Robin Holt

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.

The Role of Analogy and Metaphor in the Framing and Legitimization of Strategic Change

Strategic change initiatives disrupt established categories of stakeholder understanding and typically present a problem of justifying and legitimizing the change to stakeholders in order to gain their buy-in and support. While it has been suggested that the analogical or metaphorical framing of strategic changes is crucial in that it fosters understanding and creates legitimacy for the change, we set out to specify the conditions and uses of analogical and metaphorical framing in effecting support for strategic changes. Specifically, we argue that (a) analogies are more effective in the context of additive changes, whereas metaphors are more apt for substitutive changes, and that (b) relational analogies and metaphors are generally more effective in securing support for strategic changes, as opposed to analogies or metaphors that highlight common attributes. We also argue that the overall effectiveness of analogies and metaphors in the framing of a change is furthermore dependent on (c) the degree to which these frames are culturally familiar to stakeholders and (d) the extent to which they connect with the prior motivations of stakeholders.

Sensemaking, rhetoric and the socially competent entrepreneur.

A significant barrier to creating and sustaining firms are the difficulties experienced in continually legitimating their institutional structures. This is especially the case for small firms; entrepreneurs struggle to create and sustain often novel ideas and nascent firm structures set within, or against, well-established market environments. To better understand connections between organization formation and legitimacy of small firms we use accounts from three entrepreneurs. We break down their accounts using Aristotle’s concept of rhetoric. By attending to what Aristotle identified as the three areas of concern for rhetorical method (logos, ethos and pathos) to analyse the entrepreneurs’ sensemaking, we show their awareness of the negotiated, situated and social nature of their enterprises. Our findings expand on existing concepts such as Lounsbury and Glynn’s (2001) ‘cultural entrepreneurship’, by demonstrating how collaborative sensemaking might be practised and how social competence and an awareness of others’ needs, wishes, ambitions and objectives are central to the foundation and potential success of small firms.

The Mature Entrepreneur: A Narrative Approach to Entrepreneurial Goals

The majority of existing research on entrepreneurial goals is individualistically oriented and tends to begin with the assumption that entrepreneurs are animated solely by the pursuit of independence, freedom and profit-making. In this study, we employ Kant’s concept of maturity to develop insight into entrepreneurial goals as socially embedded. Drawing on a narrative orientation we explore how entrepreneurs articulate their goals and the images they use to metaphorically express these goals. We find that entrepreneurs articulate goals that evoke public, social and moral concerns alongside the more commonly accepted entrepreneurial goals of independence and challenging existing orthodoxies.

Entrepreneurship and process studies

Process studies put movement, change and flow first; to study processually is to consider the world as restless, something underway, becoming and perishing, without end. To understand firms processually is to accept but also – and this is harder perhaps – to absorb this fluidity, to treat a variable as just that, a variable. The resonance with entrepreneurship studies is obvious. If any field is alive to, and fully resonant with, a processual understanding of, for example, the creation of firms, it is entrepreneurship studies. This special issue is an attempt to consider the promise and potential of processual approaches to studying, researching and practising entrepreneurship. The articles in the issue attest to an increasing sensitivity to processual thinking. We argue that appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena processually opens up the field to an understanding of entrepreneurship as organizational creation – not simply the creation of new organizations but also experiments in new organizational form.

Wisdom, management and organization

The motive of success is not enough. It produces a short-sighted world which destroys the sources of its own prosperity ... A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly about its function. Low thoughts mean low behaviour, and after a brief orgy of exploitation, low behaviour means a descending standard of life. (Alfred North Whitehead, Lecture given at Harvard Business School, 1932, published in Adventures of ideas, 1933, pp. 119–120)

The presence of entrepreneurial opportunity

Beginning in a critique of conceptualisations of entrepreneurial opportunity dominant in economics and entrepreneurship studies we draw on both the heterodox economics of G.L.S. Shackle and perspectives from phenomenology to recast entrepreneurship as an imaginative act of ‘making present’ unfolding through time and lived experience. We develop both the critique and the alternative perspective through a double reading of the case of T.E. Thomson and Co., a merchant house established in Calcutta in 1834.

Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Drawing Lines in Organization Studies

We argue that when considering questions of ontology in organization studies, much can be gained by issuing reminders of the normative conditions by which meanings are fixed. In attempting to fix meaning and the conditions of meaning epistemologically, however, critical realist and social constructionist positions tend to eschew such normative considerations and assert instead how the fixity of meaning is related to causal powers on the one hand, or to discursive habit on the other. In both cases there is an urge to extend from, and somehow complete, organizational experience by drawing what we call general lines. The critical realists do this by distinguishing the necessary from the contingent, the social constructionists by arguing language goes all the way through making such a distinction impossible. Enlisting arguments and concepts from Heidegger and Wittgenstein, as well as discussing the illustrative case of the rights and wrongs of cigarette production, we suggest an alternative normative framing for questions of meaning in which necessity and contingency cohabit, something we liken to the drawing of local lines.

The creation and evolution of new business ventures: an activity theory perspective

Purpose – The paper seeks to draw on the work of Engestrom to set out an activity theory framework for the analysis of entrepreneurs engaged in the creation of new business ventures (NBVs). Adopting an activity‐based approach involves analysing the actions of individual and groups that are mediated through a range of devices, including language and physical artefacts.Design/methodology/approach – The empirical data are based on a small sample of “scholars” taking part in a UK government‐sponsored initiative to promote enterprise: the New Entrepreneur Scholarship (NES). The data were collected by means of semi‐structured interviews with the entrepreneurs. NVivo software was then used to systemise the data according to the six dimensions of the activity theory triangle.Findings – The cases illustrate the contradictions and tensions that confront nascent entrepreneurs as they consider the horizon of possibilities associated with their business idea. The paper demonstrates that the new business actually emerg...

Interacting institutional logics in general dental practice

We investigate the organisational field of general dental practice and how agents change or maintain the institution of values associated with the everyday work of health care provision. Our dataset comprise archival literature and policy documents, interview data from field level actors, as well as service delivery level interview data and secondary data gathered (2011–12) from 16 English dental practices. Our analysis provides a typology of institutional logics (prevailing systems of value) experienced in the field of dental practice. Confirming current literature, we find two logics dominate how care is assessed: business-like health care and medical professionalism. We advance the literature by finding the business-like health care logic further distinguished by values of commercialism on the one hand and those of accountability and procedural diligence on the other. The logic of professionalism we also find is further distinguished into a commitment to clinical expertise and independence in delivering patient care on the one hand, and concerns for the autonomy and sustainability of a business enterprise on the other.