| www.strategy-as-practice.org
The ‘Strategizing: Activity and Practice’ research
agenda reflects the turn towards practice-based theorizing in contemporary
social theory over the past twenty years. Strategy research has
been increasingly criticized on the basis that it is not relevant
to practice and that its contributions are paradigmatically constrained
by the positivistic assumptions and research traditions of microeconomics,
which avoid the messy realities of doing strategy. Practice-based
research within other disciplines, such as accounting and technology,
has provided evidence that what people do and how they do it is
frequently counter to rational principles and has clear implications
for both the conduct and the outcomes of work. Increasingly this
approach is reflected in a move to study the activity and practice
of strategizing, on the basis that large-scale quantitative studies
of firm assets, technologies and performance variables provide disembodied
and asocial accounts that offer little theoretical or practical
insight into the dilemmas of practitioners engaged in doing strategy.
This Standing Working Group addresses a number
of key questions that will illuminate the activity and practice
of strategizing, such as who strategists are, what strategists do,
how they do it, what influences the work of strategizing, and what
are the consequences of strategizing activity? For example, who
may be regarded as a strategist remains ill-defined and dominated
by upper echelon perspectives, despite increasing evidence that
strategic activity may be initiated and championed at numerous levels
of the firm, as well as influenced by external actors such as consultants,
regulators and shareholders. Detailed empirical investigation may
therefore provide richer conceptual explanations of the circumstances
under which different actors may be termed strategists.
An expanded definition of strategists and their
activities serves to move beyond the ongoing dichotomous tensions
between strategy formulation and implementation. Strategists may
indeed be people who analyze variables, establish positions, and
formulate plans but they might also enact environments, communicate
with stakeholders, lobby powerful actors, politicize, embellish,
reflect and emote as part of the interplay between formulation and
implementation that constitutes the everyday activity of strategizing.
Furthermore, they will do so with recourse to a range of material
and social resources, ranging from their spatial and temporal locations
within diversified firms, to their social position, the material
tools and technologies available to conduct the work of strategizing,
and the conceptual and linguistic resources with which to think
and talk about strategy. All of these resources enable the doing
of strategy but also influence its conduct through their own situated
properties and contextual meanings. In particular, locally situated
strategic activities are embedded within and contribute to broader
societal contexts, such as those constituted by influential institutions.
Hence, more complete theoretical and empirical explanations are
needed, both of how strategizing is done and also of those features
of macro and micro context that influence its doing.
Finally, it is important to understand the consequences
of strategizing activity. Strategic management research has been
preoccupied with performance outcomes, which are typically at the
level of the firm. As the focus of strategizing research moves more
towards the study of micro activities, so too, it is necessary to
define the appropriate performance outcomes for strategizing activity.
For example, what constitutes the outcome of a strategizing episode,
such as a meeting or an awayday or a strategic conversation, and
how should its success be gauged? Furthermore, the micro outcomes
of strategizing have consequences for the broader context of strategic
activity, for example, by altering the course of firm-level activity,
or even, potentially by influencing social institutions. Hence,
we seek to understand the relationships and associations between
the micro outcomes of strategizing activity and broader outcomes
at the level of the firm and industry.
This Standing Working Group calls for papers that
can address these issues through a focus upon the everyday practices
and activities involved in doing strategy. In particular, it seeks
to build upon and extend earlier work in this field, examples of
which may be found on the website www.strategy-as-practice.org.
Whilst participants should focus upon the micro level phenomena
of strategizing, we also seek papers that make robust links to the
macro level phenomena and competitive forces that both shape and
are shaped by the activities of strategizing. Theoretical, empirical
and methodological papers are invited that can clearly demarcate
the appropriate units of analysis, outcomes and theoretical contributions
applicable to and arising from strategizing research.
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