Search results

The tendency for intended strategies to lead to unintended consequences is well documented. This longitudinal, real-time analysis of planned change implementation provides an explanation for this phenomenon. We focus on the social processes of interaction between middle managers as change recipients as they try to make sense of the change interventions. We show the extent to which lateral, informal processes of inter-recipient sensemaking contribute to both intended and unintended change outcomes, and therefore the unpredictable, emergent nature of strategic change. The findings raise the issue of the extent to which it is possible to manage evolving recipient interpretations during change implementation.

Over the last two decades, Strategy as Practice (SAP) has developed from an embryonic, fringe perspective on strategy to a consolidated field of strategy research. The 2007 special issue of Human Relations on 'Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective' played a pivotal role in bringing this field to fruition. Reflecting on the broad SAP aim to 'let a thousand flowers bloom', we employ a plant-based metaphor, to distinguish three phases in the development of SAP, each associated with different types of agenda work. In an initial Germination Phase, scholars did agenda-seeking work of establishing new concepts and differentiating SAP from other fields of strategy research. A Blossoming Phase of agenda-setting work followed, establishing a community of scholars and articles that identified as SAP, and establishing and defending the boundaries of the new field. As the field became established, it entered a Harvesting Phase, characterized by agenda-confirming work of using SAP lenses to explain core strategy and organization. Based on these reflections, and considering the many public critiques of SAP, we note that the field appears to be in transition to a new Propagating Phase that offers exciting potential to cross-pollinate within the SAP field and across other areas.

This paper explores how frontline workers contribute to an organization's realized strategy. Using a workplace studies approach, we analyse the work of museum tour guides as a salient example of workers engaged in frontline work. Our findings demonstrate the subtle and intricate nature of the embodied work of frontline workers as they 'bring into being' the strategic aims of an organization. We identified five elements as central to this process: (1) the situated physical context; (2) audience composition; (3) the moral order; (4) the talk, actions and gestures of the guide; and (5) the corresponding talk, actions and gestures of the audience. Drawing on these categories, we find frontline workers to demonstrate 'interactional competence': assessing and making use of the physical, spatial and material specifics of the context and those they are interacting with, and enlisting interactional resources to uphold a moral order that brings these others in as a working audience, encouraging them to respond in particular ways. Frontline workers thus skilfully combine language, material and bodily expressions in the flow of their work. Demonstrating these dynamics gives a more central role to material in the realization of strategy than previously recognized; demonstrates that 'outsiders' have an important part to play in realizing strategy; and highlights the importance of frontline workers and their skilled work in bringing strategy into being.

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.

Our longitudinal study of the sensemaking and responses to strategic change of the senior management team of a UK multinational subsidiary provides unusual data that enable us to explore the complexity of senior team change related sensemaking. We show senior teams to be distinct interpretive communities rather than one homogeneous category of change agents, as typically portrayed in change literature, who at times of center-led strategic change occupy a complex dual recipient/change agent role. By adopting a narrative approach, we show the shared sensemaking of such a team to be impacted by the locally differentiated nature of its interpretive and relational contexts, leading to context specific interpretations of center-led change and locally distinct responses, with consequences for change outcomes. We found that because of their dual role, senior managers construct two sets of interwoven and interacting change narratives which mediate the relationship between the wider organizational change and local change actions. Our analysis reveals how these evaluations of change, accompanied by affect, evolve over time and how they impact action. These findings contribute to existing theories of sensemaking and change by addressing the previously undertheorized relationship between senior management teams' sensemaking and their responses to strategic change.