Robert Chia

Strategy as practical coping: a Heideggerian perspective

What strategic actors actually do in practice has become increasingly the focus of strategy research in recent years. This paper argues that, in furthering such practice-based views of strategy, we need a more adequate re-conceptualization of agency, action and practice and how they interrelate. We draw from the work of the continental philosopher Martin Heidegger to articulate a relational theory of human agency that is better suited to explaining everyday purposive actions and practices. Specifically, we argue 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. Whereas, from the building perspective, strategy is predicated upon the prior conception of plans that are then orchestrated to realize desired outcome, from a dwelling perspective strategy does not require, nor does it presuppose, intention and purposeful goal-orientation: strategic ‘intent’ is viewed as immanent in every adaptive action. Observed consistencies in actions taken are explained not through deliberate goal-orientation but, instead, via a modus operandi: an internalized disposition to act in a manner congruent with past actions and experiences. Explaining strategy in dwelling terms enables us to understand how it is that actions may be consistent and organizationally effective without (and even in spite of) the existence of purposeful strategic plans.

Post-processual challenges for the emerging strategy-as-practice perspective: Discovering strategy in the logic of practice

The recent turn to ‘strategy practice’ offers a genuine opportunity for establishing an alternative perspective that is clearly distinct from the traditional strategy process view. The challenge is to clarify and articulate an alternative set of ontological and epistemological premises for founding this new approach to theorizing strategy.What has been called the ‘practice turn’ in social theory provides this alternative basis for a ‘post-processual’ approach to theorizing strategy-as-practice. This ‘practice turn’ involves a radical reformulation of the intractable problem of agency and structure that enables us to bypass the ‘micro/macro’ distinction so intimately tied to the social sciences in general and to strategy research in particular. Already, there are signs that the discourse of the strategy-as-practice research community reflects this awareness and are thus straining towards some form of ‘trans-individual’ explanation that is not restricted to the mere ‘activities’ of strategy actors nor to the traditional emphasis on macro-structures and processes. This article contributes to the clarification of some of the underlying premises of current strategy theorizing and shows how the strategy-as-practice perspective can further differentiate itself from the strategy process view. From the social practices viewpoint, everyday strategy practices are discernible patterns of actions arising from habituated tendencies and internalized dispositions rather than from deliberate, purposeful goal-setting initiatives. We term this epistemological stance ‘post-processual’. Such a post-processual world-view offers a revised understanding of strategy emergence that has profound explanatory implications for the strategy-as-practice movement.

A 'rhizomic' model of organizational change and transformation: perspective from a metaphysics of change

We are not good at thinking movement. Our instinctive skills favour the fixed and the static, the separate and the self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems and structures represent the instinctive vocabulary of institutionalized thought in its determined subordinating of flux, movement, change and transformation. Our dominant models of change in general and organizational change in particular are, therefore, paradoxically couched in the language of stasis and equilibrium. This paper seeks to offer an alternative model of change which, it is claimed, affords a better understanding of the inherent dynamic complexities and intrinsic indeterminacy of organization transformational processes.

Discourse Analysis Organizational Analysis

The question of discourse, and the manner in which it shapes our epistemology and understanding of organization, are central to an expanded realm of organizational analysis. It is one which recognizes that the modern world we live in and the social artefacts we rely upon to successfully negotiate our way through life, are always already institutionalized effects of primary organizational impulses. Social objects and phenomena such as ‘the organization’, ‘the economy’, ‘the market’ or even ‘stakeholders’ or ‘the weather’, do not have a straightforward and unproblematic existence independent of our discursively-shaped understandings. Instead, they have to be forcibly carved out of the undifferentiated flux of raw experience and conceptually fixed and labelled so that they can become the common currency for communicational exchanges. Modern social reality, with its all-too-familiar features, has to be continually constructed and sustained through such aggregative discursive acts of reality-construction. The idea that reality, as we know it, is socially constructed, has become an accepted truth. What is less commonly understood is how this reality gets constructed in the first place and what sustains it. For the philosopher William James, our social reality is always already an abstraction. Our lifeworld is an undifferentiated flux of fleeting sense-impressions and it is out of this brute aboriginal flux of lived experience that attention carves out and conception names:

From Knowledge-Creation to the Perfecting of Action: Tao, Basho and Pure Experience as the Ultimate Ground of Knowing

The idea of knowledge-creation and knowledge management has become an important area of research in management studies. This preoccupation with the creation and accumulation of knowledge in its explicit representational form is underpinned by the epistemological priorities of an alphabetic-literate1 culture that takes written knowledge as the only reliable basis for effective action. Documented knowledge necessarily precedes and hence determines action and performance. Such a metaphysical orientation precludes the possibility of attaining a form of direct unmediated knowing through the relentless perfecting of action. In traditionally based oral-aural communities or in non-alphabetic East Asian cultures knowing is more often achieved directly through the immediate engagement of tasks rather than through the acquisition of abstract written signs and symbols: learning by direct observation and doing is the order of the day. Consequently, there is little systematic documenting and recording of knowledge in the written form that one finds in abundance in contemporary western cultures. Yet this apparent lack has not prevented such predominantly non-alphabetic eastern cultures from achieving outstanding levels of performance in the arts, sport and in business. This would suggest that the current obsession with knowledge-creation and the presumed route of knowledge-creation-application-performance is a peculiarly western preoccupation and that it represents only one avenue of possibility for achieving effective action. This has significant implications for our understanding of the relationship among knowledge, action and performance.

From Complexity Science to Complex Thinking: Organization as Simple Location

Recent developments in the sciences of complexity have led to a rise in interest in the application of such insights to the understanding of social phenomena such as organization. This essay seeks to examine the fundamental differences between social and natural systems and to thereby render more transparent the possible limitations of a science of complexity for the analysis of organization. Against this science of complexity, it counterposes the kind of complex thinking inspired by philosophy, literature, art and the humanities to show how such forms of thinking may be more adequate to the task of revealing to us the whole spectrum of human lived experiences; something which we argue here that the complexity sciences, in the current form they take, remain unable to access.

Sensemaking, storytelling and the legitimization of elite business careers

This article examines elite business careers through the dual lens of sensemaking and storytelling as recounted in life-history interviews with business leaders. It explores how they make sense of, narrativize and legitimate their experiences of building their careers within and beyond large organizations. The research contribution is twofold. First, we explicate the sensemaking processes embedded within the multifarious stories recorded in life-history interviews, identified as locating, meaning-making and becoming. Second, we contribute to the literature on legitimacy by examining how business leaders use their storytelling as a vehicle for self-legitimization, (re)framing their accounts of their own success and justifying their position to themselves and others. In a world where reputations are hard won but easily lost, business leaders must nurture a life-history narrative which is socially desirable if their careers are to remain on track. This may serve them well through the creative evolution of their organizational journeys.

Dominant Corporate Agents and the Power Elite in France and Britain

Corporate elites are not a new phenomenon. However, the ways in which significant agents gain ascendancy to positions of power vary across nations and cultures. This paper analyses the ascension of a small minority of corporate agents to positions of dominance and the subsequent accession of a select few to the power elite. Our theoretical position builds upon the writings of Pierre Bourdieu on power and domination. These constructs are elaborated and made tangible through a cross-national comparative study of dominant corporate agents in France and Britain. Our results demonstrate the extent to which power remains concentrated in the French and British corporate sectors; highlighting equally pronounced similarities and differences between the two countries. It is suggested that power elites function through governance networks to promote institutional and organizational goals.

Developing Paradigmatic Awareness in University Business Schools: The Challenge for Executive Education

The question of how university-based forms of executive education can effectively contribute to the enhancement of practitioner capabilities using the insights of the humanities remains underexplored. The sustained pressure in business schools to adopt a teaching curriculum and pedagogical approach that appears immediately relevant to the perceived needs of practitioners is overwhelming. Yet, universities are distinct from consultancies or other professional management institutes in that traditionally they provide well-established forums for intellectual exchange and encourage crossfertilization among academic disciplines. We maintain that university-based business schools are uniquely positioned to use their internal university-wide expertise and core capabilities to inculcate paradigmatic awareness among business executives to enable them to enlarge their horizons of understanding and hence extend their decisional possibilities. For us, this is the true competitive advantage of university-based business schools over corporate universities, management training institutes, and consultancies. We maintain that university-based business schools can paradoxically be invaluable to business and industry, not by becoming overly anxious about immediate relevance, but by recognizing that the education and development of the individual as a whole through exposure to a plurality of paradigms and perspectives, is what sets universities apart and makes them distinct from other executive education providers. Their real value to the practitioner world is in offering truly fresh insights and genuine radical alternatives to executive problem situations through novel interpretations that are counterintuitive to received wisdom and best practice.

Relevance or ‘relevate’?: How university business schools can add value through reflexively learning from strategic partnerships with business

Much has been debated about the perceived relevance/irrelevance of business schools in addressing business needs with some suggesting that academic research is not applicable to practice. We contribute by claiming the debate is itself somewhat misplaced and the real task of business schools is to instil the art of ‘relevating’ the seemingly irrelevant in order to prepare managers for the challenges they face. Paradoxically, we contend that in relentlessly pursuing scholarship, academics can make a valuable contribution to practice by offering counterintuitive viewpoints that challenge business mindsets. Ironically, value-adding contributions to practice are best made when academia resists the seductive tendency to capitulate to the immediate demands of the client. For it is only by challenging conventional wisdom and expectations and thereby creating dissonance in the minds of managers, that new and unthought avenues of action may be opened up for consideration. We illustrate this by examining the experiences of a partnership between a multinational corporation and a university in the United Kingdom where the executive education programme was carried out using action learning techniques while encouraging reflexivity in practice.