Eléonore Mounoud

Taking strategy seriously:responsibility and reform for an important social practice

Strategy is a pervasive and consequential practice in mostWestern societies. We respond to strategy’s importance by drawing an initial map of strategy as an organizational field that embraces not just firms, but consultancies, business schools, the state and financial institutions. Using the example of Enron, we show how the strategy field is prone to manipulations in which other actors in the field can easily become entrapped, with grave consequences. Given these consequences, we argue that it is time to take strategy seriously in three senses: undertaking systematic research on the field itself; developing appropriate responses to recent failures in the field; and building more heedful interrelationships between actors within the field, particularly between business schools and practitioners.

A narrative framework for management ideas: Disclosing the plots of knowledge management in a multinational company

We extend research on management ideas by providing a narrative framework for studying how management ideas are consumed. We dwell upon Certeau’s (1984) work on the practice of consumption and Ricœur’s (1983) concept of emplotment. Specifically, we study, over a 20-year time period, how Cement Inc., a multinational company, adopted and used knowledge management (KM) ideas and practices. We disclose the consumption of KM at Cement Inc. through four plots that provide an account not only in terms of adopting and using, but also in terms of organizational and individual experiences. We show that knowledge management ideas are co-consumed through multiple, iterative, continuous emplotments, unfolding at multiple levels across time, people and practices.We argue that our narrative framework makes two contributions. First, it provides an integrative view of the consumption of management ideas and proves a helpful device for making sense of an enormous amount of data. Second, it allows unity as well as multiplicity in analysis of the consumption process: one story is told from many different perspectives and results in broader understanding.

A Narrative to Approach to Strategy as Practice: strategy making from texts and narratives

Now in its second edition, this extended and thoroughly updated handbook introduces researchers and students to the growing range of theoretical and methodological perspectives being developed in the vibrant field of strategy as practice. With new authors and additional chapters, it shows how the strategy-as-practice approach in strategic management moves away from disembodied and asocial studies of firm assets, technologies and practices to explore and explain the contribution that strategizing makes to people working at all levels of an organization. It breaks down many of the traditional paradigmatic barriers in strategy to investigate who the strategists are, what they do, how they do it, and what the consequences or outcomes of their actions are. This essential work summarizes recent developments in the field while presenting a clear agenda for future research.

A case study in knowledge sharing : lessons from the information technology department of a French car manufacturer

The growth of Information Technology (IT) within organisations has created the need for organisational evolution. These evolutions particularly concern the IT department which develops and manages the IT programs and infrastructures within the organisation. Not only the evolution of IT leads to areassessment of individual knowledge and expertise within the IT department but it also has an impact on the collective competencies necessary to cooperate with internal customers, suppliers and consultants. This paper presents the organisational framework implemented within the IT department of a French car manufacturer in order to acquire and share knowledge better. We distinguish capitalisation tools, which, by creating standardised procedures and references, contribute to the collective memory and socialisation devices which produce tacit and fragmented knowledge. Finally, we identify a number of difficulties linked to the technical, professional and organisational rules of the IT department.