Paula Jarzabkowski

Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective

While the strategy-as-practice research agenda has gained considerable momentum over the past five years, many challenges still remain in developing it into a robust field of research. In this editorial, we define the study of strategy from a practice perspective and propose five main questions that the strategy-as-practice agenda seeks to address. We argue that a coherent approach to answering these questions may be facilitated using an overarching conceptual framework of praxis, practices and practitioners. This framework is used to explain the key challenges underlying the strategy-as-practice agenda and how they may be examined empirically. In discussing these challenges, we refer to the contributions made by existing empirical research and highlight under-explored areas that will provide fruitful avenues for future research. The editorial concludes by introducing the articles in the special issue.

Strategy as Practice: Recursiveness, Adaptation, and Practices-in-Use

In this article, a social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning the existing strategic management literature. In practice, there is a coexistent tension between recursive and adaptive forms of strategic action that spans multiple levels from macro-institutional and competitive contexts to within-firm levels of analysis to individual cognition. This tension may be better understood by examining how management practices are used to put strategy into practice. Such practices span multiple levels of context and are adaptable to their circumstances of use, serving to highlight both general characteristics and localized idiosyncrasies of strategy as practice. The article develops the concept of management practices-in-use into a research agenda and nine broad research questions that may be used to investigate empirically strategy as practice.

Strategy-as-Practice: A Review and Future Directions for the Field

This review maps and critically evaluates the rapidly growing body of research in the strategy-as-practice field. Following an introduction on the emergence and foundations of strategy-as-practice, the review is structured in three main parts, based on the terminology, issues and research agendas outlined in the field. First, the paper examines the concepts of practitioners and praxis. A typology of nine possible domains for strategy-as-practice research is developed, based on the way that different studies conceptualize the strategy practitioner and the level of strategy praxis that they aim to explain. Second, the paper reviews the concept of practices, which has been adopted widely but inconsistently within the strategy-as-practice literature. While there is no dominant view on practices, the review maps the various concepts of practices that inform the strategy-as-practice field and outlines avenues for future research. The final section attends to the call for strategy-as-practice research to develop and substantiate outcomes that may better explain or inform strategy praxis. Five categories of outcomes are found within existing empirical studies, and an agenda for building upon this evidence is advanced. The paper concludes with a summation of the current state of the field and some recommendations on how to take strategy-as-practice research forward.

Strategic Practices: An Activity Theory Perspective on Continuity and Change

This paper draws upon activity theory- to analyse an empirical investigation of the micro practices of strategy in three UK universities. Activity theory provides a framework of four interactive components from which strategy emerges; the collective structures of the organization, the primary actors, in this research conceptualized as the top management team (TMT), the practical activities in which they interact and the strategic practices through which interaction is conducted. Using this framework, the paper focuses specifically on the formal strategic practices involved in direction setting, resource allocation, and monitoring and control. These strategic practices arc associated with continuity of strategic activity in one case study but are involved in the reinterpretation and change of strategic activity in the other two cases. We model this finding into activity theory-based typologies of the cases that illustrate the way that practices either distribute shared interpretations or mediate between contested interpretations of strategic activity. The typologies explain the relationships between strategic practices and continuity and change of strategy as practice. The paper concludes by linking activity theory to wider change literatures to illustrate its potential as an integrative methodological framework for examining the subjective and emergent processes through which strategic activity is constructed.

Shaping Strategy as a Structuration Process

Research on top managers’ strategizing behavior has addressed how they shape either the structural context or the interpretations of organization members. I offer a structuration theory framework integrating these two partial explanations and treating strategy shaping as socially dynamic. A qualitative seven-year analysis of top managers in three universities shows a sequential pattern of shaping strategy first in the action and then in the institutional realm, and also a simultaneous pattern of shaping strategy in both realms at once. Both patterns are successful in weakly institutionalized strategy contexts, whereas the simultaneous pattern is more successful in strongly institutionalized strategy contexts.

The Role of Meetings in the Social Practice of Strategy

This article addresses the recent turn in strategy research to practice-based theorizing. Based on a data set of 51 meeting observations, the article examines how strategy meetings are involved in either stabilizing existing strategic orientations or proposing variations that cumulatively generate change in strategic orientations. Eleven significant structuring characteristics of strategy meetings are identified and examined with regard to their potential for stabilizing or destabilizing existing strategic orientations. Based on a taxonomy of meeting structures, we explain three typical evolutionary paths through which variations emerge, are maintained and developed, and are selected or de-selected. The findings make four main contributions. First, they contribute to the literature on strategy-as-practice by explaining how the practice of meetings is related to consequential strategic outcomes. Second, they contribute to the literature on organizational becoming by demonstrating the role of meetings in shaping stability and change. Third, they extend and elaborate the concept of meetings as strategic episodes. Fourth, they contribute to the literature on garbage can models of strategy-making.

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.

Top Teams and Strategy in a UK University

This paper reports on the results of an in-depth study of how a top management team (TMT) puts strategy into practice in a UK university. A study of the top team in Warwick University was conducted to analyse how strategy was formulated and implemented. The results suggest that a combination of two broad theoretical lenses provides useful analytical insight. These are strategy as practice and strategy as process. The main elements of this universitys strategy result from an interplay of localized routines and patterns of action within an organizational context, which both produces and is a product of such actions. The TMT itself was found to be clearly identifiable and stable in composition. The team exhibited identifiable patterns of strategic thinking and acting. However, the role of organizational structure was also found to be a key influence on the actions and processes of the TMT with strong central control tendencies in the team being counterbalanced by devolved operational control to individual departments. The data also reveal inter-relationships between organizational structures and the TMT in four key areas: direction-setting, monitoring and control, the allocation of resources, and processes of interaction. The overall conclusion is that to understand how strategy is practised, analysis needs to focus on how patterns of action are associated with the characteristics of both the team and the wider organization. The nature and characteristics of these patterns can be related to how strategy is put into practice.

Strategy tools as boundary objects

The strategy literature has generated an array of strategy ‘tools’, such as core competences and scenario planning. While these are used extensively in strategy teaching and in strategic planning processes, we have few insights on how they are used in practice or of their consequences. Our thinking on tools is shaped by the growing strategy-as-practice perspective, which views strategy as a type of work that people do, not just a property of organizations (Whittington, 2003). Thus, we shift our attention to what actually happens when individuals use a strategy tool, rather than simply assuming their usage. So far, current research has only focused on the intended ‘textbook’ purposes of strategy tools. We argue that we need to know much more about how these tools are used and for what purposes. Focusing upon actual use will offer insights into users’ intentions and the implications of using tools for specific interactions. In particular, different users may employ the same tool not only in different ways but for different reasons. Practitioners may thus be less concerned about the ‘proper’ or ‘improper’ use of a strategy tool than with applying it in particular situations that appear to be appropriate. However, strategy tool use may also lead to unintended consequences. While the language implicit in a particular tool shapes its results, such as a report, the report’s content may not be understood by individuals who are unfamiliar with that specific language. Hence, the use of strategy tools may constrain effective communication across organizational boundaries. There is a literature on boundary objects, which examines how tools and artefacts span work boundaries within organizations (e.g. Bechky, 2003a, 2003b; Carlile, 2002, 2004; Henderson, 1991; Star and Greisemer, 1989), that has not been incorporated into the strategy literature. We aim to build from this literature in order to better understand how strategy tools enable or con strain interaction across intra-organizational boundaries. The boundary objects literature is relevant to strategic organization because it helps us to STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 7(2): 223–232 DOI: 10.1177/1476127009102674 Copyright ©2009 Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) http://so.sagepub.com

Toward a Theory of Coordinating: Creating Coordinating Mechanisms in Practice

This paper uses a practice perspective to study coordinating as dynamic activities that are continuously created and modified in order to enact organizational relationships and activities. It is based on the case of Servico, an organization undergoing a major restructuring of its value chain in response to a change in government regulation. In our case, the actors iterate between the abstract concept of a coordinating mechanism referred to as end-to-end management and its performance in practice. They do this via five performative–ostensive cycles: (1) enacting disruption, (2) orienting to absence, (3) creating elements, (4) forming new patterns, and (5) stabilizing new patterns. These cycles and the relationships between them constitute a process model of coordinating. This model highlights the importance of absence in the coordinating process and demonstrates how experiencing absence shapes subsequent coordinating activity.