tanding Working Group 5:
Strategizing: Activity and practice: Strategizing in practice: The challenges of exploring relationships between and among individuals and organization(s)

Convenors:

 Call for papers

A practice perspective on strategizing focuses on the day-to-day activities and practices of strategizing and addresses questions such as: who the strategists are, what strategists do, how they do it, what influences the work of strategizing, and what are the consequences of strategizing activity? This perspective is characterized by the fact that strategic activity is initiated and championed not only by top managers but also at numerous other levels of the firm, as well as influenced by external actors such as consultants, regulators and shareholders. Such a perspective is looking for a better understanding of how managers use a wide range of tools, artifacts and social resources when they are making sense of strategy and strategic change through their daily activities. More specifically, this perspective aims to better understand the skills and activities that managers on different organizational levels deploy when they are performing their role as strategists. As a perspective centered on the study of daily practices, this view is looking for a better understanding of how the micro-outcomes of strategizing is either influenced or constrained by wider contexts of strategic change located at the firm, industry or society level.

This Standing Working Group is, thus, looking for papers that can address these types of issues through theoretical, methodological and detailed empirical studies of activities and circumstances under which managers are strategizing in practice. This includes socially dynamic descriptions and explanations of how practices, routines and capabilities influence strategy making, outcome and competitive advantage. In particular, this theme 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.

One of the major challenges related to the comprehension of strategizing concerns our capacity to understand how managers practically construct the links between their more individual micro daily activities and the more collective macro structures of their organizations and their environment. This year, in keeping with the main theme of the conference, the ‘Strategizing: Activity and Practice’ Standing Working Group will be looking for papers that explore the relationship between and among individuals and organizations (RIO). We seek theoretical and methodological papers as well as empirical studies that can provide useful insights in order to better understand this crucial relationship in terms of strategy. Innovative papers that attempts to grasp tensions and paradoxes of this relationship will be encouraged.

Special attention will be paid to work exploring explicit and tacit rules and norms governing the RIO and their impact on strategizing. In their day-to-day activities managers draw on organizational rules and norms by following or breaking them in strategy making and in their adaptation of their organizations to a changing environment. We need to know more about the way managers mobilize those rules and norms through the work of strategizing, how they constrain and influence strategizing and how they might influence strategy outcome and competitive advantage. How do managers use their practical knowledge of organizational rules and norms for renewing the way of strategizing in their organization?

Another important, but related, question for strategy as practice research is the way managers draw on the RIO for making sense of strategy and strategic change through their daily activities. The social embeddedness of strategy in terms of how managers’ reflections on strategizing in practice depend on institutional and cultural contexts is crucial in this analysis. How do institutions and institutional change affect the way managers daily make sense of strategy through the RIO? How do the way managers draw on the RIO when they are creating and diffusing knowledge related to the strategic change impact the institutional change and the cultural context? Papers that can demonstrate what the consequences are of different types of relationships between individuals and organization in sensemaking, but also in creation and diffusion of knowledge and in identity construction will be particularly welcome.

While papers that address the issues discussed above are welcome these themes are not exclusive and any papers that adhere to the basic thoughts of the Standing Working Group will be considered. We would like to take as many participants as possible and at the same time provide a variety of ways of discussing strategy as practice. We therefore intend to run the sub-theme sessions as a mix of standard paper sessions, interactive round table paper sessions and panels.

About the convenors

Patrick Regnér is Assistant professor at the Institute of International Business, Department of Marketing and Strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics. His research is focused on strategy development and dynamics with a particular focus on the origins of strategy and exploration/exploitation tradeoffs.

Linda Rouleau is associate professor, management department - HEC Montreal. Her research focuses on the social character of strategy formation and on the transformation of control and identity of middle managers in the context of organizational restructuring.

Ann Langley is full professor and director of the M.Sc. and Ph.D. programs at HEC Montreal. Her research deals with strategic decision making, innovation, leadership and strategic change in pluralistic organizations and notably in the health care sector. She is a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Health at the University of Montreal.