Eng Consult and Sign Up gradually withdrew to varying degrees – partly on the principle of encouraging others to ‘own the change by taking charge of it’ (as the MD of Engineer Co put it) and partly because they had ‘businesses to run’ (director, Eng Consult). One might argue that the real effect of this withdrawal was a weakening of the accountability framework, which was in turn exacerbated by a lower frequency of workshops. Indeed, these two factors may then have operated in a self-reinforcing cycle that took the steam out of the effort to see the project through, though one might equally argue that cause and effect could be reversed here. In contrast to Engineer Co and Eng Consult, the problems experienced at Sign Up and CommuniCo seemed to lie not in the frequency of sessions (high and moderate respectively), or the seniority of participants (high in both cases) but rather in the elapsed duration. In both cases the elapsed duration was only three months. We have already reported that participants in the workshops held at Sign Up felt that the process unfolded too quickly, and that workshops came thick and fast. This suggests another inhibiting factor in relation to the accountability framework that we have discussed. When the gap between sessions is as little as one week, as was often the case in Sign Up, in the interim participants have little opportunity to follow up on action points agreed during the workshop due to the pressure of ongoing business. A key figure in the Sign Up project was the sales director, who commented that ‘I’m out of the office most of the time, on the road, drumming up business. Pretty much the only time I spend with [my colleagues] is during these workshops and I just can’t spare the time in between just now to follow up on action points.’

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Exploring failure in strategy workshops Finally, the third group of cases consisted of those companies in which the workshops did not effect any changes at all. This group comprised one company (Gas Works) that conducted a series of workshops, and two companies (Electronix A and Pharma Co) that conducted single workshops. The workshops run for Gas Works shared many common features with those held for firms where transient change was reported, at least in terms of elapsed duration and frequency. This case is particularly interesting, however, because it was the only example where the sole participants were middle managers. Those selected to participate were given little information on the workshops and in the first session were both confused and suspicious. The workshops focused on the organization’s quality systems and the commercial impact that quality procedures had on product development and subsequent reliability. The directors of the firm hoped that by inviting middle managers to ‘help shape a key part of our business, [they would] grow into more commercially astute and more proactive people in the business’ (from interview with the technical director of Gas Works). Yet attempts at proactivity stalled each time because permission had to be sought from directors who did not attend the workshops. Finally, two firms, Electronix A and PharmaCo, hoped that a one-off strategy workshop would effect strategic change. The participants reported the events as a success at the conclusion of the workshops. However, follow-up interviews revealed that nothing had changed in the respective organizations and that many of the actions and intentions discussed during the workshops were never followed through. The participants in both cases were senior managers, and the workshops tackled key strategic issues relating to competitiveness and new markets. Each workshop generated lists of tasks that included further research on competitors, analysis of competences, etc. Subsequent interviews with those involved in the workshops indicated that none of these action points was followed up in any systematic way and that ‘in any case, there was no forum to report them back to’ (interview with the marketing director of Electronix A).

Discussion and contribution In this section we will discuss our findings, referring back to the ‘effectivity paradox’ of strategy workshops that we introduced at the beginning of the chapter. Johnson et al. (2006, p. 27) argued that the very separation of workshop activity from everyday practice, which is necessary for new ideas to emerge, prevents the transfer of ideas and plans from the workshop to the workplace. In their study, Johnson et al. referred to one-off workshops. Our observations on the effectiveness of single workshops support this view. Yet, in contrast to the study by Johnson and his colleagues, our observations on series of workshops yielded different results. In our study, we actually did observe strategic changes as a result of workshop activities. We would argue that in the specific case of a series of strategy workshops, the effectiveness paradox can be circumvented: such series appear to allow separation and reconnection to occur over the course of several workshops and seem also to create opportunities for strategic episodes (Hendry and Seidl 2003) to transfer to the wider organization. This is in line with the study of Schwarz and Balogun (2007), who also reported on series of workshops. In fact, Johnson and his colleagues too touch on this point in the concluding part of their paper: ‘it may be unrealistic to expect significant outcomes from a one-off event; a series of strategy workshops may instead be more effective’ (Johnson et al. 2006, p. 29). Similarly Bourque and Johnson (2007) speculate that ‘the shift from intention to realisation may benefit from a nested series of strategy workshops’. Yet not all workshop series are successful in terms of initiating strategic change. Our observations suggest that other critical aspects of workshops influence their effectivity: elapsed duration, frequency and the seniority of participants. In our data, the relationship between overall duration and frequency of the workshops played a crucial role in all the ‘successful’ cases which we studied. The organizations whose workshops stretched over twelve months or more and where sessions were intermittent fared no better than those whose workshops were one-off events. A number of participants spoke about the momentum of the

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workshops, in some cases as ‘the thing that made it work’ (from interview with a service manager in Health Org B). Here we see an analogy with Brown and Eisenhardt’s study of high-velocity industries (1997), but would argue that each of the successful cases had high momentum, rather than high velocity, since the participants of workshops that did possess high velocity (e.g. Sign Up) felt overwhelmed by the pressure of the workshops and ongoing organizational activities. Our data suggest that compressing intensive work into a few months is an unsuccessful tactic. Why might this be the case? One possible argument is that genuine strategic change challenges fundamental assumptions about the characteristics and nature of an organization, and is therefore problematic. Such processes effectively challenge organization members to reconsider the identity of their organization (Beech 2000). This process requires a comparatively safe environment, and Hendry and Seidl (2003) argue that the renegotiation of such fundamental assumptions occurs in the course of ‘episodes’, such as workshops, where customary practices are suspended. Such episodes make it possible for the members of an organization to step out of their daily routines in order to reflect on them critically (Doz and Prahalad 1987; Roos and Von Krogh 1996). In most cases the organizations we studied made conscious efforts to suspend day-to-day practice during the workshops. This corroborates the findings of other studies on strategy workshops (Bourque and Johnson 2007; Johnson et al. 2006; Schwarz and Balogun 2007). Practices such as holding workshops off-site and ensuring that interactions among participants have an informal, non-hierarchical character were common. In the three successful cases presented here, there was a sense that the organizations concerned needed a period of adjustment before becoming comfortable with the change process. Both Baker A and Univ Serv E ‘edged up to the precipice’ (interview with the sales director of Baker A) repeatedly before finally implementing real and lasting changes. As for Univ Serv E, the frustrations that resulted from being ‘always on the cusp of change’ were openly discussed (quote from field notes).

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When asked to reflect on the project conducted with Gas Works, managers described the workshops as ‘a space and time for the management team to meet […] in a context which was not a production meeting, progress meeting, etc.’ (interview with a middle manager from Gas Works). Those involved also commented that the workshops ‘started with a loosely formed agenda and progressively tightened up as it became clear what had to be done’. Interestingly, participants also identified two key departures from ‘the Gas Works way of working’. First, the project team checked with the directors less frequently than usual, and second, there was input from everyone as opposed to only those responsible for the implementation of agreed action. Given that organizations ‘find it very difficult to generate higher level discourses’ (Hendry and Seidl 2003, p. 178), these managers seem to suggest that the strategy workshop represented an opportunity for such discourses to take place. Since the project at Gas Works did not subsequently produce strategic change, one might argue that in fact there was not sufficient time to make the most of that opportunity and that the organization may have found itself under pressure to revert to its normal mode of operating (MacIntosh and MacLean 1999), particularly with regard to consulting the directors before taking action. Finally, our observations suggest that the seniority of participants is a further crucial aspect with regard to the effectivity of the strategy workshops. This is illustrated by the case of Engineer Co where, initially, the senior management team was highly involved in the workshops but then passed responsibility on to a group of middle managers described as ‘the change team’. The change process eventually lost momentum mainly because of a perceived lack of interest from the top management team. Whilst the importance of involving top management in the process of strategic change has been widely discussed in popular texts on change management, it is less evident in the literature on strategy process or Strategy as Practice. Sillince and Mueller (2007), for example, point out the problems associated with ‘top management ambivalence’. In our study, the involvement of senior management played a key role not only in workshop activities, but also in engaging all those

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in the organization who would have to adopt new ideas, plans or ways of working. A general point that demands consideration concerns the direction of causality implied in our findings. Our argument here is that some configurations of frequency, elapsed duration and membership produce strategic change. However, one might argue that the three ‘successful’ organizations enjoyed our particular approach to strategy workshops more than others, and therefore their commitment lasted longer than that of the rest. This could mean in turn that the eventual success or failure of the workshops is a side issue. Whilst such an argument merits consideration, it ought to be noted that we explicitly agreed with each organization at the outset that we would not seek to prolong the engagement. Overall, our study makes three main contributions to the relevant literature. First, it contributes to the literature on Strategy as Practice, which takes a particular interest in the role of formal practices (Jarzabkowski 2003; Whittington 2003). Whilst many researchers have dismissed formal practices as ‘mere rituals’ that have no wider bearing, Strategy as Practice scholars have drawn attention to the significance of rituals as such. They have shown that a ‘ritualized event may be highly significant in and of itself’, independently of whether it has any broader effect on the organization concerned (Bourque and Johnson 2007), and some researchers have actually analysed strategy workshops as ritualized events (e.g. Bourque and Johnson 2007; Johnson et al. 2006). In this chapter we have gone a step further by showing that formal practices, such as workshops, are not only significant as rituals per se but can also lead to significant changes in an organization. This is in line with studies on other formal practices, such as administrative practices (Jarzabkowski 2003, 2005; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002) or meeting practices (Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008) that have been shown to have a great influence on organizational development. Second, the chapter contributes to our understanding of the phenomenon of strategy workshops. We have pointed to an important distinction between single workshops and workshops that involve a series of sessions. In particular, having

studied ninety-nine workshops conducted over a five-year period with ten organizations, we have been able to comment on the impact of distinct aspects, such as the frequency with which workshops are held, level of attention paid to action points, and continuity and commitment from senior managers. We have highlighted the mechanisms by means of which a series of workshops overcome the difficulty of translating agreed changes into action within the organization at large – a problem identified by Hendry and Seidl (2003) and Johnson et al. (2006), and referred to as the effectivity paradox. Our third contribution relates to the methodological approach adopted in this study and thus to recent debates on new modes of knowledge production (Huff 2000). Our research project provides an empirical example of what Van de Ven describes as ‘engaged scholarship’ (2007). In particular, the role of practitioners in both framing and conducting the research process represents something of a break with the conventional division of labour applied in much of the social sciences. Starbuck recently pointed to the folly of building hypotheses and theory around ‘random noise’ (2006, p. 15) but in our approach, practitioners were central to the research process: they all had access to research data from all the firms that constituted the network forum which we had set up, so data from one firm could be presented and contrasted to data from other firms by members of those firms as well as by us as academic researchers. This suggests a much more active form of participation in the research process than is often the case. A number of the practitioners from this network have co-published with us on both theoretical and methodological issues. Also, at some points in the course of our study, practitioners participated in research that focused on firms other than their own. Many scholars have called for new and more engaged ways of bridging the relevance gap in research; forms of coproduction such as the one described here attempt to respond to those calls. Our findings have several implications for practice. First of all, this study has shown that one-off strategy workshops are very unlikely to succeed in effecting organizational change. A series of

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workshops is more likely to be effective since this allows participants to combine maintaining a certain distance from, and at the same time a connection to, the organization. Second, our data suggests that when designing a series of workshops, it is important to consider overall duration, frequency and seniority of participants. While this does not guarantee success, our study implies that it does increase the chances that workshops will have the intended impact. Thus, our study has implications both for those who participate in or initiate strategy workshops as a means of advancing their organization, and for those who design, deliver or facilitate them. We must also address the limitations of this study. A first potential limitation has to do with our role as facilitators in this set of workshops. We undoubtedly brought specific theories to the workshops. The ten organizations concerned had been informed that we were interested in developing our understanding of complexity theory, as it applied to social systems. However, during the workshops we also deployed a range of fairly standard analytical tools and techniques used in strategy studies, similar to those described by Bourque and Johnson (2007). In general, whether the facilitators of strategy workshops draw consistently on the same theories can be a source of some concern, however, we should point out that the same facilitation process and the same theories were used by the same facilitators in each of the ten cases considered here. This is not to suggest that we sought to validate our data by means of a ‘randomized control trial’ but simply to emphasize the consistency of our approach in all ten cases. It is possible that the success of a series of workshops of longer elapsed duration, which our data corroborates, is, in fact, related to our style of facilitation, or to facilitation that centres to some extent on theories of emergence, or both. In our method statement, earlier in the chapter, we pointed out that the trade-off between a high degree of personal access to data on the one hand, and the generalizability of outcomes on the other, is significant. There is no evidence in our data to support the hypothesis that one-off strategy workshops produce strategic change. Or, to be more precise in our claim, we have no evidence to suggest that we, as facilitators, can help to produce strategic change

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through one-off interventions. This calls for further research on strategy workshops – possibly even a larger-scale, quantitative study – with different sets of facilitators employing different sets of tools. Finally, another limitation relates to the focus of our study. Motivated by the concept of strategic episodes and the idea of the effectivity paradox, we were particularly interested in the relationship between activity within the confines of the workshops and activities within the wider organization. Because of that, it is possible that we may pay less attention to the influence of other aspects underlying the workshop dynamic, such as power games. In view of this, future research that investigates workshop activity from different theoretical perspectives is likely to yield additional insights.

REFERENCES Alvesson, M. (2003), ‘Beyond neopositivists, romantics and localists: A reflexive approach to interviews in organizational research’, Academy of Management Review, 28/1: 13–33. Balogun, J., Jarzabkowski, P. and Seidl, D. (2007) (eds), ‘Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective’, Human Relations, 60/1 [Special Issue]. Beech, N. (2000), ‘Narrative styles of managers and workers’, Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 36/2: 210–229. Boje, D. (1991), ‘The storytelling organisation: Study of story performance in an office-supply firm’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 36: 106–127. Bourque, N. and Johnson, G. (2007), ‘Strategy workshops and “away-days” as ritual’, in G. Hodgkinson and W. Starbuck (eds), Oxford handbook of organizational decision making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 552–564. Brown, S. and Eisenhardt, K. (1997), ‘The art of continuous change: Linking and time-pacing evolution in relentlessly shifting organizations’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 42: 1–34. Dalton, M. (1959), Men who manage: Fusions of feeling and theory in administration. New York: Wiley. Doz, Y. and Prahalad, C. K. (1987), ‘A process model of strategic redirection in large complex firms: The case of multinational corporations’, in A. Pettigrew (ed.),

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The management of strategic change. Oxford: Blackwell, 63–82. Eden, C. and Huxham, C. (1996), ‘Action research for management research’, British Journal of Management, 7/1: 75–86. Eisenhardt, K. (1989), ‘Building theories from case study research’, Academy of Management Review, 14/4: 532–550. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994), The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage. Hendry, J., and Seidl, D. (2003), ‘The structure and significance of strategic episodes: Social systems theory and the routine practices of strategic change’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 175–196. Hill, T., Nicholson, A. and Westbrook, R. (1999), ‘Closing the gap: A polemic on plantbased research in operations management’, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 19/2: 139–156. Hodgkinson, G. P., Whittington, R., Johnson, G. and Schwarz, M. (2006), ‘The role of strategy workshops in strategy development processes: Formality, communication, coordination and inclusion’, Long Range Planning, 39/5: 479–496. Hodgkinson, G. P. and Wright, G. (2002), ‘Confronting strategic inertia in a top management team: Learning from failure’, Organization Studies, 23/6: 949–977. Huff, A. (2000), ‘Changes in organizational knowledge production: 1999 presidential address’, Academy of Management Review, 25/2: 288–293. Huff, A. and Huff, J. (2001), ‘Re-focusing the business school agenda’, British Journal of Management, 12/S1: 34–46. Jarzabkowski, P. (2003), ‘Strategic practices: An activity theory perspective on continuity and change’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 23–55. (2005), Strategy as practice: An activity-based approach. London: Sage. Jarzabkowski, P. and Seidl, D. (2008), ‘Meetings as strategizing episodes in the social practice of strategy’, Organization Studies, 29/11: 1391–1426.

Jarzabkowski, P. and Wilson, D. (2002), ‘Top teams and strategy in a UK university’, Journal of Management Studies, 39/3: 355–383. Johnson, G., Langley, A., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2007), Strategy as practice: Research directions and resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, G., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2003), ‘Micro strategy and strategizing: Towards an activity-based view’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 3–22. Johnson, G., Prashantam, S. and Floyd, S. (2006), ‘Toward a mid-range theory of strategy workshops’, AIM Working Chapter Series, 35-March-2006. Kotter, J. (1982), The general managers. New York: Free Press. MacIntosh, R. and MacLean, D. (1999), ‘Conditioned emergence: A dissipative structures approach to transformation’, Strategic Management Journal, 20/4: 297–316. MacLean, D. and MacIntosh, R. (2002), ‘One process, two audiences: On the challenges of management research’, European Management Journal, 20/4: 383–392. MacLean, D., MacIntosh, R. and Grant, S. (2002), ‘Mode 2 management research’, British Journal of Management, 13/3: 189–207. Mintzberg, H. (1973), The nature of managerial work. London: Harper and Row. (1994), The rise and fall of strategic planning. London: Prentice Hall. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001), Re-thinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (2001) (eds), Handbook of action research. London: Sage. Roos, J. and Von Krogh, G. (1996), Managing strategy processes in emergent industries: The case of media firms. London: Macmillan. Schwarz, M. and Balogun, J. (2007), ‘Strategy workshops for strategic reviews: A case of semi-structured emergent dialogues’, AIM Research Working Chapter Series, 54-February-2007. Sillince, J., and Mueller, F. (2007), ‘Switching strategic perspective: The reframing of accounts of responsibility’, Organization Studies, 28/2: 155–176.

Unpacking the effectivity paradox of strategy workshops Starbuck, W. H. (2006), The production of knowledge: The challenge of social science research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Susman, G. I. and Evered, R. D. (1978), ‘An assessment of the scientific merits of action research’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 23/4: 582–603. Tranfield, D. and Starkey, K. (1998), ‘The nature, social organization and promotion of management research: Towards policy’, British Journal of Management, 9/4: 341–353. Tsoukas, H. and Hatch, M. J. (2001), ‘Complex thinking, complex practice: A narrative

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approach to organizational complexity’, Human Relations, 54/8: 979–1013. van de Ven, A. (2007), Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittington, R. (1996), ‘Strategy as practice’, Long Range Planning, 29/5: 731–735. (2003), ‘The work of strategizing and organizing: For a practice perspective’, Strategic Organization, 1/1: 117–125. (2006), ‘Completing the practice turn in strategy’, Organization Studies, 27/5: 613–634. Yin, R. (1984), Case study research. London: Sage.

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Struggling over subjectivity: a critical discourse analysis of strategic development1 P I K K A -MA A R IA L A IN E and EERO VAARA

Introduction Discursive perspectives provide opportunities to map out and critically examine some of the most fundamental questions in strategy and strategizing that are not easily approached with more traditional perspectives on Strategy as Practice (Hendry 2000; Knights and Morgan 1991; Seidl 2007; Vaara et al. 2004). This is the case with ‘subjectivity’, which can be understood as a discursively constructed sense of identity and social agency in specific contexts. In their seminal Foucauldian analysis, Knights and Morgan (1991) had already examined how strategy discourse can transform ‘individuals into subjects whose sense of meaning and reality becomes tied to their participation in the discourse and practice of strategy’ (p. 252). Thereafter, other discursive analyses have touched upon subjectivity. In particular, Samra-Fredericks (2005) has shown how organizational identities and power relations are constructed in strategy conversations. Mantere and Vaara (2008) have in turn demonstrated how different strategy discourses construct very different kinds of identities for organizational actors and consequently impede or promote participation. Nevertheless, empirical studies focusing on the discursive construction of subjectivity and its various implications in organizational strategizing are still rare in this area. 1

A longer version of this chapter was initially published in Human Relations (Laine, P.-M. and Vaara, E. 2007. Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering group. Human Relations, 60/1: 29–58). We have shortened the paper and updated parts of the theoretical discussion for this book chapter.

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In this chapter, we wish to add to this research by examining subjectivity in strategy discourse from a discursive struggle perspective. We approach organizational discourse as a dialectical battle between competing groups (e.g. Mumby 2004). From a discourse struggle perspective, discourses have a great deal of power over individuals, but at the same time individuals can also draw from specific discourses for their own purposes. Central to this perspective is to view discourse and subjectivity as closely linked. On the one hand, specific discourses produce subject positions for the actors involved. On the other, actors employ specific discourses and resist others precisely to protect or enhance their social agency or identity. We examine these discursive struggles in the context of an engineering and consulting group. Our analysis is based on extensive data, including interviews of people representing different positions in our case company, various kinds of documentary material and data gathered by participant observation. In this chapter, we report three examples of competing ways of making sense of and giving sense to strategic development, with specific subjectification tendencies. First, we show how corporate management can mobilize and appropriate a specific kind of strategy discourse to attempt to gain control of the organization, which tends to reproduce managerial hegemony but also trigger discursive and other forms of resistance. Second, we illustrate how middle managers can resist this hegemony by initiating unit-specific strategy discourses to create room for manoeuvre in controversial situations. Third, we show how project engineers can

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distance themselves from management-initiated strategy discourses to maintain a viable identity in the midst of all kinds of pressures. Although our examples are case-specific, we believe that similar discursive dynamics also characterize strategizing in other organizations.

A discursive struggle perspective on subjectivity Our analysis draws from the critical discourse studies tradition. This approach has grown out of the seminal work of Foucault (Foucault 1994) on the one hand and the development of specific methodologies in applied linguistics on the other (Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Wodak and Meyer 2002; Fairclough 2003). While many types of studies can be included under the broad umbrella of critical discourse studies, a general characteristic of such studies is to focus on the role played by language in the construction of power relationships and reproduction of domination. This is arguably a particularly suitable perspective for our analysis of subjectivity. Critical discourse perspective has been put to use in various fields of human and social sciences, and the applications have differed significantly. In critical organizational discourse analysis (Fairclough 2005; Mumby 2004; Phillips and Hardy 2002; Thomas 2003), the role given to the social context has varied. In our analysis, we want to emphasize that one cannot understand specific texts and discourses without considering the social context in question. According to this view, discursive practices are among the most important social practices defining our social reality – and still overlooked in many areas such as mainstream strategy research. However, there are other important social practices, the role of which should not be underestimated. In strategizing, these range from routinized sensemaking patterns and behaviours in organizational decision-making to explicit traditions and methods in organization-specific strategy processes (Jarzabkowski 2005). In fact, we argue that the role of specific discursive practices becomes salient precisely when they are linked with the other

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social practices constituting strategy and strategizing in specific contexts. Critical organizational discourse analyses have also varied in their orientation towards micro-level linguistic elements. Most of these analyses have focused less on the textual micro-elements and more on the linkages between discourse use and organizational action (Mumby 2004; Phillips and Hardy 2002). In our view, it is important to analyse textual elements in sufficient detail to understand their subtle effects on subjectivity (see also Fairclough 2005). However, the level of analysis must obviously depend on the research question and design. In this chapter, our focus is on the subjectification tendencies found in organizational actors’ talk about strategy and strategizing in a specific organizational context. Here, we will focus on specific discursive processes and practices through which subjectivity is constructed and (re)constructed in organizational strategizing. In any case, organizational discourses have ontological power; they define concepts, objects and subjectivities (Hardy and Phillips 2004). Most importantly for our purposes, discourses provide us with conceptual repertoires with which we can represent ourselves and others. These are subject positions that are available for people to occupy when they draw on these discourses, and these subject positions have fundamental implications for specific individuals. ‘One’s actions in the world as well as one’s claim to “voice” depend upon how one is positioned within specific discourses’ (Burr 1995, p. 141). The positions available within discourses bring with them what Davies and Harré (1990) refer to as a ‘structure of rights’; they provide the possibilities for and the limitations on what we may or may not do and claim for ourselves within a particular discourse. What is important in this kind of analysis is an explicit focus on the linkage of discourse and power in the organizational context. Following the example of Mumby (2004, 2005) and others (e.g. Thomas and Davies 2005), we approach this linkage as a dialectical battle between competing groups. This allows us to see how discourses define subjectivities, but also how the use of specific

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discourses is part of the battle over power, hegemony and an individualized sense of identity. As Mumby puts it: ‘Framed discursively, a dialectical analysis focuses less on identifying the meaning of particular discourses, and more on the interpretive struggle among discourses and practices. Analyses explore how social actors attempt to “fix” meanings in ways that resist and/or reproduce extant relations of power’ (Mumby 2005, p. 24). These dialectics often involve a dynamic between control (using a specific discourse for means of control) and resistance (trying to cope with or directly resist specific discourses and their implications, e.g. on subjectivity). For this purpose, we put forth the concept of ‘discursive struggle’ as a theoretical lens that helps to focus attention on the multiple and multifaced discursive dialectics in strategy discourse. The point here is that these discursive struggles not only deal with competing views concerning organizational strategies, but also involve more fundamental questions related to the subjectivity of the actors involved. These include their rights and opportunities to engage in organizational decision-making, their autonomy as organizational actors and ultimately their identity as respected and important organizational members. This opens up a perspective that helps us to understand the inherent discursive politics involved in organizational strategizing. On the one hand, the mobilization of a specific discourse can serve as a means of managerial control. On the other, these discourses may be resisted precisely because they undermine the subjectivity of particular organizational actors. This resistance can take the form of open criticism, be shown in the ignoring of the hegemonic discourses or be manifested in alternative discursive articulations. For an empirically grounded illustration of such dialectics, we now turn to our case analysis, where we examine the discursive construction of strategic development and its implications for subjectivity. Here, we will focus on the following empirical research questions: ‘How do the actors discursively make sense of and give sense to “strategic development”?; and How do they construct specific subjectivities for themselves and others?’

The Elling Group as a site of discursive struggle We focus on ‘strategic development’ in the Elling Group.2 This case can be seen as a revealing example of how managers and organizational actors make sense of and give sense to ‘strategic development’ in very different ways. Here, we define ‘strategic development’ broadly, including all kinds of activities and processes related to the deliberate or emergent development of the business and organization. Consequently, we are not only dealing with the formal strategy process or on the official strategy rhetoric but also other talk around ‘strategic development’. We focus on distinctive articulated ways of representing organizational reality, that is, ‘discourses’ in this organization. This definition of organizational discourses resonates with the view adopted by Watson: ‘Discourse is a connected set of statements, concepts, terms and expressions which constitutes a way of talking or writing about a particular issue, thus framing the way people understand and act with respect to that issue’ (Watson 1994, p. 133). The point is that these discourses are alternative and competing ways of socially constructing organizational reality around strategic development. They are also closely linked with other, more material organizational practices such as the financial control of specific units and customer projects as well as resource allocations for specific development activities. Established in the 1950s, the Elling Group is an engineering and consulting group based in northern Europe. The company has a long tradition in providing extensive engineering projects for specific industries, typically involving the design and construction of new plants. It is considered to be the leading company in its sector globally, with a reputation for providing state-of-the-art technological solutions and professional expertise. From the perspective of the company, this has meant relying on the ability to manage technologically and organizationally complex customer projects. ‘Competence,’ ‘efficiency’ and ‘quality’ related to project work have been the cornerstones of the company’s strategy. 2

The names of our case company (Elling Group) and our case unit (Repco) are pseudonyms.

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However, things have changed in recent years at both the customer end and internally. Technological development has changed working procedures and provided new alternatives for customer solutions. The investments made by the customers of the Elling Group have not increased as hoped for, which has reduced demand for the traditional services of the group. The competition has also increased. New competitors have entered the field and offered new alternatives for the customers. Local companies, which offer their services at a lower price, have also intensified competition. The group has transformed itself into a multinational listed corporation. This has been shown in an accentuated emphasis on ‘shareholder value’. Financial difficulties faced in recent years have further reinforced profitability concerns and resulted in streamlining and cost cuts. New demands coming from the customers and top management have intensified project work in most units of the corporation. For example, project schedules have been sharpened dramatically. At the same time, increasing efforts have been made to develop new products and services. This is also the case with the Repco unit that is the case-in-case unit that our analysis focuses on. Repco forms one important division of the group. It concentrates on specific kinds of engineering products and services that have traditionally been sold in extensive long-term projects. In this situation, managers, project engineers and other key actors have actually shared rather similar views concerning the need to increase the profitability of the corporation as well as the necessity to develop their operations and services. Against this background, it has been surprising – and disappointing – to management that new strategic ideas such as ‘value added services’ have not taken off and that the personnel has not proved to be altogether committed to the strategic plans. This makes this case a particularly interesting one; it reveals that such problems are linked with fundamental concerns about subjectivity and power.

Methods We have examined the ‘strategic development’ processes in this company by compiling several

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kinds of empirical material on a longitudinal basis, focusing on the period 1998–2004. This includes participant observation, all kinds of company documents and targeted interviews. First, participant observation has been used. The first author has designed and carried out management training programmes for the company since autumn 1998. Altogether, 160 middle managers and other professionals have attended the thirteen-month programme, which has run eight times. Strategic development has been an essential part of these training programmes. The corporate management and the HR people have seen these programmes as important arenas to communicate the corporate strategy and to teach the new concepts and skills needed in strategic planning. In these programmes, the participants have, for example, prepared strategic plans for their own areas of responsibility. In these sessions, they have, together with the facilitators (including the first author), also reflected on the implementation of these plans as well as on how particular theoretical ideas have worked in practice. The sessions have provided numerous examples of concrete discursive struggles among the participants of these programmes. In addition, this training activity has led to invaluable informal contacts with the organizational members, helping us to map out typical patterns of discourse use in this organization. Second, various kinds of documents concerning company strategy are another important source of empirical material. Many of these are publicly available, but they also include material that the first author has, with the approval of the case company, been able to gather during this research project. These documents have been especially important for us to be able to examine specific features of the ‘official corporate strategy’ and then to place the interviewees’ comments about ‘strategic development’ against this background. Third, material has been generated from semistructured interviews with our case unit personnel by the first author of this chapter. These were conducted on a cross-sectional basis but focused on the changes taking place between 1998 and 2004. Altogether twenty people out of sixty working in the Repco unit were interviewed. The interviewed persons included the manager of the unit, five other

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key persons that form the middle management of the unit, and sixteen project engineers. A ‘storytelling approach’ was followed in the interviews, placing a special emphasis on the interviewee’s own experiences. The idea was to let the interviewees talk as much and as freely as possible about ‘strategic development’ and their role in it. However, the interviews also included specific questions. These questions focused on their work, the corporate strategy, the strategy of the unit, the development work in the unit and the specific strategic activities in this unit and their experiences of all this. On average, the interviews lasted for two hours. They were all tape-recorded and fully transcribed. All this provides an extensive discursive database for examining various discourses and discursive practices around ‘strategic development’. In particular, this data has allowed us to combine discursive material with ethnographic information, which is arguably a particularly fruitful starting point for analyses of strategy discourse (SamraFredericks 2004, 2005). Combining these data has not, however, been unproblematic. In particular, the interviews obviously reflect more of what is said in the interview situation rather than ‘naturally occurring talk’ in the organization more broadly. Nevertheless, precisely by comparing the observational, documentary and interview data we have been able to distinguish recurrent examples of discourse use, that is, instances that characterize the actors’ discourses more generally. Critical discourse analysis is usually abductive, that is, ‘a constant movement back and forth between theory and empirical data is necessary’ (Wodak 2004, p. 200). This is also the case with our analysis. Our research design allowed us to contrast the corporate management strategy discourse with strategic development talk in the case unit, and these comparisons have been an essential part of the refinement of our theoretical ideas. At the first stage of our analysis, we focused on the overall differences in the corporate management, middle management and project engineer discourses on strategic development. We concentrated on typical features and patterns, but used specific examples to analyse particular discursive practices in more detail. These analyses focused on specific textual elements – e.g. recurrent concepts or metaphors – as

well as particular features in discourse use – e.g. rhetorical micro-strategies or modality shifts. This kind of analysis is not methodologically unproblematic as it involves a constant comparison of specific textual elements within a substantial textual database. In our case, the participant observation and the informal contacts with the company helped a great deal in placing specific texts in their wider social and intertextual contexts. At the second stage, we then focused on discursive struggles over subjectivity. This proved to be a very complex research task, which in itself reflects the intricate linkages between strategy and subjectivity. In practice, we focused on specific examples highlighting the key hegemonic battle at play: corporate management control vs. organizational resistance. This does not, however, mean that all the discursive struggles would link with this conflict. Neither should this be interpreted as a sign of ever-present animosity between specific groups of people. Rather, this focus reflects our willingness to focus on and single out some of the most central discursive elements and patterns that characterize the discursive struggles at play in this organization. We examined numerous examples, from which we singled out typical and particularly telling illustrations of discourse use. Finally, we chose to focus on three central discursive patterns to be reported in this chapter, each of which is exemplified by illustrative texts.

Appropriation of strategy discourse to gain control We begin by demonstrating how corporate management can mobilize and appropriate a ‘new strategy discourse’ and how this reproduces managerial hegemony to be resisted by others. While the group management had been working on ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic planning’ before, the corporate management focused its attention on ‘strategic’ issues in the aftermath of a market slowdown in 2001. A ‘new strategy discourse’ has thereafter been communicated through both formal (e.g. official presentations to internal audiences and external stakeholders, in-house-magazine, annual report) and informal (e.g. various kinds of meetings and

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discussions) channels. This discourse has been a way for the corporate management to reorganize decision-making and planning processes (largely on the basis of traditional top-down approaches), to tackle the key challenges of the group (as they have seen them) and to promote the new objectives defined within this discourse (e.g. focus on ‘valueadded services’ and ‘consulting’). While this discourse has been promoted by various channels and taken various forms, we will here focus on specific examples from the in-house magazine and management training programme to highlight some of the most salient hegemonic elements in this discourse. This is how the new strategy was introduced in the in-house magazine: The renewed strategy process was implemented with Consulting Company Ltd, making use of their strategy model. The objective was to introduce a new method for developing the Group’s strategy for the period 2001–2005, and at the same time identify new business ideas. Hundreds of pages of bullet point presentations were generated in the course of the strategy process. The complete strategy documentation amounts to more than 100 pages. A condensed version of the strategy will be cascaded throughout the company in the form of presentations. Because of the confidential nature of the strategy documentation, it cannot be presented in detail in the In-House Magazine. Therefore this article is limited to presenting the mission slogan and the values in brief. The strategy will be cascaded throughout the Group to every employee. (In-house magazine 12/2001)

This is an informative example in several respects. First, through arranging objects such as ‘strategy process’, ‘model’, ‘strategy documentation’, ‘new business ideas’, ‘mission slogan’, ‘values’, and categories of social actors (top management, employees, the consulting company) the text reproduces a particular order seemingly controllable by top management. Second, the introduction of the new strategic planning model (as a progressive model of organizational decision-making) is legitimated in a particular way. This is done by reference to a well-known management consulting company (‘Consulting Company Ltd’). Third, the emphasis on ‘presentations’ and ‘documentation’ underscores the planning-intensive nature

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of strategizing. At the same time, it underscores the central role of those that supposedly have the best knowledge and are most capable of conducting such analyses and drawing conclusions, that is, the corporate management and the consultants. Fourth, there is also a strong emphasis on secrecy (e.g. ‘confidential’) which further underscores the role of corporate management as key strategists and the passive role ascribed to the organization. Fifth, the others are given a ‘condensed’ version of strategy. This means in effect that not many organizational members are given an opportunity to see the full document. The metaphoric expression of ‘cascading’ further positions the employees as passive recipients rather than active agents participating in the preparation of the strategy. In many senses, the corporate management’s strategy discourse has thus drawn from traditional conceptions of ‘strategic planning’ (Ansoff 1965) characterized by a ‘top-down’ approach rather than more recent ideas about a ‘bottom-up’ approach (Floyd and Wooldridge 2000; Mintzberg and Waters 1985). While the corporate management’s strategy discourse has thus tended to undermine the possibility of others to participate in official strategic decision-making, its content has also had other problematic implications for the subjectivity of specific actors. In particular, the corporate management’s strategy discourse has included elements attempting to limit the opportunities of specific actors to engage in development work. The following is an example of how ‘innovation’ has been linked with the strategy process: Side by side with the strategy process, a separate innovation stream was pursued with the aim of creating new products and business ideas transcending the borders between business groups. Representatives of all business groups participated in this process. (In-house magazine, 12/2001)

This corporate discourse seems to paint a picture of organization-wide participation in corporateled innovation processes. Within the corporate discourse, such innovations have, however, been primarily those that the corporate management has seen as ‘value-added services’ or ‘consulting’ rather than traditional project work. This has had a major impact on units that have traditionally

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relied on project work, such as the Repco unit, not so much because of a disagreement concerning the need to develop new products and services but because of this self-declared right of corporate management to define and control what these products and services should be and how they should be developed. Importantly, all this has happened in the context of increasing financial control which has itself been legitimated in the official strategy. In fact, the corporate management’s strategy discourse has emphasized the need to focus on profitability not only in project work but also in the development of new products and services. The following is one of many examples of corporate management explaining this focus in a speech in the management training programme: We [top management] can only anticipate the expectations of the clients and personnel. The only issue that we do not have to guess are the expectations of the owners. That we know; it is a fact. The owners want earnings per share. That means profitability and growth and above all no surprises. Whatever we say we better live with it. (President, 2004, participant observation)

This is a telling example in two senses. First, targets set by top management are legitimated by unambiguous references to ‘owners’. Here, as well as elsewhere in strategic communication, the President draws from the powerful ‘shareholder value’ discourse and positions top management (personal pronoun ‘we’) as owners representatives with a particular organizational role and identity. The president emphasizes alignment with owners by presenting owners’ expectations as a ‘fact’. ‘Clients’ and ‘personnel’ are then portrayed in another manner: as actors whose expectations can only be ‘anticipated’. The modalizing term ‘only’ provides an ‘extreme case formulation’ (e.g. Pomerantz 1986) that underscores the inability of top management to do anything else than to ‘anticipate’. This means that there is little direct communication between management and clients or personnel. This prioritization of shareholders over ‘clients’ can, however, be seen as undermining the importance of customer contacts in project work, an issue that we will come back to in the following

sections. Second, ‘no surprises’ and ‘we better live with it’ invoke a patriarchal discourse where an intimidating father expects obedience from others (i.e. ‘personnel’) (e.g. Holmer-Nadesan 1996, pp. 53–56). Such limits are, however, something that the people in the Repco unit, emphasizing the need for continuous and somewhat unpredictable innovation processes, have found difficult to accept, as explained in the following sections. With respect to corporate management, their strategy discourse has promoted their own status as strategists whose decisions and actions determine the future of the organization. At the same time, they have increasingly sought support from other people in their discourse. In fact, ‘participation’ has recently become a major topic of discussion in this group, too. This has typically involved the in-built distinction between ‘strategy formulation’ and ‘strategy implementation’. For example, in an important presentation, the president emphasized that: The definition of the strategy is relatively easy but the implementation is the hardest issue […] The most important thing in strategy are actions. (President, management training programme, 2004, participant observation)

The point here is that this discourse can be seen as a plea for participation in ‘implementation’ – a classic challenge in strategic development in this as well as in other organizations. Such ‘participation’ has elsewhere been called ‘participation by command’ (e.g. Eriksson and Lehtimäki 1998, 2001). By using this vocabulary, the president has reproduced the traditional patriarchal view that it is the role of the corporate management to make the key decisions and then of other organizational members to ‘implement’ them, a worldview that has been difficult to accept by those who have valued the relative independence of project work and the ability to invest in development activities in these contexts. In all, the launching of the new strategy discourse can be seen as an attempt to gain control over the organization. With this discourse, the corporate management has legitimated its authority position in the midst of uncertain market development, but at the same time undermined the agency and subjectivity

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of others. This is a major reason for active or passive discursive resistance in the Repco unit as well as elsewhere, as discussed in the following sections.

Creation of room for manoeuvre Next we turn to illustrate how middle managers have initiated their own strategy discourse to create room for manoeuvre in a situation where the corporate management’s strategy discourse does not support their development activities. In our case, the manager of the Repco unit and his closest colleagues have approached strategic development in a way that differs radically from the conception of the corporate management. Their discourse has drawn from an entrepreneurial ethos, emphasized the need for local strategy work and underscored the importance of participation. Often, this discourse has also involved criticism of the corporate management’s strategy in terms of both the objectives and the organization of the strategy process, but the managers have been cautious in terms of voicing this criticism vis-à-vis top management. Characteristic of Repco management discourse is that concrete strategic development work has been seen as a key activity – regardless of whether it has been sanctioned by top management. In fact, in the interviews these people told how they had to start the work ‘in secret’, as in the following: All of us were busy in the current customer projects and we did not have any spare time for development work. So we started conducting the new product development in secret. We were able to do this because we had financing from the National Technology Agency [because they did not receive resources from corporate management].

In this example, expressions like ‘no spare time’ and ‘in secret’ depict strategic development as hard and demanding work. Importantly, the key actors – that is the middle managers in the Repco unit – are portrayed in a heroifying light. The following is then a typical example describing their view of the official strategy process led by corporate management: The [corporate management] strategy does not disturb us […] It’s just fine if it doesn’t go against

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what we have thought […] However, we must constantly, if not really confront, then convince management that we are doing the right things here.

What is central in this quote is the seemingly nonchalant approach to top management’s strategy discourse. Corporate strategies are seen as ‘not disturbing’ and later the lack of contradiction is portrayed as ‘just fine’. Both denial and diminishing are discursive practices that effectively create an impression that the interviewee would not care too much even if the strategies were contradictory. However, ‘if not really confront’ presupposes that they could also defend their ideas more aggressively, if needed. It is also clearly indicated (‘constantly […] convince management’) that there is a need to remind the corporate management of specific ideas and needs. This is apparently required to secure the financing of their development work, but also something that they are willing to do. In this way, trying to influence the corporate management became an essential part of their strategy work.3 Overall, middle managers’ view on strategizing has resembled a ’bottom-up’ approach. An interviewee described this in an illuminating way: This is like strategic control from the unit, and the [corporate] management has gradually become mature enough to understand these [their strategies].

Note how their approach to strategic development is coined in the interesting notion ‘strategic control from the unit’, underscoring the importance of local development work. The image built through this term is that the middle managers – rather than top management – are the progressive strategic entrepreneurs whose views and actions should be taken seriously. There is also a passing reference to the lack of ‘maturity’ in top management’s strategic thinking, which delegitimizes and undermines the importance of the official strategy discourse.

3

Importantly, the Repco management has lately succeeded in ‘getting its message heard’ at the corporate management level. This has also led to material consequences, and the Repco management has obtained more time and money for development work. In the unit, this has reinforced the belief in their own approach to strategy.

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The unit management has worked hard to make all the people within the unit and also others in specific units participate in coordinated strategic development work. ‘Participation’ has also become a central theme emphasized in their unit – as well as in the interviews. This is how the head of the unit summarized their approach: I began to arrange this kind of meetings in our unit […] So that we could figure out together what kind of competence is needed in the future […] then we had workshops of this kind for the whole unit […] and then we have had personal discussions. I want to hear it from everybody personally what kind of issues they are interested in and what kind of personal development challenges they would be ready to take. It’s not right that I just order people to do something. The awakening has to happen individually.

As is evident, this participation differs radically from the corporate management ‘participation by command’ mode (see the previous section). Notions such as ‘figure out together’, ‘workshops’, and ‘for the whole unit’ construct a collective approach to strategizing. This collective subjectivity is, however, also linked with the individual level as in ‘personal discussions’ and ‘personal development’. ‘It’s not right that I just order people to do something’ includes a presupposition that the head of the unit could exercise his hierarchical power in strategizing, but is not willing to do that in the name of participation. Interestingly, the Repco management discourse has at times included religious elements (e.g. ‘awakening’ above). The following is another typical example: It has been kind of an enlightenment that we do not speak about projects in my unit anymore; we talk about the lifecycle of the plant […] We have tried to spread this to the shop floor level […] There are sixty of us, and ten have been awakened so there are fifty that have to be awakened [… ] We have now started to spread the gospel.

These biblical metaphors (‘enlightenment’, ‘awakening’, ‘gospel’) are clear examples of the strong sense of community among these key people. At the same time, such expressions tend to reinforce a particular kind of power relationship between the management of the Repco unit and the project

engineers. In fact, the subjectivity constructed for the key managers at Repco paradoxically resembles that of top management, whose approach they are keen to criticize. Note how the metaphor of ‘spreading the gospel’ also distinguishes between ‘true believers’ and those who have to be ‘awakened’. This is an important distinction that reflects the challenge of Repco management vis-à-vis the project engineers, many of whom do not seem to be easily ‘awakened’. This is an issue which we will examine in more detail in the following section. In all, while this Repco discourse reflects specific convictions concerning the corporate strategies and the appropriate organization of strategy processes, it can and must also be seen as a means to resist corporate management hegemony. In fact, the discourse of the unit manager and his colleagues has served as a basis for autonomous strategic development work and the legitimation of actions that have not been supported within the framework of the corporate management discourse.

Distancing to maintain viable identity In our third example, we illustrate how specific engineers can distance themselves from management-initiated strategy discourses to maintain viable professional identity in the midst of increasing pressures. For these people, the development work conducted in the context of the projects is the key strategic activity in the organization. The corporate management’s approach to strategy has been seen as superficial but also problematic, as it has tended to undermine their professional identity and reduce their ability to develop new products and services in the project context. Neither has the Repco unit management’s call for participative unit-specific strategic development gathered much support, because it has been seen as far removed from the actual challenges of project work. The project engineers have themselves emphasized the role of root-level development work within the projects, as in the following example: In that project I had to create a procedure for an XYZ system. I was the first one to do that in our company and had to dig up [information] from a

A critical discourse analysis of strategic development number of places. We also have experts within this field, and I had to interview a lot to put it together. People later asked me to provide them with this procedure […] I am not saying this to stress my own importance but to emphasize our way of working.

In such examples, the interviewees have described how the project engineers confront new situations, and how these challenges can be tackled by hard work (e.g. ‘dig up’, ‘interview a lot to put it together’). This is a typical example in terms of the pronounced individualism involved (e.g. with the personal pronouns). These and other expressions also reproduce a masculine identity linked with this male-dominated engineering profession. Importantly, in these examples as in numerous others, the focus is on development work conducted in the project context, to underscore the difference from the corporate management or Repco unit discourse, which focus on the need for separate strategic planning sessions and development projects. The project engineers have emphasized the role of ‘experience’ in strategic development. The following is a typical example from an interview: As a matter of fact, the customer trusted us so much that during the project we sat down together and he asked us to handle this new issue that had emerged from the EU directive, so that he doesn’t have to worry and start asking somewhere else […] It was new to us to provide a total solution for this particular area […] We had this one guy, Howard, who had done parts of it within one previous project […] and now Howard was given the task of figuring out what we should do […] So it was Howard who developed this solution […] and he did this development work within a customer project […] and this was the beginning of a new competence area within the project work.

Here, the interviewee constructs the project engineers as ‘trusted partners’ for the customers with impressions like ‘customer trusted us’, ‘we sat down together’, and ‘he asked us to handle this […] so that he doesn’t have to worry’. The point is that it is the seasoned project engineer who is in the unique position of being able to engage in a dialogue with the customer. Experience comes in both as a basis of trust and as capability to solve the problems. By these and other similar references to

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‘experience’, ‘customer contacts’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘capability’, the project engineers have legitimated their position as central actors with respect to strategic development. Such examples have also (re) constructed images of heroism, related to the difficult technological and financial challenges. This heroism has been further accentuated by the lack of support given by management and the increasing cost pressures. Through this kind of discourse they have thus (re)produced a positive self-image in the midst of all kinds of changes. In their discourse, the project engineers have often questioned the rationality of top management’s strategy discourse. The following is a typical example criticizing the focus on ‘value-added services’ or ‘consulting’: In my view our [the company’s] problem is that there is no understanding […] if you look at the annual report or what the President says, it is consulting […] but if you ask the customer, it is our strength that we can take care of large projects and see them through as scheduled.

Within the project engineers’ discourse, any attempts to redefine their role as trusted partners of the customers have been seen as threatening. This is exemplified by a vivid comment by a seasoned project engineer who was horrified with the image of becoming a ‘consultant’: The consultants piss me off […] I have seen consultants there. They drink coffee in the meetings. They are nice guys, but they don’t know anything. I haven’t got the slightest idea what they are doing. But if the customer pays for it, why not? And obviously we [the group] are also going to that direction. We don’t develop people to become project professionals. Instead we develop ‘presentation skills’. We must be able to speak for more hours with less knowledge. But in my opinion, if you know your subject, you can convince people without any particular presentation skills.

With the personal pronoun ‘they’ the interviewee distances consultants from ‘himself’ (‘I’) and ‘us’ (‘we’). By using the present tense form he translates his situational experience of consultants to consultant practice. By defining consultants as ‘being’ he invokes a subjectivity of ‘performer’ to project engineers. He attributes skills like

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‘speaking’ and ‘presenting’ to consultants but does not count those skills as part of ‘knowing your subject’. He uses a masculine metaphor ‘piss me off’ and irony like ‘nice guys, but they don’t know anything’ to underscore the difference between experienced project professionals (who can genuinely help the customer) and consultants (who are seen as mere actors without any valuable skills). On the whole, these reflections manifest typical ways in which project engineers have resisted the ‘castrating’ effects of the official strategy discourse. Characteristic of the project engineers’ discourse has indeed been a very critical view on the corporate management’s overall approach to strategy process which was often seen as ‘empty rhetoric’, as exemplified in the following:

resist top management, they will be transferred to other positions’. In all, it is important to note that the project engineers’ discourse is not only an expression of deviant opinions about the corporate objectives or about organizational decision-making processes, but also a means of resisting managerial hegemony. By reverting to their discourse, the project professionals have attempted to protect their professional identity and autonomy – and partially succeed in doing this. Namely, by not surrendering to the strategy discourse of the corporate or unit management, they have limited the ability of the management to control the actual project work – discursively and otherwise.

Discussion I have seen the fine-looking green book that they have waved around, and there are these fancy posters on the wall. I wonder if they [the corporate management] have themselves understood what they say with their circles.

Note how in the first quotation the references to ‘fine-looking green book’ and ‘fancy posters on the wall’ are effective means of distancing, and how the imagery of ‘waving around’ categorizes the official strategy work as unimportant. Questioning the competence of top managers in the second quotation is then a straightforward example of the trivialization and delegitimation of official strategy work. Such criticism has served an important purpose for the reconstruction of the positive self-image of the project engineers. However, it has rarely been voiced outside the project engineers’ own spheres. These project engineers have also tended to dismiss the bottom-up development work in Repco. Although they have acknowledged the efforts made to secure the future of the unit, they have on the whole been sceptical of the new plans developed by the Repco management. In fact, their strategic development activities have often been constructed as ‘pottering about’, with little possibility of having a real impact on key decisions. At worst, the unit manager and his collaborators have been portrayed more as ‘clowns than real managers; if they

In our empirical analysis, we have focused on two interrelated questions: ‘How do the actors discursively make sense of and give sense to “strategic development”?’ and thus ‘How do they construct specific subjectivities for themselves and others?’ We need to emphasize that we can only offer glimpses of the myriad of discursive processes and practices involved in the Elling Group. What we have reported here are specific examples of competing ways of making sense of and giving sense to ‘strategic development’, with particular implications for subjectivity. First, we have illustrated how the introduction of a new official strategy by corporate management can be seen as an attempt to gain control of the organization. While the exact features may vary greatly from case to case, such appropriation of strategy discourse by top management is likely to be very common in contemporary organizations. In fact, this is probably one of the most typical ways in which hierarchical power relationships are re-established with respect to decision-making in contemporary corporations. In this case, it involved the reproduction of traditional strategy discourse with its top-down conceptions of strategy work. In many ways, this discourse was instrumental in legitimating top management-led change initiatives, but at the same time involved such hegemonic tendencies that many other organizational members could not but resist. This is a

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major reason for why the new corporate management discourse never fully ‘took’ in the organization. Our point here is that this is not uncommon but very typical; attempts to gain control are bound to trigger acts of resistance of various kind. Discursively, this resistance often means invoking alternative discourses. Second, we have shown how middle managers can initiate unit-specific strategy discourse to create room for manoeuvre in situations where their development activities are not supported by the corporate management’s strategy discourse. Their own entrepreneurial discourse emerged as an alternative that helped to resist the hegemonic discourse of the corporate management and re-establish the subjectivity of these middle managers as ‘strategic actors’. In particular, this discourse provided a means to legitimate specific actions that seemed to contradict the official strategy discourse of the corporate management. What is particularly interesting in this case is how legitimacy was sought by referring to ‘pioneering’ or ‘more progressive’ approaches than those of the corporate management. While our case unit can be described as a particularly active one, we argue that these kinds of discourses, which provide alternatives to the official strategy, are likely to be found in most other corporations as well. Third, we have illustrated how project engineers can distance themselves from managementinitiated strategy discourses to maintain viable identity in the midst of difficult changes. In this case, the subjectivity constructed in managementled strategy discourses seemed particularly threatening for their professional identity as competent project leaders. In this situation, their own strategic development discourse was an interesting mixture of the traditional project-based discourse of the company and a sceptical attitude towards the new strategy initiatives of the corporate or middle managers. When legitimating their traditional role as key people in business development, they frequently referred to ‘customer needs’ and ‘experience’, thereby focusing attention on the concrete business operations instead of ‘abstract strategy rhetoric’. Again, such resistance by specific worker groups is likely to characterize many contemporary organizations. This has already been shown in other

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contexts (Contu and Willmott 2003; Doolin 2002; Ezzamel et al. 2001; Holmer-Nadesan 1996). It must be emphasized that these dialectics of control and resistance are not merely abstract instances of organizational rhetoric, but closely linked with the social context and the material conditions at hand. These specific discourses reflect the specific social positions and concrete challenges of the actors involved. They are in the end not too surprising, either; rather, they mirror the age-old tension between top-driven control on the one hand and the right for self-determination and selfrealization on the other. This does not, however, undermine the constitutive effects of such organizational discourses. On the contrary, as this case vividly illustrates, traditional strategy discourses tend to privilege top managerial decision-makers and limit the opportunities of others to fully participate in organizational strategizing. This frequently reproduces the classical confrontation between the top and lower levels of organizational hierarchy. It is also important to underline that not all discursive action is fully conscious or intentional. This means that specific discourses can be reproduced almost automatically without a complete understanding of their implications. In this sense, top managers and other organizational actors can easily remain ‘prisoners’ of the established discourses and other social practices such as ‘topdown approaches’ or ‘participation by command’. In fact, it is probably often the case that top management are not fully aware of the problematic disempowering effects of their strategy discourse, especially as these are often conveyed through subtle discursive practices. Hence, as illustrated by this case, overt or covert resistance to a new official strategy discourse may often come as a surprise to top management. Finally, this kind of analysis also helps us to deepen our understanding of the role of other organizational members in discursive strategizing. Their role is easily reduced to responsiveness/ non-responsiveness: ‘consent’ or ‘resistance’ without taking into account the generative power of their discourse. In particular, this case highlights the crucial role of middle managers. Rather than being mere ‘translators’ of corporate strategies (e.g. Floyd and Wooldridge 2000), they can act as

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agents creating new discursive and social practices for unit-specific needs. They are thus central political actors whose discursive and other actions play an important role in organizational strategizing (see also Balogun and Johnson 2005; Brown and Humphreys 2003; Rouleau 2005). At another level, the project professionals’ discourse is an essential vehicle through which they can not only work for or against specific managerial agendas but also promote specific ideas that they consider important. This analysis thus helps to better understand the overwhelming discursive complexity in organizational strategizing that should not be underestimated in any analysis of organizational strategy processes.

Conclusion The starting point of this chapter has been to focus on the discursive construction of subjectivity, which is a topic that deserves a great deal of attention if we want to better understand the underlying sociopolitical dynamics in organizational strategizing. This is a major challenge, especially for the Strategy as Practice stream of research that seeks to add to our knowledge of the social and hence also discursive processes constituting strategy, strategizing and strategists in specific settings. In our view, this analysis makes two specific contributions to the Strategy as Practice literature. First, we think that the chapter makes a contribution in outlining the discursive struggle perspective on subjectivity. In our analysis, we have drawn from the seminal work of Knights and Morgan (1991) on the linkage between strategy and subjectivity. However, we have tried to further develop this approach so that we can better understand the ways in which subjectivities are constructed and reconstructed in organizational strategizing. We have done this by introducing the discursive struggle perspective that has been applied in other organizational contexts (e.g. Mumby 2004) but not really used in the strategy domain. This is an interesting and useful perspective as it helps us to focus on the constant dialectics of control and resistance in organizational strategizing and thereby better comprehend how organizational strategizing links with broader

issues of hegemony and resistance. In our analysis, we have reported three examples of how organizational actors make sense of and give sense to ‘strategic development’, with fundamental implications for agency and identity. These examples manifest three specific but typical ways in which organizational actors mobilize discourses in struggles over subjectivity: the launching and appropriation of strategy discourse by top management in an attempt to gain control over the organization, the initiation of an alternative strategy discourse to resist top managerial hegemony and to create room for manoeuvre by specific unit managers, and distancing from management-led strategy discourses to maintain viable identity at the project engineer level. Although our examples most certainly have unique features, we believe that they illustrate more general discursive patterns that can be found in many contemporary organizations. Second, this kind of view on strategic development discourses also provides additional explanations to why some of the strategic ideas do not ‘take’ (Hardy et al. 2000), lead to ‘failures in strategizing’ (Maitlis and Lawrence 2003) or have ‘unintended consequences’ (Balogun and Johnson 2005). In this sense, our analysis contributes both to more socially (Balogun and Johnson 2004, 2005; Floyd and Wooldridge 2000) and discursively oriented analyses (Hardy et al. 2000; Maitlis and Lawrence 2003) examining ‘misunderstandings’, ‘communication problems’ or ‘lack of commitment’ in strategy processes. In simple terms, our analysis shows how the reasons for such problematic experiences do not only lie in opposing views concerning the strategic direction of the organization but also involve very different ideas concerning what ‘strategic development‘ or ‘strategizing’ should be all about (see also Mantere and Vaara 2008). Central here is the role and identity given to specific actors. In brief, most people want to see and portray themselves as ‘strategic actors’, and efforts – intentional or unintentional – to limit this role are likely to confront discursive and other social resistance. While our study has pointed to specific discursive dynamics, there are many issues that will require closer scrutiny in future studies. In particular, there is a need for closer analyses of alternative

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and competing strategy discourses in different settings. In this chapter, we have sketched some ideas about how the ‘official’ corporate strategy, middle managers’ views on strategy and the discourse of specific professionals are linked together. Future studies could go much further in this direction, for example, by examining various kinds of encounters with methods such as conversation analysis (Samra-Fredericks 2004, 2005). It would also be important to continue to examine the various subtle means through which subjectivities and organizational power relationships are discursively constructed in specific texts. Such analyses could in turn draw from more linguistically oriented discourse analysis (Kuronen et al. 2005). It would also be interesting to see to what extent the legitimacy of specific discourses comes from their widespread use, for example, in the media. A more fundamental issue for future research is then what is defined as ‘strategic’ in the first place and by whom (see also Clegg et al. 2004; Carter et al. 2008). In our case, the project engineers’ work can be seen as ‘strategic’ in the sense that their practices were crucial in constituting the actual emergent strategy of the organization (Mintzberg and Waters 1985) and its competitive advantage. How some activities and practices are labelled or defined as ‘strategic’ or ‘non-strategic’ in strategy literature and actual organizations requires specific attention in future studies. Finally, there are also practical implications that should be taken seriously. First and foremost, this analysis illustrates the central role that discourses play in organizational strategizing. The main point is not to dismiss the role of discourses as mere ‘communication’ but to understand that the very act of talking about strategy involves important implications in terms of the role and identity given or not given to specific actors. This should lead to sensitivity when it comes to organizational strategizing and the design and organization of specific strategy processes. Second, this analysis shows that hegemonic and non-participative approaches rarely lead to the enthusiasm and commitment called for in the ‘implementation’ of specific strategies but rather tend to result in resistance in different forms. This is not a surprising finding per se, but this analysis should help to understand some

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of the underlying reasons that relate to fundamental questions concerning the agency and identity of specific organizational members. Third, this analysis also illustrates that all actors are easily bound by existing discourses – traditional ways of approaching strategy. This is a serious problem as far as it means – as it often does – precisely the reproduction of hegemonic and non-participatory approaches. Therefore, there are good reasons for all involved in strategizing to attempt to go beyond the traditional top-down approaches and to actively search for ways to encourage participation – even in situations where the interests of particular actors may seem contradictory. This can be seen as a specific challenge for strategy experts – including all involved in the Strategy as Practice community.

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Doolin, B. (2002), ‘Enterprise discourse, professional identity and the organizational control of hospital clinicians’, Organization Studies, 23/3: 369–390. Eriksson, P. and Lehtimäki, H. (1998), ‘Strategic management of the local information society. A constructionist perspective on the production and evaluation of strategy documents’, Administrative Studies, 4: 290–301. (2001), ‘Strategy rhetoric in city management. How the presumptions of classic strategic management live on’, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 17: 201–223. Ezzamel, M., Willmott, H. and Worthington, F. (2001), ‘Power, control and resistance in “The factory that time forgot” ’, Journal of Management Studies, 38/8: 1053–1079. Fairclough, N. (2003), Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Longman. (2005), ‘Discourse analysis in organization studies: The case for critical realism’, Organization Studies, 26/6: 915–939. Fairclough, N. and Wodak, R. (1997), ‘Critical discourse analysis’, in T. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as social interaction. London: Sage, 258–284. Floyd, S. W. and Wooldridge, B. (2000), Building strategy from the middle: Reconceptualizing strategy process. California: Sage. Foucault, M. (1994), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume III, ed. J. D. Faubion. New York: The New Press. Hardy, C., Palmer, I. and Phillips, N. (2000), ‘Discourse as a strategic resource’, Human Relations, 53: 1227–1248. Hardy, C. and Phillips, N. (2004), ‘ Discourse and power’, in D. Grant et al. (eds), The SAGE handbook of organizational discourse analysis. London: Sage, 299–316. Hendry, J. (2000), ‘Strategic decision making, discourse, and strategy as social practice’, Journal of Management Studies, 37/7: 955–977. Holmer-Nadesan, M. (1996), ‘Organizational identity and space of action’, Organization Studies, 17/1: 49–81. Jarzabkowski, P. (2005), Strategy as practice. An activity-based approach. London: Sage. Knights, D. and Morgan, G. (1991), ‘Corporate strategy, organizations and subjectivity: A critique’, Organization Studies, 12/2: 251–273.

Kuronen, M.-L., Tienari, J. and Vaara, E. (2005), ‘The merger storm recognises no borders – An analysis of media rhetoric on a business manouver’, Organization, 12/2: 247–273. Maitlis, S. and Lawrence, T. B. (2003), ‘Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: Understanding failure in organizational strategizing’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 109–139. Mantere, S. and Vaara, E. (2008), ‘On the problem of participation in strategy: A critical discursive perspective’, Organization Science, 19/2: 341–358. Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J. A. (1985), ‘Of strategies, deliberate and emergent’, Strategic Management Journal, 6/3: 257–272. Mumby, D. K. (2004), ‘Discourse, power and ideology: Unpacking the critical approach’, in D. Grant et al. (eds), The SAGE handbook of organizational discourse analysis. London: Sage, 237–258. (2005), ‘Theorizing resistance in organizational studies. A dialectical approach’, Management Communication Quarterly, 19/1: 19–44. Phillips, N. and Hardy, C. (2002), Discourse analysis. Investigating processes of social construction. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Pomerantz, A. (1986), ‘Extreme case formulation. A way of legitimizing claims’, Human Studies, 9/2–3: 219–229. Rouleau, L. (2005), ‘Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day’, Journal of Management Studies, 42/7: 1413–1441. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2004), ‘Understanding the production of “strategy” and “organization” through talk amongst managerial elites’, Culture and Organization, 10/2: 125–141. (2005), ‘Strategic practice, “discourse” and the everyday interactional constitution of “power effects” ’, Organization, 12/6: 803–841. Seidl, D. (2007), ‘General strategy concepts and the ecology of strategy discourses: A systemic-discursive perspective’, Organization Studies, 28/2: 197–218. Thomas, P. (2003), ‘The recontextualization of management: A discourse-based approach to analyzing the development of management thinking’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/4: 775–801.

A critical discourse analysis of strategic development Thomas, R. and Davies, A. (2005), ‘Theorizing the micro-politics of resistance: New public management and managerial identities in the UK public services’, Organization Studies, 26/5: 683–706. Vaara, E., Kleymann, B. and Seristö H. (2004), ‘Strategies as discursive constructions: The case of airline alliances’, Journal of Management Studies, 41/1: 1–35.

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Watson, T. (1994), In search of management. Culture, chaos & control in managerial work. London: Routledge. Wodak, R. (2004), ‘Critical discourse analysis’, in C. Seale et al. (eds), Qualitative research practice London: Sage, 197–213. Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (2002), Methods of critical discourse analysis. London: Sage.

CHAPTER

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Strategizing and history M O NA E R IC SO N and L E IF MELI N

Introduction The living role of history has so far been missing in the Strategy as Practice literature. This chapter emphasizes strategizing in the context of time and suggests a dialogical openness to the past. The literature on Strategy as Practice predominantly sees practice ‘as something that firstly can be chosen and aligned through some form of deliberative weighting on the part of a strategist (albeit on a micro-social scale), and secondly, can be observed and classified by a researcher in terms of its outputs, or effects’ (Chia and Holt 2006, p. 637). Here, a challenge is to interlink close observations of the micro-level activities of people ‘with a continuous regard for the wider institutional context that informs and empowers such activities’ (Johnson et al. 2007, p. 22). Even if scholars taking up this challenge put individuals’ activities in context, the contextual dimension of time is still seldom included, eschewing historical frameworks. The aim of this chapter is to take the Strategy as Practice perspective a step further by elevating the historical dimension as a living tradition that shapes present future-oriented activities performed by practitioners in their representation and reconstruction of the past. Our focus centres on strategizing in relation to hermeneutical situatedness, prompting a dialogical openness to the past. Hermeneutical situatedness allows the practitioner to take on the appearance of a social historical being always affected by the testimony of history and under its influence (Gadamer 1989). The purpose is to show how hermeneutical situatedness shapes strategizing, that is, how unfolding strategic activities bring in history through the practices and the discourse of the past, broadening present future-oriented strategizing 326

to include history, represented and reconstructed at present as a living tradition. With the present as the starting point for a (re)turn to history, our purpose concerns the present–future–past relationality with reference to the practitioner’s existential being in and belongingness to the world. Implied in this is the dialogical openness to the past providing the practitioner with a living relationship with history, which means that investigating history as a context and making it available to present activities is not sufficient. As Gadamer (1989, p. 168) points out, a historical context does not provide a living relationship with the individual ‘but rather a merely ideative representation (Vorstellung)’. We hope to contribute with new understanding of how strategizing unfolds. In agreement with Chia and Holt (2006), we see a need for a revised understanding, accounting for strategizing as emanating from ‘an internalized modus operandi that reflects our culturally mediated disposition’ (p. 637). Here history as a living tradition plays a pivotal role. This chapter continues with a presentation of our perspective, anchored in a philosophical hermeneutically based understanding of practice, emphasizing the practitioner as a social historical being supported by the notion of hermeneutical situatedness that accentuates the present–future–past relationality. This perspective is put into the context of the Strategy as Practice literature. After a methodological note, closely linked to our theoretical framework, there follows an analysis of different strategic activities providing insights into strategizing as hermeneutically situated. Finally, the concluding discussion brings our interpretations and insights together in a coherent view on strategizing and history through the living cultural tradition associated with hermeneutical situatedness. It also directs attention to future research issues.

Strategizing and history

Towards a philosophical hermeneutically based perspective on Strategy as Practice Albeit Strategy as Practice studies do not deny the historical dimension, ‘how it is that people live in history’ (Lave 2003, p. 21) is mainly ignored. In focus is ‘the activities of those who enact, develop and deliver strategies; with the activities related to the doing of strategy’ (Johnson et al. 2007, pp. 16–17). The Strategy as Practice perspective directs attention to praxis and practices (Whittington 2003), where strategizing actors draw on certain practices when acting: ‘they shape strategic activity through who they are, how they act and what practices they draw upon in that action’ (Jarzabkowski et al. 2007, p. 10). Intra-organizational praxis is marked by extra-organizational practices, implying an integrated approach to the study of practice (Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington 2006). The actors construct activity, produce strategic action when interacting with distributed and accessible practices. Feldman and Pentland (2003, p. 101) describe the relevant activities as performative routines, which mean ‘specific actions, by specific people in specific places and times’. Practice scholars contribute to an understanding of many different issues and, given the multiplicity of issues, it is not surprising that there is no unified practice approach (Schatzki 2001). Neither is there a concern for history and its living dimension. A prime concern is rather the provision of detailed descriptions of everyday activity for the development of knowledge to enhance the firm’s ability to generate competitive advantage. An organization’s competitive edge depends on the coordination of the development of knowledge across the division of labour and on the productive move of knowledge within the organization (Brown and Duguid 2001). In this context, a crucial issue is to manage practice-based knowledge. As for effective service innovation, an integration of the firm’s capabilities with customers’ needs is required (Dougherty 2004). Equally important is to practise product innovation and to develop knowledge of how a product fits the firm (Dougherty 1992). Related to this, middle managers are supposed to use their stock of shared knowledge when involved in sensemaking and sensegiving (Rouleau 2005).

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On the individual level, it is important to empower effective practices. Therefore, the concern is the performance of the practitioners with their local effectiveness, including a mastery of the routine (Whittington 2003) and a need for better praxis that help shape more appropriate practices and practitioners (Whittington 2006). Strategy as Practice studies rarely discuss history as a living tradition with a focus on the practitioner as a social historical being. History is not merely a flexible resource the practitioner through lived experience selectively draws upon and invokes in the here-and-now time and space, as Samra-Fredericks (2003) maintains. When turning the attention to strategizing as lived experience, one needs to dwell on the practitioner’s existential conditions. As Jarzabkowski (2005, p. 24) emphasizes, one must ‘get inside the lived experience of the practitioners as they are doing strategy, understanding the multitude of actions and practices that constitute their “reality” in doing strategy’. But since the framework proposed by Jarzabkowski is informed by activity theory and theories of situated action and distributed cognition, the question arises on how the notion of lived experience comes into realization in the study. ‘It is difficult to infer from the view of strategy as a goal-directed activity historically embedded in the organization how lived experience of the practitioners relates to the goal-directedness and the historical embeddedness’ (Ericson 2007, p. 33). There is a need to secure a more philosophically based theoretical grounding of the Strategy as Practice perspective, which means placing primacy on ontologically oriented questions and taking into account the practitioner’s engagement in the world (Chia and MacKay 2007). Since hermeneutics, as shaped in the late twentieth century in the form of philosophical hermeneutics, is intimately linked with the study of history (Bernstein 1983), it is highly relevant to draw on philosophical hermeneutical insights. With reference to Gadamer (1989), a prominent figure in the development of philosophical hermeneutics, we direct our attention to the practitioner as a social historical human being, placing primacy on the practitioner’s ontological engagement in the world. Influenced by the phenomenology of

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Husserl and Heidegger, Gadamer inquired into the element of tradition, arguing that it constitutes the ‘real nature’ of human sciences. He put forth the idea that ‘research in human sciences cannot regard itself as in an absolute antithesis to the way in which we, as historical beings, relate to the past. At any rate, our usual relationship to the past is not characterized by distancing and freeing ourselves from tradition’ (p. 282). The practical dimension of philosophical hermeneutics, inherited from practical philosophy with its focus on praxis, brings effective-historical consciousness and horizon to the fore, which means that history is operative in our lives and cannot be treated as an object ontologically independent of a subject. Horizon represents the individual’s standpoint and designates ‘the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’ (Gadamer 1989, p. 302). As Gadamer sees it, we are always shaped by effective history. In other words, already thrown into tradition, we cannot free ourselves of tradition. Advancing the life-world idea, which derives from phenomenology and can be traced back to the idea of life-world developed by Husserl, Gadamer stresses dialogical openness in connection with a move with horizon and broadening of horizon.1 Here, lived experience refers to an existential mode of being-in-the-world that entails the dialogical way individuals relate to each other and to the cultural past. In terms of a communicative partner and living tradition, the past suggests a move with the horizon. Horizon then denotes the representing and reconstructing of the past – in the light of present future-oriented activities. Based on dialogical openness, the practitioner as a social historical being is able to look beyond what is nearby and change the understanding of a matter. Grounded in 1 Gadamer is strongly influenced by Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’ and ‘Politics’, the task of which was to defend practical and political reason against the domination of technology-based science. This illustrates what it means to broaden one’s horizon, enabling a fusion with another horizon. The appropriation of the Aristotelian insights implies that Gadamer is critical of his own situation. In the dialogical encounter with the work of Aristotle, he realizes that practice is not to be confined merely to techno-logically organized work (Bernstein 1983).

Heidegger’s phenomenological thinking, Gadamer considers every encounter that takes place with another person an encounter with the lived experience of that person. The view of history suggested in this chapter thus interlinks with the notion of lived experience as an ongoing integrative process. This experience provides the basis in the life of the practitioner, relating the practitioner to other human beings and to the cultural past. Experience is then not the discovery of facts. What we call experience and acquire through experience is a living historical process which constitutes our existential beingin-the-world (Gadamer 1989). In this process, the present and the future are brought together with the past, proposing a move beyond a chronological understanding towards a living history, which brings us to the issue of strategizing in relation to hermeneutical situatedness. With a living history, the practitioner is always affected by the testimony of the past and under its influence. Accordingly, in approaching an understanding of strategizing that accounts for hermeneutical situatedness, an important task is to relate strategizing to a mode of being that centres its focus on human communication, attributing a crucial role to language. Language can be seen as a social event in which individuals change and develop themselves through the processes of internalization and externalization, as Berger and Luckmann (1966) posit. Further, it can be argued that language is a medium through which we live. Our talk is a form of action and a resource for accomplishing social reality (SamraFredericks 2003). This integration of language into life brings out an understanding of human activity in the sense that a human being always is in her horizon. As with Gadamer (1989), understanding is a form of linguistic practice. Language includes talk and action and links the human being to the world. Implicated in this conceptualization of language is the belongingness to historical tradition – to the living past.

Methodology Our study uses an interpretative methodology influenced by philosophical hermeneutics. This means

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that it rests upon the assumption that the individual and the world interrelate through the individual’s lived experience of the world and, further, emphasizes hermeneutical situatedness in reference to the individual’s existential connections with the world. This notion of lived experience frames our methodology and gives primacy to an interpretative study that directs the interest to consciousness and experience, accentuating a dialogical openness to experience as dependent on historical grounding. As Gadamer (1989, p. 463) purports: ‘Belonging is brought about by traditions’ addressing us. Everyone who is situated in a tradition […] must listen to what reaches him from it. The truth of tradition is like the present that lies immediately open to the senses.’

Strategy as Practice as lived experience The focus on consciousness and lived experience is essential in philosophical hermeneutics, guiding our understanding of Strategy as Practice. History is always part of the practitioner and cannot be conceived of as an object as if it were ontologically independent of a subject. In other words, history denotes effective history which sets the task for consciousness. From a philosophical hermeneutical view, consciousness then means effectivehistorical consciousness (Bernstein 1983). The view of consciousness and experience espoused by philosophical hermeneutics therefore differs from that of other qualitative approaches, such as ethnography, grounded theory and phenomenological approaches (Moustakas 1994). Ethnography and grounded theory include analyses of experience as it appears in human consciousness based on a person’s memory, image and meaning (Moustakas 1994). Intentional experiences are acts of consciousness that combine an outward experience of an object with the object as contained in consciousness, as Moustakas explains. Experience is studied in an object, data about which can be collected as if the object is able to free itself from the subject that studies it. An empirical phenomenological study involves descriptions that help the researcher analyse what an experience in a particular situation means for a person having that experience. The descriptions

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underpin a delineation of meaning units that are related to each other and to the situation as a whole. To clarify the meaning of a unit, the researcher eliminates redundancies and elicits what the essence of the situation is for the subject. The aim of an empirical phenomenological study is to understand, from the subject’s own description, the underlying meaningful relations of experience (Kersten 1989; Moustakas 1994). Following the epoche process, in Husserl’s phenomenology, the researcher studies a phenomenon as far as possible free of her own preconceptions, beliefs and knowledge of the phenomenon. Consequently, it is important to refrain from ‘intendings and positings such that all that is left in acceptance are those pertaining “to the sphere of the transcendental ego’s ownness” in the natural attitude’, as Kersten (1989, p. 49) clarifies. Expressed differently, the deliberate attempt is to return to the things themselves. The focus is on how things and facts appear to a person in consciousness, excluding empirical interpretations and existential affirmations. ‘Epoche’ is a Greek word that means looking for what is really there. Such a reductionist approach, characterized as transcendental phenomenology, is basically a process of internal reflection through which a subject’s stream of conscious experience is analysed for disclosing the actualities and potentialities that constitute an experience (Moustakas 1994). Here Erlebnis is centred on, referring to a psychological understanding of experience and thus to the enduring residue of moments lived (Gadamer 1989). As Moustakas (1994, p. 41) concludes, transcendental phenomenology takes a rational path along which knowledge emerges from ‘a pure ego, a person who is open to see what is, just as it is, and to explicate what is in its own terms’. The primary source of phenomenological knowledge is perceptions, with intentions and sensations making up their content. These perceptions are called horizons. By introducing the concept of Erfahrung, Gadamer (1989) moves beyond an experience related to a subject, providing the basis of history as a living cultural tradition. He ascribes to experience an ontological status. Rather than placing the emphasis on horizontalization of perceptions in which the essence of a subject’s experience can be

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singled out, Gadamer uses the term ‘Erfahrung’ to designate an ongoing integrative process in which a human being is able to overturn an existent perspective and widen her horizon. Experience is subsequently related to effective-historical consciousness. Our methodology exhibits an awareness of lived experience in the sense marked by the Erfahrung term. Not derived from the enduring residue of specific moments in a human being’s life, experience is fused with the whole movement of life (Gadamer 1989). To be able to understand practice, we must take into account historical tradition and experience as lived. This is a central tenet of our philosophical hermeneutically oriented methodology.

Empirical material and methods A case study of strategizing as human activity is presented below. It focuses on the evolvement of a small domestic business firm, founded in 1923, into a global corporation with more than 1,800 employees in 2006, called Nefab. The empirical material is generated through interviews, documents and observations at top management meetings. The emphasis is on strategizing with reference to complex, interwoven activities associated with development in Nefab without marking out boundaries of a firm or company. A world of practice emerges through the language used by individuals who consider themselves representing or being associated with Nefab (Ericson 2007). Primarily, people with many years of association with Nefab were interviewed. Furthermore, people holding a position as manager were also interviewed, as they were expected to be engaged in strategic and organizational activities related to business development. Talking to people with more than twenty years, and in one case forty-seven years, of employment provided insights into complex, interwoven activities. In total, thirty-seven interviews were conducted during the period 2002–2006, both at the Nefab headquarters in Jönköping, situated in the southern Swedish province of Småland, and at the largest subsidiary, Nefab Emballage AB, in Runemo, located in the northern Swedish province of Hälsingland. In addition, notes were taken during seven top management meetings attended

during 2004. The owners, managers, assistants, employee representatives and board members met with actively take part in a rich array of strategic activities. The titles assigned the interviewees in the text refers to the positions they held at the time of the study (2002–2006). The questions, posed in an open-ended fashion, focused on a broad range of strategic activities associated with three major strategies: solutionsproviding, product differentiation and internationalization. Questions also focused on how the interviewees were introduced to their work; what relationships with other people were established over time and how these relationships changed; if they had been engaged in organizational and other types of changes; what type of activities they had been involved in since they were employed and what critical issues they had dealt with; what the place in northern Sweden, Runemo, where the business started up, meant to them; and what terms they would use to describe their work in Nefab. The interviews mainly took the form of dialogues through which we tried to gather indications of the interviewees’ lived experience while listening to what reached him or her from the past. It is, however, difficult to continuously emphasize a dialogical character of the interviews when translating the words of another person. As Czarniawska (1997) points out, many topics that are brought up in a conversation among practitioners and the researcher get reduced in space when conclusions are drawn based on the conditions set by the researcher. Therefore, there might be a tendency to wipe out nuances in the dialogues. According to Czarniawska (1997, p. 18): ‘We can become at best the spokespersons for the others, translating their speech by saying something that we think they mean.’ Preparations for the interviews were made by reading internal newsletters and documents. The information generated from these documents gave some hints on what kind of activities people were involved in and supplemented the interview accounts, including Nefab Annual Report, 1985–2004; Nefab News, 1976–2005 (approximately 4,300 pages); Organisation Nefab Group; Handbook for Team Representatives and Facilitators; Offering to subscribe for share in

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Nefab AB/Prospectus; NEFAB customer survey 2004 and some confidential reports. Due to the limited time allotted for completing the research project, the written material mainly concentrated on activities and changes during the past two decades. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The juxtaposition of material generated from interviews with material from internal documents and annual reports, and with material based on notes from observations at top management meetings, offer insight into strategizing and its temporal context with reference to present–future–past relationality. Observations means here that the researcher’s attention was directed to activities that the top managers were involved in and talked about. As noticed at the meetings, the top managers agreed on making substantial efforts, on a global level, to become a more competitive and market-oriented organization, implementing a renewed product concept while letting go of past ways of thinking about the product. At these meetings, the present, the future and the past clearly were brought together. When juxtaposing the material, our interest was also drawn to activities repeatedly referred to verbally and in the written form. Repetition indicated important activities to highlight. A Nefab world of practice emerges in our study through the language used by the interviewees and through the language used in annual reports, internal newsletters and other documents, and at the top management meetings. The vision of this world is to become the customers’ global partner of complete packaging solutions. Two customer segments are particularly significant: the telecom equipment and the automotive industries. To ensure that the customers receive complete packaging solutions promptly and efficiently, operations are organized in a matrix with five market regions – Nordic; Central Europe; South Europe, Brazil and Great Britain; North America; and Asia – interacting with three functions that cut across the regional borders – Customer Solutions; Operations; and Finance and Economy. Akin to the ethnomethodological conversation view (Garfinkel 1967), our interpretative methodological approach takes account of talk-in-interaction

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and the lived strategy (Samra-Fredericks 2003), but we try also to understand Strategy as Practice as constituted in the practitioners’ existential relations with history as lived tradition. At the same time, when looking into the Nefab world of practice, it is difficult to make explicit the practitioners’ existential connections with the world. We cannot directly observe another person’s experience or obtain data from interviews or documents about the interrelatedness between the person in question and the world in which the person lives. This would require us to live through all the conscious states and intentional acts which constitute experience (Schutz 1932). Although language serves as a mediator of a living past (Gadamer 1989), we can only gather some indications of the practitioner’s lived experience while listening to what reaches the practitioner from the past at present. The activities described and discussed can be understood as life expressions connected with lived experience. According to Seebohm (2004, p. 94), ‘the lived experience of other living beings and human beings is absent for us as well. We have only their life expressions as indicators of their own lived experience. But we have no possible immediate access to, no original evidence of, the lived experience in other human beings or animals.’ Another limitation of our study concerns the focus, which is directed solely to the historical dimension. It clearly leaves out other important aspects of Strategy as Practice, such as ‘tacit’ methods for doing practice and talk-based interactive routines (Samra-Fredericks 2003), how agents’ identities and their strategies are co-constructed (Chia and Holt 2006), and how practitioners make sense of and narrate their notions about directionality (Barry and Elmes 1997). Nevertheless, in the next section we keep our focus on strategizing interlinked with history. Gadamer’s understanding of philosophical hermeneutics lays the groundwork for the thesis that all understanding and interpretation are intrinsically connected with practical application (Bernstein 1983). In this, a bridge is implied between our practical methodological and theoretical concerns. Our methodological approach provides us with a theoretical framework. The ensuing discussion is therefore theoretically grounded in philosophical

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hermeneutical concepts, subsequently guided by the notions of lived experience and the being-inthe-world mode of engagement. This means that we direct our understanding and interpretation of the empirical material towards present future-oriented strategizing, and towards changes in horizons that open up for a representation and reconstruction of the past. The fact that the practitioner is always involved in the dialectical interplay with the past enhances the practical dimension of philosophical hermeneutics. History is operative in the lives and activities of the practitioners (Gadamer 1989).

Strategizing and history – applying a philosophical hermeneutical framework Present future-oriented strategic activities are interpreted as changes in people’s views of how business should be conducted at present. Theoretically grounded in a philosophical hermeneutical understanding, these changes prompt a move of people’s horizons of the past (Gadamer 1989). The activities constitute the world of practice of Nefab people. Solutions-providing, upgrading of technological knowledge and construction of machines for producing boxes of different designs are strategic activities that propose moves with the horizons of the past. Present future-oriented solutions-providing activities serve as our empirically oriented starting point. We cannot place ourselves in the past but reach towards the past through present futureoriented activities. These activities open up to a historical dimension, coming alive in the owners’ present efforts to keep in force the history of Nefab and in the words people use when talking about their here-and-now involvement. Solutionsproviding brings us back to the geographical place where the Nefab business once started. It originates in the formation of a vision and its revisions, and directs attention to a business concept that both enables and constrains people to participate in the transformation of Nefab into a solutions-providing company. Solutions-providing further interrelates with box-producing which proposes a focus on the development of packaging and internationalization of trade. The present challenge faced by Nefab people to provide the

customers with solutions rather than with boxes inevitably turns to past box-producing, and internationalization activities. Accordingly, we organize the empirically oriented illustration and our philosophical hermeneutically based interpretation by first directing our interest to the geographical place, then to the vision formed by the principal owners of Nefab and its revision, to the concept of complete packaging solutions and its enabling and constraining character, and finally to internationalization and broadened horizons. With a concern for an individual’s being-inthe-world mode of engagement, we argue that the practitioner as a social historical being expresses an interest in another person for reaching an understanding that opens up for opportunities to market, produce and sell packaging solutions overseas. The concept of horizon applied here presumes lending oneself to the emerging of something else. But an encounter with tradition may also involve tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar, as Gadamer (1989) contends.

The geographical place From our philosophical hermeneutically based theoretical viewpoint, it is clear that present futureoriented strategic activities call attention to the past, keeping the past alive by providing links to the geographical place Runemo, where the business started up in the 1920s, manufacturing and selling wooden products for the neighbours only. From the viewpoint of the corporate telecom coordinator and key account manager, this small community remains the centre for excellent development work of the physical product: The heart of Nefab is in Hälsingland. There is an extraordinarily high competence level in Hälsingland, foremost with regard to all types of reusable packaging solutions. I think that many companies in the world very much depend on the people there. There are some old guys who are very competent and therefore of crucial importance for the companies that operate around the world.

The accounting assistant also highlights Runemo in terms of locality and place: I visited Nefab in Hälsingland when I began working here at the head office in Jönköping, in 2001. I

Strategizing and history was guided around and I talked to people. It is very important to visit the place where the business once started, I think. The heart of Nefab is still in Hälsingland. I felt a very good working spirit and I really enjoyed visiting reality, as they used to say, and see how things are done and not merely sit in my office, at the head office here in Småland, counting money. The main owners have their roots in Hälsingland, which further strengthens the impression that the heart is in Hälsingland.

The principal owners, Ing-Marie Nordgren and her husband Jochum Pihl,2 still care very much about Runemo, where Ing-Marie’s grandfather, father and uncle built up the Nefab business, as the facilities manager emphasizes : It should be emphasized though that the NordgrenPihl family cares very much about the place where the business once started. They try to maintain a positive Nefab spirit through their simple downto-earth way of living. Ing-Marie Nordgren feels strongly for the place in Hälsingland and she puts great effort in keeping the history of Nefab in force.

a living tradition and in that sense as a communicative partner of present future-oriented activities. The hermeneutical situatedness of activities brings out the past, projecting the past into the present and the future as a living tradition. There remains a continuity of meaning which links the present and the future to the past (Gadamer 1989). The geographical place of Runemo is crucial in that respect. Newly recruited people and customers visit Runemo, which also serves as a place for training sessions and annual board meetings: The location in Hälsingland means a lot; it has a symbolic value, which has to do with the fact that the owners are firmly rooted and truthful to Hälsingland. The owners actively take part in the business through the Board and they are involved in various kinds of development projects. Customers from all over the world visit the plant in Hälsingland so there is really a strong feeling for the province. (Staff manager)

A visit to a place where everything started evokes special feelings: As newly employed I was sent to Hälsingland, to Nefab Emballage, for an introduction during a couple of days. You stay in Gammelgården, near the production plant. A visit to the place where everything once started evokes special feelings. I think that it is the culture, sort of […] the culture of Nefab […] I kind of felt that and I still have that feeling.

A positive Nefab spirit derives from the Hälsingland place. The project leader describes the spirit in the following way: One is very keen on making contact easy in Nefab. The Nefab spirit is about simplicity. Much of it derives from the safe northern province of Hälsingland and some from Småland. When I visited Hälsingland during a two-week introduction program I really felt the simplicity. After visiting all companies of the Group, I feel that everyone expresses pride being part of a Swedish group. When I went to our French subsidiary, the first thing I noticed in the entrance hall was the big head of an elk, which symbolizes the connection to Sweden.

The Nefab spirit contributes to keeping the history of Nefab in force with the past treated as 2

The ownership structure changed in September 2007 with the private equity company Nordic Capital acquiring a majority stake in Nefab. Since 1983, Ing-Marie Nordgren and Jochum Pihl, representing the third-generation owners of Nefab, have been majority owners. In accordance with the agreement with Nordic Capital, Nordgren and Pihl will stay as minority owners, yet be able to exert some influence for keeping in force the history of Nefab, as Ing-Marie Nordgren points out.

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By inviting customers from all over the world to visit the plant in Hälsingland, the ties are strengthened with the place where the cradle of the global business once stood: ‘Customers from all over the world visit the plant in Hälsingland so there is really a strong feeling for the province’ (staff manager). In addition, the philosophical hermeneutical concept of history elucidates the fact that the paintings made by Ing-Marie Nordgren’s father, and the son of the founder of the Nefab business, HansElov Nordgren3 who was managing director during the period 1969–1982, help represent and reconstruct the past as a living tradition. The daughter 3

Hans-Elov Nordgren retired in 1982 and his son-in-law Jochum Pihl was appointed managing director. Pihl left his position at the annual shareholder meeting in June 1994 and Lars-Åke Rydh became the CEO of Nefab.

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presents the Nefab subsidiaries scattered around the globe with the paintings on different inauguration occasions. My father painted a lot, especially during his part-time sick leave the last two years before he died in 1983. There were so many paintings that I wondered what to do with them all. Then I came up with the idea that the paintings might actually add something to the cultural glue or to the Nefab spirit that helps knit people together in Nefab, worldwide. So I had the paintings framed out of the particular bars that hay used to be piled on to dry. Together with a résumé of the history of Nefab and a few words about my father I present our subsidiaries with the paintings, usually when a ceremony in the form of an inauguration of a new factory is taking place or in connection with a visit by the Board of Directors. My father envisioned Nefab as an international company and when leaving one of his paintings in the care of a subsidiary abroad there will be a piece of his soul in that company. I think this is a beautiful thought. (Ing-Marie Nordgren)

The paintings seem to establish a frame of reference for present, future-oriented solutionsproviding activities, actualizing the days of a former managing director. Through the material used for the frames of the paintings, Ing-Marie Nordgren links local Hälsingland culture and practices to Nefab. This constructs a situation that suggests a transposition of the horizons of the employees and customers visiting the place. Our conclusion Activities associated with the past project into the future through a living tradition. The fact that IngMarie Nordgren and Jochum Pihl care very much about the place Runemo, keeping the Nefab history in force and the Nefab spirit alive, allows the past to speak repeatedly with the present and the future (Gadamer 1989). Newcomers and customers transpose themselves in the historical horizon from which the geographical place in different ways communicates with them. Here a person’s own past and that of the geographical place towards which the person’s historical consciousness is directed helps instigate a move of the horizon and a broadening of the horizon. The employee and the

customer are brought into a situation that forces them to look beyond what is present.

The vision and its revisions In reference to solutions-providing, strategizing concerns the development of the complete packaging solutions concept – the CPS concept – which involves activities associated with the delivery of reliable, cost-efficient and environmentally compatible packaging solutions, including the sourcing of all packaging material. Current talk and action largely focus on how to become a more marketoriented learning organization envisioned as a CPS supplier. Strategizing with reference to present solutions-providing activities progressively directs towards the future but, at the same time, orients towards the past. Consistent with our philosophical hermeneutically based theoretical framework, what is going on at present integrates with the horizon of the past with which people in the lived-in-world move. The underlying assumptions of the livedin-world mode of engagement prompt an interplay between and the bringing together of the present, the future and the past. Following Gadamer (1989), we contend that the strategic activities enhance the communicative feature of the past when drawing attention to the present future-oriented formation of the vision. Strategic activities accordingly refer to a hermeneutical situation which engages the practitioner. The CPS concept originates in the formation of the vision and its continuous revisions carried out by the principal owners Ing-Marie Nordgren and Jochum Pihl, who had already expressed the idea in the 1980s of offering the customer everything associated with transport: In the 80s we pursued the idea of expanding the vision, incorporating what we today call complete solutions, in order to offer the customer everything that is associated with transport. However the vision was not materialized, which proved that the time was not ripe. Nevertheless we learned a lot. At the beginning of the 90s we went back to basics. In the mid-90s we encouraged a segmentation of the market, and at the beginning of 2000 we revised the vision, drawing on the experiences we had gained about complete packaging

Strategizing and history solutions. The time was right to do that. Now this more advanced type of packaging services was requested by the market. We do still focus on refining the vision of being a global partner for complete packaging solutions and are also engaging in the continued global expansion, in particular with regard to Asia. (Ing-Marie Nordgren)

The vision suggests a stream of activities that entails discussions, expectations, agreements and continual revisions. It exhibits the future-oriented ‘Nefab way’, pronouncing what is becoming. The Nefab way reveals that the winner of tomorrow is an expertise company. As Lars-Åke Rydh, the CEO, remarks: ‘Tomorrow’s winners in the struggle over who will win customer confidence to deliver packaging will be the company with the best expertise. We will successively develop increasingly toward being a know-how company.’ ‘Tomorrow’ designates what has not yet occurred with the arrow of time pointing to the future. It is no longer good enough to be a skilled manufacturer of a good product. Customers want more. The general packaging skills of our organization are becoming increasingly important. During recent years, we have made determined efforts to develop our combined expertise, a work in progress that will continue in 2003. (Lars-Åke Rydh)

‘Work in progress’ is consistent with the vision, communicating what the customers want the product to be. The efforts to develop expertise entail a process of constructing a more advanced offer. Implicit in this work is a disjunction between a former and a latter offer that proposes revision, instigating a movement directed towards the future. To materialize the vision, to become the global partner of complete packaging solutions, the business concept requires the managers and other employees to supply its customers within selected global market segments solutions that reduce total cost and environmental impact. The imperative is to show the market that Nefab truly has a vision of providing complete packaging solutions, according to LarsÅke Rydh. Applying our theoretical framework, we argue that people are drawn into the reconstruction of

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their horizons, which presupposes dialogical openness, not only to each other, but to the cultural past. Hermeneutical situatedness suggests here that the experience of the principal owners helps create relations to Nefab employees and to the past. Our conclusion The vision implies moves of the historical horizons. In accordance with Gadamer (1989), these particular moves represent changes that occur over time in the standpoints of the principal owners, the managers and others. The vision pictures what Ing-Marie Nordgren and Jochum Pihl want the company to reach for. Here, future orientation manifests in the difference between the 1980s and the beginning of the 2000s. The principal owners’ focus on refining the vision clearly marks a horizon movement reflected by what is a revised standpoint from which the Nefab business is seen.

A business concept as enabling and constraining The CPS concept connects with the CPS Competence project, which is carried out through teamwork that enables people to actively participate in the transformation of Nefab into a solutionsproviding company with global presence, shouldering more responsibility. At the same time, several challenges are faced when implementing the CPS concept and some sales persons feel constrained about engaging in providing solutions. Drawing on our philosophical hermeneutical framework, enabling refers to the broadening of horizons whereas constraining chiefly refers to the narrowing or nonbroadening of horizons. It is possible to speak of both broadening and narrowing of horizons, as Gadamer (1989) informs us. Enabling associates with a rich variety of activities performed by Nefab people through teamwork across organizational units and regions to realize the CPC concept, reaching and securing the knowledge and competence level required by the customers. According to the director of sales and marketing, ‘to offer CPS the way that our customers expect us to, we have to make knowledge accessible all over the Group. Therefore, it is very

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important that we share knowledge with each other instead of building knowledge “islands”.’ The group competence coordinator defines competence in the following way: ‘your ability to deliver results, by using your knowledge, your experience and your network of experts. Right values are also a significant constituent of competence. It is important to share knowledge and information in order to increase your colleagues’ ability to deliver results.’ The staff manager is involved in competence development and teamwork on the local level, in Nefab Emballage. When looking to the future, she describes competence development as a tool for strengthening the competitiveness of the company, and the goal-oriented teamwork taking place: ‘Since production moves to low-cost countries, it becomes even more important to focus on competence. Competence development is a tool for strengthening the company’s competitiveness […] Goal-oriented teams focus on specific tasks in accordance with a goal set before-hand.’ Teamwork implies a shift in individuals’ way of talking and acting: earlier it was up to the managers to see that you were performing in accordance with their rules. Increasingly, responsibility for the work has shifted to the employees themselves. Today you have to develop your competence, being able to actively take part in the ongoing change processes, coping with various problems that might arise. The problems are nowadays ‘put on the floor’, so to speak, and you must be prepared to take on more responsibility. This increases your understanding of what is going on, which I think is very good. Teams composed of six to ten people are taking on more responsibility for competence development and for issues associated with quality and environment. Step by step we are making improvements. The intensified competition, also from low-cost countries, forces us to consistently guard against falling behind the competitors. (Employee representative of LO, The Swedish Trade Union Confederation, and member of the board of directors)

Teamwork is a lever for developing competence also on a global level, as the director of sales and marketing says. The establishment of centres of competence facilitates global work by encouraging

cross-border communication between teams, enabling an understanding of how to provide services that cover the entire logistics chain of the customer. Key account managers, sales people and others immerse themselves in the customers’ experience to find out what the customers’ preferences and needs are, while also dealing with tensions that emerge between familiar and unfamiliar ways of operating on the market. The global business development manager is leading various projects in interaction with one of the key customers, namely Flextronics. He says: ‘As the Global Business Development Manager I have been assigned the task of analyzing the markets of Flextronics worldwide, designing, carrying out and coordinating various projects. My responsibility is global. At present I am cooperating with Flextronics in Poland, Hungary, China and Malaysia.’ The global business development manager refers to activities performed in encounters with representatives of the Flextronic customer with the dialogue being an important part of designing and managing projects. Our theoretical framework grounded in philosophical hermeneutical thinking helps reveal that changes and reciprocities take place through the dialogues. With standpoints revised, horizons are broadened, leading to a new understanding of the present situation, manifesting in the coordination of various projects. Local and global teamwork activities progressively direct towards the future but do also orient towards the past. Integral to the actual teamwork is the ‘quality of freedom’ that brings with it the sense of the informal and boundaryless organization that has long since evolved (logistics manager). Corridors and coffee breaks used to work as arenas for teamwork and decision-making. As the group competence coordinator informs us, ‘many decisions were taken during discussions in the corridors, and information about the decisions was shared immediately after, at the next coffee break. Communication took place in informal ways. Projects, more loosely structured, were set up without rigorous guidance.’ What is going on at present admittedly integrates with the activities of the past. Ongoing teamwork activities are not simply a product of

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purposive activities. Following Gadamer (1989), it is clear that the horizon of the present forms under the influence of the past. It is not a closed horizon but something into which people engaging in ‘enabling’, associated with local and global teamwork, move and move with them. Not only does the CPS concept enable people to broaden their horizons, but also imposes some constraints that seem to hinder a broadening move with the horizon of the present. There might even be a tendency to close in on the traditional (non-CPS) packaging offer. Activities supposedly constraining the implementation of the CPS concept combine with the enabling activities. This relates to the struggles that engage the president and heads of the regions and the sales people in the different markets to be on track, not deviating from the Nefab way. The president and head of the Central Europe region faces the challenge of changing the existing experienced sales team from a box seller to a CPS consultant. In the ‘old’ markets of Central Europe, that is Benelux, Great Britain, Germany and Austria, new ways of selling have to be learned. After years of experiencing box selling there is little readiness for change and letting go of old defences and behaviour. He reveals: ‘It is hard to convince experts in other packaging materials to join us to improve the competence of the team, because we have been just a box producer and some of our local companies are quite small.’ Several challenges are faced when attempting to dilute a box-producing image, implementing the CPS concept. The president and head of the Nordic region admits that ‘it is a huge step mentally for a product and production-oriented organization to become a customer-oriented organization’. Also the president and head of the North America region points to a wood box seller mentality among the sales people in the region and the need to develop confidence in their ability to sell complete packaging solutions and to provide incentives to sell non-wood solutions. Also, he recognizes a need to enhance confidence in the entire organization’s ability to deliver such solutions, pushing forwards to continue moving in the direction provided by the Nefab way. The development of confidence in

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the ability to provide the customer with complete packaging solutions proposes a broadened horizon movement. Our conclusion In their endeavour to realize the CPS concept, Nefab people arguably broaden their horizons while representing and reconstructing the past associated with the earlier non-CPS packaging offering, without holding on to this offering. Enabling therefore refers to a shift in people’s ways of talking and acting that allows for horizon movements. From our philosophically hermeneutical viewpoint, the change in the understanding, of what actions need to be taken at present in order to implement the CPS concept, prompts a move of people’s horizons. In other words, the range of vision from which the future-oriented CPS concept is seen widens. Implied in this is a dialogical openness (Gadamer 1989) that relates the members of a team to each other and to customers requiring more sophisticated packaging solutions. The dialogical openness, hermeneutically situated, fosters the communication and cooperation essential for the development of local and global competence with teamwork considered a lever for developing this competence. The establishment of competence centres further facilitates the global work by encouraging communication and cooperation between teams, enabling an understanding through a move with the horizons of the team members. At the same time, inherent in the struggles to implement the CPS concept are constraints that can be described as horizons that are bound to the old way of supplying packaging. Following Gadamer (1989), this indicates that a person does not see far enough while not being able to overturn an existent perspective, or strongly believes in the significance of the qualities adhered to the traditional way of providing packaging. But the horizon of the present continuously forms, as Gadamer points out, and might therefore express a breadth of vision that enables a person to look beyond what is nearby, ‘seeing better’ the advantages associated with the CPS concept. Through this horizon movement, constraining can turn into enabling.

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Internationalization and broadened horizons Notably, box-producing does not re-present a background against which future-oriented solutionsproviding activities tune in as the past dynamically repeats and gains contemporaneity with the present. Some managers still face the challenge of changing from box seller to solutions provider. Present activities connect with the past, accentuating the living tradition feature of the past. Interlinked with solutions-providing, box-producing activities recall activities carried out at the physical place where the business once started. In the early 1920s, Sigurd Nordgren, the grandfather of Ing-Marie Nordgren, opened a carpentry shop at his home in Hälsingland for making skis, kitchen utensils and bread boxes in order to meet the needs of the local customers who lived in the neighbourhood. The facilities manager tells about the very beginning of the business: The ash-tray, on which Sigurd put a small chimney for carrying the smoke away, was one of the very first hand-made products. I have been told that his eldest son (Sigurd and his wife had five sons and one daughter) met a girl, whose father was a baker. The baker was in need of boxes to put bread in and to satisfy the demand of the new customer that unexpectedly turned up, Sigurd started to make wooden breadboxes. The business expanded and in the mid-60s, when I was working here in the factory, we manufactured breadboxes, selling them to bakers all over Sweden and even abroad, in Norway.

In the years to come, increasingly sophisticated packaging was developed. The employees, who were involved in production, constructed and learned how to use different kinds of machines. They developed a high level of knowledge for advancing their technical competence. Just one single person or a team of technicians used to control all steps in the development of a new machine concept. Continuous development of the production process was highly important for strategic purposes, maintaining a competitive edge and cost efficiency. Strategic activities related to boxproducing accordingly underwent differentiation that manifested in the design and construction of

machines and production equipment, quality work and adaptation to environmental regulation. People’s commitment to continually upgrading technological knowledge, constructing machines for producing boxes of different designs with the requirements of environmental compatibility in mind, implies moving and broadening of horizons. As social historical human beings, the employees relate to a past when less sophisticated packaging and boxes were produced. Applying philosophical hermeneutical theory, the upgrading of technological knowledge suggests a move with the horizon of the past. Therefore, there is no objectifying process by which employees with long experience of box-producing and a great many years of employment in Nefab can free themselves from the past. While not preconditioned by history, the past comes alive in present future-oriented activities that aim to maintain competitive edge and cost efficiency. During the 1980s and the 1990s, trade became more internationalized and production facilities and subsidiaries were established abroad. Internationalization also meant understanding a situation in which people from Japan, Singapore, Malaysia or China find themselves. ‘True optimism’, ‘good relationships’, the opportunity given Nefab to start up production in China and hire Chinese staff within a fairly short period of time and the expression ‘very well received’ indicate moving and broadening horizons. Our own tradition and that other tradition towards which one’s attention is directed help shape these moving horizons (Gadamer 1989). At the very beginning of the 1990s, sales were conducted in Japan, where a full-time staff consisting of three people expressed their true optimism about sales opportunities. Before counting on regular deliveries, large customers were contacted for testing the Nefab products marketed by the Japanese agent. In Singapore and Malaysia, business relationships were developed with representatives of the company PB Packaging. From a visit to a Nefab closed for the summer, in 1992, the president and the project manager drew the conclusion that the Nefab products should have a good potential market in Singapore and Malaysia. Jochum Pihl, the co-owner, together with the managing

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director of Nefab Emballage AB, followed up on this by visiting Singapore two years later. Due to the good relationships that were built up, PB Packaging decided to employ a sales executive for the promotion of Nefab products. In 1997, a decision was made to set up a production plant in China, at a place called Wuxi, situated between Nanjing and Shanghai. Good infrastructure was provided through the contacts with the industrial park in Wuxi (WSIP), which had specialized in assisting 100 percent foreign-owned companies to establish in China. According to Jochum Pihl, ‘WSIP is a unique phenomenon in China, and we, having had the possibility to study this industrial park more closely, consider it a very good alternative compared with starting a joint venture with a Chinese company’. Nefab was able to begin production as early as the first quarter of 1998 after hiring Chinese key staff. At the end of the 1990s, the telecom equipment industry was developing rapidly and Ericsson, the biggest customer of Nefab, was in place starting up a number of joint ventures with Chinese partners – the most important one turned out to be Ericsson Nanjing Communication Co (ENC): On my business trips abroad I used to visit our customers in Europe. I talked to them, asking them about their plans, also with regard to establishments on the Asian market. At the same time I showed my sincere interest in the particular challenges they faced and in the problems they dealt with. I felt that I was very well received. As a result of the business trips it was fairly easy to take the decision to set up a factory in Asia, following our customers in their geographical expansion. (Jochum Pihl)

By visiting ENC, Pihl found out that cooperating with ENC was a very good idea. In need of more sophisticated packaging delivery for loudspeakers and telecom furniture, ENC welcomed cooperation with Nefab, the Swedish supplier of Ericsson: They had delivered enough to realize that production of packaging is not as simple as it might seem, and therefore they discussed the issue of future cooperation with Nefab with pleasure. This was also supported by the Ericsson staff, which welcomes a Nefab presence of some kind in China.

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This is a very exciting challenge for Nefab, which is why the short visit was followed up by another visit by myself and Lars-Åke Rydh in mid May. Now we have to study the condition for an establishment more in detail. (Jochum Pihl)

Nefab started production in 1998, anticipating continued market growth, and knowing that infrastructure projects in the form of telecom expansion are prioritized in China. It should also be noted that the temporality suggested by internationalization activities relates strategizing to the days of Hans-Elov Nordgren. As the CEO, during the period 1969–1982, he played a significant role in the development of the business, as the Nefab people interviewed witness. When describing the activities of Hans-Elov Nordgren and his way of being, the past gains contemporaneity with the present. The words people use instigate a process in which past and present continuously mediate. Today, the focus on sustaining global presence implies that it is certainly not good enough to be a skilled manufacturer of a physical product, as LarsÅke Rydh points out. It is necessary to develop and coordinate the solutions-providing concept ensuring cooperation with key customers across the regional boundaries, achieving globality. Filling the customer’s ‘complete need’ requires restructuring the organization, dividing it into market units and supply units. To more quickly meet the complete need, the accomplishment of acquisitions suggests integrating the acquired companies in the existent structure, which gains the support of a key account structure for realizing positive synergies between the different units and markets. The broadening of horizons is implicated in the filling of the customers’ complete need and in the realization of the positive synergies between the units, the markets, and the acquired companies and the acquirer. Our conclusion Internationalization unfolds in interactions among people belonging to different historical traditions. Internationalization also means the discovery of other people’s horizons and traditions in which people as social historical beings hermeneutically situate. Tradition speaks from people’s historical

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horizons from which they cannot free themselves. Every encounter with tradition could involve a tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. However, through a sincere interest in the other and building good relationships, one is able to reach an understanding (Gadamer 1989) that opens up for opportunities to market, produce and sell packaging solutions overseas. This implies a move with one’s horizon, looking beyond what is nearby. Since the horizon of the present is always in motion, people are able to overcome their own particularity and that of the other, Gadamer contends.

Strategizing and hermeneutical situatedness – concluding remarks Our theoretical framework derives from an interpretative methodological approach that draws on philosophical hermeneutical thinking. This framework strengthens the interplay between the ontological assumptions and the qualitative method employed in the actual research. With the focus on present future-oriented strategic activities calling attention to history, it clearly shows that the notions of effective-historical consciousness and lived experience frame our understanding and interpretation of the empirical material. On this basis, important insights are gained about strategizing as hermeneutically situated, concerned with the relationship between individual and world in which the past is represented and reconstructed at present with a future outlook. The chapter reveals a need for an increased understanding of the practitioner as a social historical being, engaging in strategizing. The strategic activities described and discussed in connection with horizon movements reflect numerous encounters among practitioners. Owners, managers, assistants, employee representatives and board members, as social historical beings, participate and share in strategic activities associated with a geographical place, revisions of a vision, a business concept as enabling and constraining strategic activities including internationalization. On a more generalized level, our philosophically based understanding and interpretation suggest that a geographical place, where the bricks

once were laid for a business, constructs a situation that admits a transposition of the horizons of people visiting and being exposed to the place. In the light of the present presence, atmosphere and activities associated with the place are represented and reconstructed. A person’s own past and that of the geographical place towards which the person’s historical consciousness is directed help instigate a move of the person’s horizon and a broadening of the horizon. That towards which one’s attention is directed is not locked in and constrained by history. Further, our understanding and interpretation show that a vision holds a future orientation but reflects also a disjunction between a former and a latter customer offer which proposes revision that prompts a movement towards the future. People involved in future-oriented revising activities are, at the same time, involved in reconstructing their past, moving with their horizons of the past. Looking to the future means reconstructing the past. The horizon of the present cannot be formed without the past. In the words of Gadamer (1989, p. 304): The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never absolutely bound to any one standpoint […] Horizons change for a person who is moving. Thus the horizon of the past, out of which all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion.

Also pointed out, a business concept could be both enabling and constraining, with enabling referring to the broadening of horizons and constraining concerned with the narrowing or non-broadening of horizons. People who endeavour to implement a renewed business concept admittedly broaden their horizons, representing and reconstructing a past when letting go of old familiar ways of doing business. Nevertheless, a person holding on to an old offering may appear reluctant to move with the horizon for opening up for an offering more consistent with a renewed business concept. The horizon must express a breadth of vision that enables a person to overturn an existent perspective and look beyond what is familiar and nearby. There is no truly closed horizon, as Gadamer (1989) asserts. A horizon is something into which

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we move and moves with us and, through this horizon movement, ‘constraining’ can evolve into ‘enabling’. With reference to internationalization, strategizing concerns the moves of the horizons of those involved in communicating and cooperating across national borders. Talk and action that centre around the moves into foreign markets open up horizons from which new business opportunities are seen. Cooperating across national borders requires openness to views expressed by people coming from different countries and situated in various traditions. Since communication and cooperation involve dialogue, according to Gadamer (1989), it is important to be attentive to the differences that might be present, broadening one’s range of vision from which a project and internationalization efforts are seen. The openness is such that it exists both for the one who speaks and for the one who listens. When listening to another person’s insight into a matter, one might discover something in it, coming to an understanding. This means broadening one’s horizon, which basically presumes lending oneself to the emerging of something else, Gadamer explains. Since human beings continuously externalize themselves in activity, there is no ‘closed sphere of quiescent interiority’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 70). While being open to the unfamiliar, people join with others in a dialogical relationship. It is our hope that this chapter contributes to an elaborated meaning of strategizing within the perspective of Strategy as Practice. Based on our philosophical hermeneutical understanding and interpretation of the empirically oriented material, a trans-individual dynamic Strategy as Practice perspective emerges. Strategic activities associated with the past are projected into the future through a living tradition that ‘speaks’ repeatedly with the present and the future (Gadamer 1989). This means that strategizing is not directly attributable to an individual practitioner and the practitioner’s intentions and purposes, but rather trans-individual, while giving primacy to culturally and historically shaped and situated practice (Chia and MacKay 2007). Consequently, we do not identify macroentities tied to micro-activities. A reliance on a micro–macro distinction (or individual agency and

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structure), where macro-entities are aggregations of micro-activities, refers to a form of social atomism, as Chia and MacKay argue. The philosophical hermeneutical notions of lived experience and the being-in-the-world mode of engagement help overcoming the need for drawing a dividing line between micro and macro. The question of what it means to be a practitioner involved in strategic activities pertains to an ontological level. The individual practitioners, thrown into the world, are always grounded in their horizons with their present future-oriented strategic activities opening up for a representation and reconstruction of history. The present–future– past relationality is expressed through and manifested in horizon movements, assuming a shift in focus away from horizontalization of perceptions, in which the essence of an individual’s experience and practice is singled out, towards experience as an ongoing integrative human life process. Such a process holds a cultural historical practical dimension that relates experience to effective-historical consciousness and horizon. Our appreciation of the present–future–past relationality thus directs the attention to trans-individual social practice that, according to Chia and MacKay, ‘flattens’ the micro–macro dimension. As Gadamer (1989, p. 304) puts it: ‘Just as the individual is never simply an individual because he is always in understanding with others.’ This holds an awareness of the trans-individual character of Strategy as Practice, directing attention to that which emerges in between practitioners, in meetings, discussions and negotiations, always shaped by and situated in cultural tradition. A living tradition view on history eschews a reification of history as a factor or path that constrains and determines present future-oriented strategic activities. The present ascribes to history the role of a communicative partner of the present, thus representing and reconstructing the past in the light of the present (Gadamer 1989). The practitioners’ being in and belongingness to the world opens to a dynamic transindividual understanding of strategizing in which the interrelationship between strategizing and history – with reference to hermeneutical situatedness – emerges.

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Future research In future research, we see it as important to direct more interest to the ontological issue of human activity and the dialogical encounter with historical tradition, appreciating the practitioner’s existential connections with the world and relationships with other people. In agreement with Chia and MacKay (2007) we contend that research on Strategy as Practice should be directed to philosophically grounded theorizing. As Chia and Holt (2006, p. 638) argue, ‘we need to begin to acquire a new vocabulary for interrogating organizational phenomena in such a way as to urge theorizing towards new paradigms of understanding that assume practices and relationality to be the fundamental explanatory basis of social phenomena’. There a need within strategizing and practicebased research to not only dive deeper into everyday activity and to increase the degree of ‘realism’ but also to explicitly address and raise questions about the realism assumptions that underpin a ‘deep dive’. There seems to be a need for more explicit thinking about the logic and vocabulary underlying practice and a need to elaborate on the aspect of history. Although practice-oriented studies take into account that people live in history and emphasize the need ‘to get inside the lived experience of the practitioners as they are doing strategy’ (Jarzabkowski 2005, p. 24) and tracing the contours of their lived experience over time and space dimensions (Samra-Fredericks 2003), limited interest is dedicated to ‘how it is that people live in history’ (Lave 2003, p. 21) and how the notion of lived experience comes into realization in human activity. As Booth (2003) points out, the importance of history is not well understood in the strategy literature. The notion of history as path dependencies recognizes that history matters and constrains the future behaviour of a firm (Teece et al. 1997) but ignores a temporal context that directs attention to the present–future–past relationality. Deterministic versions of history in which strategizing is preconditioned by history face increasing scepticism in studies concerned with narrative aspects and in critical management studies (Clark and Rowlinson 2004). A pure chronological arrangement of the

past, the present and the future does not account for an awareness of history as a living tradition in the sense that history belongs to present futureoriented strategic activities. Human reality is a historical reality and not the sum of historical facts or a sequence of types of facts that can be reproduced in the present (Seebohm 2004). Our philosophical hermeneutically based understanding and interpretation goes even further, taking into account that the practitioners always find themselves within a situation and that this hermeneutical situation represents their range of vision, that is, their horizons. The living tradition view, outlined in this chapter, hermeneutically situates strategizing. References Barry, D. and Elmes, M. (1997), ‘Strategy retold. Toward a narrative view of strategic discourse’, Academy of Management Review, 22/2: 429–452. Berger, L. P. and Luckmann, T. (1966), The social construction of reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bernstein, R. J. (1983), Beyond objectivism and relativism: Science, hermeneutics and praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Booth, C. (2003), ‘Does history matter in strategy? The possibilities and problems of counterfactual analysis’, Management Decision, 4/1: 96–104. Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (2001), ‘Knowledge and organization: A social-practice perspective’, Organization Science, 12/2: 198–213. Chia, R. and Holt, R. (2006), ‘Strategy as practical coping: A Heideggerian perspective’, Organization Studies, 27/5: 635–655. Chia, R. and MacKay, B. (2007), ‘Post-processual challenges for the emerging strategy-as-practice perspective: Discovering strategy in the logic of practice’, Human Relations, 60/1: 217–242. Clark, P. and Rowlinson, M. (2004), ‘The treatment of history in organisation studies: Toward an “historic turn”?’, Business History, 46/3: 331–352. Czarniawska, B. (1997), ‘On the imperative and the impossibility of polyphony in organization studies’, GRI-rapport, 2. Gothenburg: School of Economics and Commercial Law, Gothenburg University.

Strategizing and history Dougherty, D. (1992), ‘A practice-centered model of organizational renewal though product innovation’, Strategic Management Journal, 13: 77–92. (2004), ‘Organizing practices in services: Capturing practice-based knowledge for innovation’, Strategic Organization, 2/1: 35–64. Ericson, M. (2007), Business growth. Activities, themes and voices. Cheltenham; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Feldman, M. S. and Pentland, B. (2003), ‘Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 48/1: 94–118. Gadamer, H.-G. (1989), Truth and method. New York: The Continuum. Garfinkel, H. (1967), Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Jarzabkowski, P. (2005), Strategy as practice. An activity-based approach. London: Sage. Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. and Seidl, D. (2007), ‘Strategizing: The challenge of a practice perspective’, Human Relations, 60/1: 5–27. Johnson, G., Langley, A., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2007), Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kersten, F. (1989), Phenomenological method: Theory and practice. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Lave, J. (2003), ‘The practice of learning’, in S. Chaiklin, and J. Lave (eds), Understanding

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practice. Perspectives on activity and context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moustakas, C. (1994), Phenomenological research and methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rouleau, L. (2005), ‘Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day’, Journal of Management Studies, 42/7: 1413–1441. Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003), ‘Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday efforts to shape strategic direction’, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1: 141–174 Schatzki, T. R. (2001), ‘Introduction practice theory’, in T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina and E. von Savigny (eds), The practice turn in contemporary theory. London: Routledge, 1–14. Schutz, A. (1932), The phenomenology of the social world. Repr., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Seebohm, T. M. (2004), Hermeneutics: Method and methodology. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Teece, D., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A. (1997), ‘Dynamic capabilities and strategic management’, Strategic Management Journal, 18/7: 509–533. Whittington, R. (2003), ‘The work of strategizing and organizing: For a practice perspective’, Strategic Organization, 1/1: 117–125. (2006), ‘Completing the practice turn in strategy research’, Organization Studies, 27/5: 613–634.

Author Index

Alvesson 168, 173, 177, 248 Aristotle 37 Astley 155, 159 Atkinson 259 Balogun 48, 56, 59, 91, 94, 95, 99, 204, 243, 244, 252, 253, 259, 261 Barad 27, 30 Beech 243, 246 Bertaux 258, 259, 262 Bhaskar 109, 114, 115, 124 Blackler 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137 Boden 237, 239 Bourdieu 1, 2, 3, 9, 13, 35, 36, 40, 41, 43, 109, 110, 114, 115, 116, 121, 124, 141–151 Chamberlayne 260 (de) Certeau 1, 2, 10, 34, 35, 38, 40, 183, 184, 190–192, 194 Chia 48, 49, 51, 54, 58, 59, 141, 147, 183, 184 Chia and Holt 326 Chia and MacKay 327, 341 Czarniawska 186, 187, 188 Deleuze 170, 173, 174, 178, 179 Denzin and Lincoln 204 Dorado 285 Dreyfus 49, 50, 51, 52, 55 Dunne 37, 42 Engestrom 127, 128–129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136 Ezzamel 155, 156, 166 Fairclough, 218, 219, 311 Feldman 12, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 274, 287 Finkelstein 93, 97 Fligstein 285 Foucault 1, 2, 3, 10, 110, 168–170, 172, 173–174, 176, 177–178, 179, 180, 311 Gadamer 326, 328, 329, 341 Garfinkel 230, 231, 238 Geertz 29 Giddens 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 13, 25, 26, 29, 109–124 Goffman 114, 119, 249

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Golden-Biddle 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 88 Hacking 64, 67, 68, 74 Hambrick 93, 94, 97, 98 Heidegger 47, 48, 49, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60 Heritage 232, 234, 236 Holt 184 Huff 3, 10, 306 Jarzabkowski 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 34, 41, 48, 56, 59, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 129, 130–131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 142, 145, 147, 205, 212 Johnson 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11–12, 34, 42, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 202, 203, 204, 243, 244 Kaptelinin 127, 128, 129, 132, 133 Kersten 329 Knights 168–169, 171, 174, 176–177, 178, 179 Knights and Morgan 2, 3, 6 Knorr Cetina 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75 Knudsen 63, 67, 69, 70, 74 Laine 155, 165, 166 Langley 3, 8, 47, 48, 54, 56, 245 Latour 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75 Lave 24, 25, 26 Law 30 Leontiev 127, 128, 129, 130–131, 135 Lilley 169, 174 Locke 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 88 Luhmann 65, 70 MacKay 48, 49, 51, 54, 58, 59, 141, 147 Mantere 155, 162, 165, 166 Mauws 159, 166 Miettinen 133, 134 Mintzberg 48, 53, 58, 59, 123 Mumby 310, 311, 322 Mol 28 Moustakas 329 Nardi 127, 128, 129, 132, 133, 137 Nicolini 141, 145 Nonaka 35, 37, 39, 40, 44

Author Index Orlikowski 1, 7, 8, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123 Phillips 155, 159, 166 Porter 119, 122 Regnér 161 Reckwitz 96 Ricoeur 184, 189–190, 192–194, 195 Rorty 99 Rose 172, 179 Rouleau 245, 248, 260, 261 Rumelt, 202, 215 Sacks 230, 232, 234 Samra-Fredericks 220, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 310, 314, 327, 328, 331 Schatzki 23, 25, 27, 49, 50, 51, 52 Schein 24 Seidl 1, 4, 5, 6, 12, 48, 56, 59, 69, 91, 94, 95, 155, 161, 166 Suchman 24, 25, 27 Silverman 239

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Townley 174, 177, 178 Toyama 35, 37, 39, 40 Tsoukas 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74 Urry 30 Vaara 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 148, 155, 162, 165, 166, 168, 172, 173, 177, 178 Van Dijk 218 Van Leeuwen 222, 225 Vygotsky 2, 127–128, 131, 134 Wacquant 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151 Watson 312 Weick 36, 44, 213 Willmott 155, 156, 166 Whittington 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 34, 40, 41, 47, 48, 49, 54, 58, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 91, 93, 96, 97, 98, 101, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 243 Wittgenstein 50, 51, 155–166 Wodak 218, 219, 224, 225 Zammuto 155, 159

Index

Action deliberate 49, 52, 54, 57, 59 non-deliberate 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60 research 12, 13, 24, 29, 100, 101, 102, 296 theory 63, 67, 98 Activity 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14 goal-directed 135 practical 128, 135, 137 system, 127, 128–131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137 system framework, 129, 130, 136 theory 127–138 Agency 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 49, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 73, 109, 110–111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 310, 317, 322, 323 decentralization of 65 Agent 141 Agreement 155, 159, 160, 164, 165 Authenticity 259, 268 Awareness explicit 52, 55, 57, 58, 60 thematic 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 Back-stage access 250, 254 Biographical methods 258 Capital 141, 142, 143–144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150 Cartesian split 34 Close-with relationship 243, 247, 250, 251, 252, 253 Coherence progressive 80, 82, 83, 85, 87 synthesized 80, 81, 82, 85, 87 Collaborative research 208 Collective 127, 128, 129, 130, 131–132, 133, 135–137, 138 Concept 155, 156, 159, 160, 161, 165–166 Consistency 259 Constructing contribution 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Constructing intertextual coherence 79, 80, 82 constructivism 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 empirical 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71 radical 65 social 63, 64, 65, 69 systemic 63, 65, 66, 69 Constructivist engagement 67 analytical 67 ironic 67 practical 67

346

reformist 67 revolutionary 67 Consumption / consuming 190–194, 195 Control 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 179, 310, 312, 314, 316, 320, 321 Conversation 186, 187, 189, 195 Conversation analysis 230, 232 Coping 8, 13 action 35, 40, 42, 43, 44 deliberate 54, 57, 58, 59 practical 49, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 4, 6, 11, 217–219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 228, 311, 314 Critical realism 115 Cross-national 14 Cross case analysis 296 Cumulative experimentation 284–287 Data analysis 296 Decentralization of organization 49, 54, 57 Dialectical battle 310, 312 Dialectics 312, 322 Diaries 206, 259 Direct observation 275 Director 300 Discipline 170, 171, 174 Discourse 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173–175, 176, 177, 178, 179–180, 183, 184, 185, 186–188, 189, 190, 191, 192–194, 195, 217, 218, 220, 221, 310, 311, 317 Discourse analysis 217, 218, 219, 227 Discursive 3, 4, 5, 6, 11–12, 13 Discursive practice 217, 219, 221, 222 Discursive struggle 155, 159, 165, 166, 310 Discovery technologies 67, 71, 75 Disempowering 321 Disposition 141, 142–144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150 Domination 143, 145, 149, 150 Double hermeneutic 29 Effective history 328 Elapsed duration 297 Electronic data gathering 207 Embeddedness 109 Empowerment 160, 161

Index Episode 276 Episteme 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45 Epistemology performative 30 representational 30 building 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44 dwelling 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45 constructivist 94; see also constructivism genetic 65 operative 65, 66 pragmatist 67 Ethnographic methods 204, 206 Ethnomethodology 230, 231 EM/CA 230, 232, 234 Event database 205 Experience 328, 329 Family resemblance 156, 158, 165, 166 Field 141, 142–143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150–151 Form of life 158, 159, 160, 162 Formal strategic practices 5 Forms of asymmetry 232 Generalizability 206 Genealogy 170–171, 179 General management 163, 164 Geographical place 332–334, 340 Habitus 141–144, 145–148, 149, 150 Hermeneutical situatedness 12, 326, 328 Hierarchical supervision 172 Horizon 328, 329 Identity 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 243, 246, 247, 253, 322 Identity work 246, 248 Ideology 218, 223 Inadequacy noncoherence 86 progressive 86, 87 synthesized 86 Incommensurability noncoherence 86 progressive 86 synthesized 86 Incompleteness noncoherence 86 progressive 86 synthesized 86 Inductive analysis 276 Institution 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 122, 123, 124 Institutional change 11, 12, 274, 284 and agency 274 and routines 274–275 Institutional talk 232, 234, 240 Institutionalization 64 Instructional mode 210 Integrity 259

347

Intentionality 132, 137, 138 Intentional 141, 144, 146, 147 Intertextual field 80, 81, 82, 83, 85 Intertextuality 219 Knowledge 168, 169, 170, 171, 173–176, 178, 179 explicit 24, 39, 41, 99 personal 37 practical 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 45, 52, 99, 100, 102 propositional 36, 37 tacit 24, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 45, 48, 50, 57, 58, 59, 99 types of 36, 37 Knowledge accumulation 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 normal science 92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102 practice-theory based 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 pragmatic 92, 99, 100, 102 Knowledge production 306 Knowledge-in-practice 26, 44 Label 161, 162, 163 Laboratory experiments 210, 211 Laminate 239 Language 155, 156–160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166 Language game 155, 156, 157–158, 159–166 Legitimacy 251, 252, 321, 323 Legitimation 64, 91, 99, 222, 225, 226, 227 Lexical choice 232, 234, 236 Living Tradition 341, 342 Lived experience 156, 159, 162, 164, 327, 328 Logos 36 Longitudinal engagement 250, 254 Longitudinal field study 275, 292 Macro 141, 142, 145, 147, 150 Media 226 Media text 222, 224, 225, 227 Mediation 14, 128, 130, 133 Membership categorization device 232 Methodological challenges 5, 10 individualism 34, 48, 49, 59, 60 pluralism 40 reflections 4 Methodology 6, 11, 12 Metis 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 Micro 141, 142, 145, 147, 150 Micro-level 1, 2, 3, 13 Middle managers 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 268, 300, 310, 317, 321 Minor moves 239 Mode 1 research 292, 294 Mode 2 research 292, 294 Multiple case 294 Multiple methods 203, 205 Multiple performances 249, 254 Multi-faceted design 250

348

Index

Narratee 259 Narrative 183–195 Narrative analysis 248 Narratives of practice 258–261, 266–268 Narration 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 195 Narrator 259 Nomological network 92, 95 Noncoherence 80, 82, 85, 87 Object(s) 135–137, 138, 212 Objectivation 64 Ontological entanglement 27, 30 individualism 27 separation 27, 30 societism 27 Ontology 7 Operational closure 65 Organizational restructuring 262 Participant observation 24, 29 Persuasion 159, 165 Phenomenology 231 Philosophical hermeneutics 327, 328, 331 Philosophy of science 96 Phronesis 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 Plot / emplotment 185, 188, 192–194 Power 2, 5, 6–7, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 169, 170, 171, 176, 177, 178, 179, 221, 223, 311, 321, 323 Practical reasoning 230, 231, 232 Practice 1–14, 141–143, 144–146, 147–151, 183–195, 326 Practice theory 110, 115, 117, 121 Practice as perspective 2, 3, 7, 13, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30 as phenomenon 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30 as philosophy 23, 25, 27, 29, 30 intervention 24 ontology 23, 27, 30 perspective on institutional work 273 Practitioner 326, 328, 340, 341 Praxis 2, 4, 9, 11, 13, 246, 247, 248 stream of 137 Problematization of literature 79, 82, 85 inadequate 82, 84, 85, 87 incommensurate 82, 85, 87 incomplete 82, 83, 85, 87 Process research 47, 48, 49, 57, 58, 59, 60 shortcomings of 47 Production / producing 183, 184, 185, 186, 188–190, 191, 192, 194, 195 Protocol analysis 211 Prototypes 211 Rationality 159, 165 Reading 184, 189–190, 195 Reflective practice 253

Relational ontology of individuation 35, 41 Relationality 326, 341 Research design 211, 212, 215, 292 Resistance 7, 13, 173, 176, 177–179, 310, 312, 321 Resource 141, 143–144, 145, 147, 150 Retrospective reframing 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59 Retrospective sensemaking 36 Routines 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 274 as a unit of analysis 275 institutionalized 284 Rules 155, 156, 159, 160, 161, 162–165 Self-referentiality 65 Senior management 300 Senior manager 300 Sensemaking 4, 5, 6, 12 Sequence organization 232 Social atomism 34 Sociomaterial practice 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60 Sociomaterial configuration 27, 28 reality 27, 28 Strategist 168, 169, 170, 176–180 (Strategic) intention (-ality) 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180 Strategic plan 220 Strategic text 220 Strategic episodes 301 Strategizing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 326 Strategy as Practice 1–14, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 326 Strategy as Practice Agenda 1 Strategy as Practice research 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 12 Strategy practitioner 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 24, 28, 29, 34, 36, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 58, 59, 60, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101 Strategy talk 220 Strategy workshop 291, 306 Structuration 109–124 Structure 141, 142–143, 144, 145–147, 148, 150 Struggle 142, 148–149, 151 Student inquirers 208, 210 Systems theory 65 System autopoietic 65 cognitive 65 communicative 65 social 65 Subject 129, 130, 131–132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 Subjectivity 10, 11, 12, 13, 168, 170, 176, 177, 178, 221, 230, 310–322 Talk-in-interaction 232, 235, 237, 240 Techné 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45 Techniques of self 169 Technologies-in-practice 26

Index Teleoaffective structures 50, 51, 57 Text 183–195 Textuality 188, 189 The sociological eye 48 Theoretical understanding 52, 53 Tools and techniques 6 Top management 162 Transcripts 232, 233, 239 Trust 252, 253 Turn design 232, 237 Turn-taking 232

Unfolding 178, 179 Unique adequacy 238 Unusual contexts 206, 209 Video-recordings 233 Violence 149 Visibility 174, 175, 176, 179 Work life story 259, 260 Workplaces studies 233 Writing 184, 189–190, 191, 192, 195

349