2002 Jarzabkowski Strategy as Practice Recursiveness Adaptation and Strategic Practice in Use 2002

Strategy as practice: Recursiveness, adaptation and strategic practices-in-use. Paula Jarzabkowski

STRATEGY AS PRACTICE: RECURSIVENESS, ADAPTATION

AND STRATEGIC PRACTICES-IN-USE

by Paula Jarzabkowski

RP0212

P Jarzabkowski, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK

July 2002

ISBN No: 1 85449 532 1

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KEYWORDS:

Strategy as practice, strategic practices, social theory, recursiveness, adaptation

Strategy as practice: Recursiveness, adaptation and strategic practices-in-use

Abstract

In this paper, a social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning existing strategic management literature. In practice, there is a co-existent tension between recursive and adaptive forms of strategic action since both are important to competitive advantage. This tension may be better understood by examining how practitioners use strategic practices, such as management tools and techniques, to put strategy into practice. We exemplify this point with a discussion of how strategic planning may be adapted to the multiple contexts in which it is used. The paper concludes by proposing a research agenda for the study of strategic practices-in-use.

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Strategy as practice: Recursiveness, adaptation and strategic practices-in-use

Introduction

Recently, concern over the gap between the theory of what people do and what people

actually do has given rise to the ‘practice’ approach in the management literatures. For

example, there are literatures on knowing in practice, formal analysis in practice and

technology in practice, each of which share a common focus upon the way that actors

interact with the social and physical features of context in the everyday activities that

constitute practice. Most recently, the practice approach has entered the strategy

literature, recommending that we focus upon strategists engaged in the real work of

strategising (Hendry, 2000; Whittington, 1996; 2001a). That is, just as the literatures on

knowing in practice suggest that knowledge is not something that a firm has but

knowing in action, something that a firm and its actors do (Cook and Brown, 1999), so

we should examine strategy not as something a firm has but something a firm does.

The practice approach is commensurate with appeals for a new paradigm to revitalise

strategy theory by addressing key questions and concerns, such as how firms behave

and how and why firms are different (Prahalad and Hamel, 1994). However, we should

be cautious about launching into yet another theory of strategy since the field is already

characterised by a diverse array of approaches from microeconomic theories of firm

positioning to examinations of managerial cognition (Mintzberg et al, 1998). Strategy

as practice can provide a valuable contribution to this problem because it is posited as a

framework for understanding the relationships between different theories (Hendry,

2000). Each existing approach is assumed to provide a partial view of strategy, with

actual practice the point of interaction between different theoretical approaches. While

the points of interaction that constitute practice are richly supported by social theory,

there is no applicable framework for their integration in the strategic management

literature. The dearth of theoretical orientation leaves the strategy scholar with

questions about what practice is, why it is a relevant topic for investigation, and how it

might be studied. In this paper we develop a social theory framework that may be used

to integrate existing strategic management literature and provide a platform for the

empirical investigation of strategy as practice.

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The paper is in three sections. The first section of the paper draws upon social theory to

address two themes implied by practice, recursiveness and adaptation. These two core

elements of practice implicitly underpin much of the current strategic management

literature. For example, in a double special issue of Strategic Management Journal on

the evolution of capabilities (Helfat, 2000), all eleven papers deal with some aspect of

strategic change or rigidity, particularly the conundrum of how a firm can embrace

both. A theory of practice brings recursiveness and adaptation into a dialectic tension in

which the two are inextricably linked. Practice is thus a means of integrating diverse

strategy literatures within a more holistic framework. In the second section we suggest

that to empirically investigate these two practice themes, it is important to examine

how strategic practitioners use strategic practices. A theoretical explanation for the role

of practitioners and strategic practices-in-use is provided. The third section develops a

research agenda for the study of strategic practices-in-use, which we posit as a method

for understanding recursive and adaptive forms of strategy as practice. This research

agenda is supported with the example of strategic planning, a persistent strategic

practice that has adapted to multiple contexts over time. In conclusion, the paper

proposes that strategy as practice is a topic for serious academic endeavour being both

theoretically robust and practically relevant.

Section one: Recursiveness and adaptation in practice

In this section, a theoretical foundation for two key practice themes, recursiveness and

adaptation, is built upon four main areas of social theory; structuration (Giddens, 1984),

habitus (Bourdieu, 1990), social becoming (Sztompka, 1991), and communities of

practice (Brown and Duguid, 1991; 2001). These theoretical contributions to practice

are elaborated and then linked to concepts in existing strategic management literature.

While the diversity of approaches might be criticised for eclecticism, practice is posited

as the point of interaction between pluralist epistemologies (Cook and Brown, 1999).

Our intention is to develop a more holistic approach to the study of practice through the

integration of diverse theoretical perspectives (Spender, 1998).

First this section examines the reciprocity inherent in strategy as practice, termed the

problem of recursiveness because it obscures the means by which practice adapts. The

problem of recursiveness penetrates the strategic management literature at multiple

levels from individual cognition to organisational structures and industry environments

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(see Table 1). To address this problem, the paper turns to the second theme, that of the

social context in which practice occurs. Practice occurs in macro contexts that provide

commonalities of action but also in micro contexts in which action is highly localised.

The interaction between contexts provides an opportunity for adaptive practice, a theme

that is also present in the strategic management literature (see Table 2). Discussion of

these two themes furnishes a theoretical orientation for recursiveness and adaptation as

key concepts in the strategic management literature that co-exist in strategy as practice.

INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

Reciprocal practice: the problem of recursiveness

The term ‘practice’ implies repetitive performance in order to become ‘practised’; that

is, to attain recurrent, habitual or routinized accomplishment of particular actions. For

example, in sport or music practice develops competence and improves performance.

Practice is thus a particular type of self-reinforcing learning akin to single loop or

exploitative learning theories (cf. Argote, 1999). The routinized nature of practice may

be explained by theories of social order, such as structuration (Giddens, 1984), in

which the interaction between agent and structure is recursive. Structuration examines

the relationship between agents and socially-produced structures through recursively

situated practices that form part of daily routines. Structures are the collective systems

within which human actors carry out their daily activities. Structures constrain and

enable human action and are also created and re-created by actors who draw upon

social structure in order to act. This reciprocity between agent and structure enables the

persistence of social order, embedding it in social institutions that endure across time

and space. Lest this appear excessively deterministic, social order may serve agency,

being drawn upon purposively by knowledgeable actors. However, knowledge is not

necessarily explicit. Rather, action may occur as a function of practical consciousness,

in which tacit, experience-based knowledge is “incorporated in the practices which

make up the bulk of daily life” (ibid:90). Structuration makes three main contributions

to the routinized nature of practice. First, practice is institutionalised in social structures

that persist across time and space. Secondly, institutional social structures are

incorporated in the daily practices that constitute action. Thirdly, structures persist

through the tacit knowledge and practical consciousness of actors who choose familiar

patterns because it provides them with “ontological security” (ibid:64).

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Bourdieu (1990) further elaborates the reciprocity between agent and structure. He

refers to a dialectic of social structures and structuring dispositions within which every

practical action occurs. This dialectic is the ‘habitus’, which is socially constructed but

transcends the individual, being “constituted in practice and … always oriented towards

practical functions” (ibid:52). Practice comprises social order residing both in people’s

minds and in the habitus, which functions as a form of collective memory. Bourdieu

imbues the latter with properties akin to genetics “reproducing the acquisitions of the

predecessors in the successors” (ibid: 291). The temporal persistence of habitus shapes

the aspirations of those who enact it in daily practice. Habitus assumes causality by

structuring new information in accordance with the information already accumulated.

This ensures its constancy and resistance to change. Agents’ choices will be influenced

by their consideration of what is possible, this belief being shaped by “concrete indices

of the accessible and inaccessible” (ibid: 64). For Bourdieu, agents are “accomplices in

the processes that tend to make the probable a reality” (ibid: 65).

Both Bourdieu and Giddens provide a rationale for the stable and institutional

characteristics of practice, albeit that structuration predicates this stability on the

ontological security of the actor while habitus is a more structurally oriented theory.

This focus on stability obscures the adaptive nature of practice (cf. Orlikowski, 2000)

and will be termed here the problem of recursiveness.

Recursiveness means the socially accomplished reproduction of sequences of activity and action because the actors involved possess a negotiated sense that one template from their repertoire will address a new situation. [While] recursiveness is always improvised … equally, there can be a durability about recursiveness that constrains attempts to transform the sequences. (Clark, 2000:67)

This durability may be considered a ‘code-of-practice’ or even ‘best practice’, being

sedimented rules and resources that govern how to act. Recursiveness underpins much

of the strategic management literature and is present at three levels, the actor, the

organisation and the social institution. At the level of the actor, the problem is largely a

psychological one arising from individual cognition. The mental models of actors are

subject to structural influences such as formal operating procedures (Cyert and March,

1963), heuristic devices (Newell, Shaw and Simon, 1962), and, in interpretative

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theories, to stored cognitive recipes (Weick, 1969). The relationship between thought

and action arises from procedural memory, the skill-base associated with cognition.

Procedural memory predisposes those familiar routinized actions developed from

experience that actors undertake without conscious thought (Cohen and Bacdayan,

1994). Individual cognition is related to social structure through its manifestation as

collective phenomena shared by groups of actors. Similar to the notion of habitus,

collective memory structures boundarize cognition (Cyert and March, 1963) and create

perceptual filters (Prahalad and Bettis, 1986) that direct choice-making behaviour

towards the known. The reinforcement of routinized and stable structures through

collective cognition is found in literatures on groupthink (Janis, 1972), top team

homogeneity (Wiersema and Bantel, 1992), and restricted learning capabilities (Tripsas

and Gavetti, 2000). The recursiveness arising from actors’ needs for ontological

security (Giddens, 1984) is thus present in much of the literature on cognition,

interpretation and collective cognition.

At the organisational level, the problem of recursiveness is illustrated in path

dependence, persistent organisational routines, and organisational memory. The

strategic and operational routines of an organisation have genetic properties that

predispose it to act in certain ways and, more importantly, define the possible options

that it may take (Nelson and Winter, 1982). Routines are socially complex, embedded,

and interlocked. They comprise a social architecture that penetrates a firm’s

communication channels, information filters and problem-solving strategies making it

difficult for the firm to absorb new technologies (Henderson and Clark, 1990). The

normative influences of routines may be understood as organisational memory (Walsh

and Ungson, 1991) or cultural web (Johnson, 1987), providing embedded repertoires,

rites and rituals for action that are persistent sources of firm identity. These

characteristics may even be considered firm resources, building distinctive traits that

are a non-transferrable source of competitive advantage. However, path dependence

means that resources are difficult to shed or reconfigure quickly. Strategically a firm is

liable to exploit and build upon existing resources (Grant, 1991), exhibiting resource

deepening behaviour that channels evolution along familiar lines (Karim and Mitchell,

2000), even where these are no longer viable. The distinctive social structures of a firm

may thus be seen as its core rigidities (Leonard-Barton, 1992), predisposing recurrent

action patterns (Cohen et al, 1996) and leading to organisational inertia (Hannan and

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Freeman,1984; Rumelt, 1995). These concepts of organisational stability are implicitly

underpinned by the social theory of habitus; that social structure assimilates

information that is self-reinforcing and resistant to change.

The problem of recursiveness arising from embedded social institutions is present in

institutional theory, particularly the notion of isomorphism, in which organisations,

particularly those in the same sector or industry, come to resemble each other because

of the common social structures upon which they draw (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983).

Similar to the self-reinforcing structural notions of habitus, social institutions may be

predisposed to particular organisational forms (Hannan and Freeman, 1977). These

institutional forces are also linked to agency through their influence on managerial

cognition (Elenkov, 1997), with isomorphic tendencies evidenced in the choice-making

behaviour of actors who draw upon similar social structures. For example, firms in the

same industry display similar recipes for action (Spender, 1989). This is because

strategic actors are embedded within industry networks that constitute collective

cognitive structures and these influence conformity of choice in different firms

(Geletkanycz and Hambrick, 1997; Porac et al, 1989).

Undoubtedly, social practice is characterised by recursiveness that is evident in the

choices arising from interaction between social institutions, organisations, and actors

(cf. Table 1). This is not necessarily a weakness for firms. Indeed, the literature extols

the competitive advantages of an experience curve (Argote, 1999), successful

companies ‘stick to the knitting’ (Peters and Waterman, 1982), and resource-deepening

behaviour builds distinctive competences and capabilities (Karim and Mitchell, 2000).

From this perspective recursiveness equates with learned efficiencies, suggesting that

‘practice makes perfect’. Since firms display similar choice-making behaviour,

recursiveness may even be associated with best practice. However, the convergence

that underpins best practice may also be associated with organisational inertia and the

destruction of strategic differentiation between competitors (Nattermann, 2000). As

differentiation and change are important factors of competitive advantage in even

moderately dynamic environments, recursive practice is a problem in strategic

management. However, for each of the arguments above, there are counter arguments

that suggest practice also has adaptive characteristics (see Table 2). In order to

understand practice as an ongoing social process, capable of encompassing both

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stability and change, we now turn to theories of co-existent and dynamic interaction

between agent and structure.


Adaptive practice: social movement within macro and micro contexts

Adaptation, being varying degrees of change from incremental adjustment to radical

reorientation, may be explained using the theory of social becoming (Pettigrew, 1990;

Sztompka, 1991). Sztompka (1991) exposes three false dichotomies in social theory.

First, he criticises the dichotomy between agent and social structure, proposing that

there is a third ontological dimension; “the unified socio-individual field” (ibid:94).

Secondly he shows the false separation of static and dynamic processes of social

reality. This is because ‘life’ or ‘living’ are constantly undergoing change and self-

transformation. Finally, he posits that potential and actuality are not separable since

potential reality and actual reality are in a continual state of oscillation and feedback in

the process of social becoming. Sztompka’s theory is one of “a living, socio-individual

field in the process of becoming” (ibid:95). The interaction between agent and structure

does not sustain sedimented behaviours; it is ‘becoming’, not became. He identifies

practice as the unit of analysis for observing ‘becoming’, which is the chain of social

events “where operation and action meet, a dialectic synthesis of what is going on in a

society and what people are doing” (ibid:96).

Practice is an evolving process of social order arising from the interplay between

external and internal social structure building. External structure is the wider societal

context, in which there is a current of social movement; “what is going on in a society”

(ibid:96). Internal structure is any given group engaged in their own local construction

of practice, “what people are doing” (ibid:96). Change is carried out within the internal

context in interaction with the external context. There is thus an ongoing process of

social becoming that is realised through a chain of social events, or practice.

These assumptions about changing social order underpin the strategy process field,

which “describes how things change over time” (Van de Ven, 1992:169) through the

study of sequences of events (for example, Abbott, 1990; Glick et al, 1990; Van de Ven

and Poole, 1990). In strategy process studies, change arises from the interaction

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between embedded levels of context from the socio-economic to the industry to the

firm (Pettigrew 1987; Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991). Child (1997) incorporates the actor

into the change process through strategic choice, which is “a consciously-sought

adaptation to, and manipulation of, existing internal structures and environmental

conditions” (ibid:67, emphasis in original). Organisations are involved in an ongoing,

adaptive process of internal or within-firm social structure building, embedded within a

wider context of external or environmental social structure building.

The interplay between levels of social structure building may be better understood with

reference to plurality. Modern society has plural social institutions, such as political,

economic, ethnic, and religious institutions that may be regarded as co-existing forms

of social structure (Giddens, 1991; Whittington, 1992). Actors are involved in the

interplay between these institutions, affording opportunities for change. For example,

divergent firm level strategies in the Taiwanese computer industry are found to result

from the varied use that skilled strategic actors make of the different rules and

resources present in three social institutions; political, technological and business

systems (Hung and Whittington, 1997). Strategic behaviour may thus be divergent or

isomorphic depending upon the particular institutions that are invoked, with modern

society characterised by plural social institutions.

This theoretical framing suggests that there are macro and micro contexts in which

strategy as practice occurs (Whittington, 2001b). Interaction between contexts provides

opportunities for adaptive practice because the macro level is characterised by multiple

social institutions, while the micro level is heterogeneous due to the localised social

movement occasioned by “what people are doing” (Sztompka, 1991:96). We now

explore micro context through the literature on communities of practice.

Micro-context: Communities of practice

In a ‘community of practice’ individual thought is essentially social and is developed in

interaction with the practical activities of a community, through living and participating

in its experiences over time (Cook and Brown, 1999; Lave and Wenger, 1991). The

literature on communities of practice provides two important components of a theory of

practice; that practice is local and that local contexts provide opportunity for adaptive

practice. We shall explore these in turn.

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While communities may have some broad similarities, each community has specific

social interactions that constitute a unique interpretative context (Brown and Duguid,

1991). Practice is local and situated, arising from the “moment-by-moment interactions

between actors, and between actors and the environments of their action” (Suchman,

1987:179). Rather than looking for structural invariants, normative rules of conduct, or

preconceived cognitive schema, therefore, practice scholars should investigate “the

processes whereby particular, uniquely constituted circumstances are systematically

interpreted so as to render meaning shared” (ibid:67). To understand practice it is

important to move beyond institutional similarities to penetrate the situated and

localised nature of practice in particular contexts.

This concept of a localised and unique interpretative context is central to the literature

on communities of practice. For example, Orr’s (1996) photocopier technicians operate

in a distinctly local setting in which their interactions are strongly influenced by the

particularities of a specific work time and space. Orlikowski (2000) draws our attention

to the localised use of technology that results in contextual specificity of technology-in-

practice, even where the use of these technologies is widely pervasive and normatively

structured in wider contexts. Practice is situated, experiential knowing-in-doing, and

thus particular to the participants in a community (Brown and Duguid, 2001; Cook and

Brown, 1999).

This local context provides an opportunity for adaptive practice. New knowledge about

specific situations may arise from the social activities of dialogue and interaction

(Brown and Duguid, 1991; Cook and Brown, 1999; Wenger, 1998), often about a

problem or failure (cf. Pisano, 1994; Sitkin, 1992). For example, when the formal code-

of-practice for mending a faulty photocopier is inadequate to the task Orr’s (1996)

technicians engage in adaptive social interaction. They tell stories about the problem

that generate new methods for its solution. New practice does not come from external

sources but from participating in the social process of problem-solving within that

community. In this process, existing frameworks take on new meanings that are highly

contextual. Local practice may thus deviate from institutionally established practice.

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However, a problem is not essential to the learning inherent in a community of practice.

Communities of practice are concerned with, and always oriented towards social

activity (Wenger, 1998). The social nature of communities constitutes an adaptive

learning opportunity that involves new forms of practice. Through the entry and exit of

their members, communities are exposed to generative practice. New participants learn

from continuing members how to interpret the social infrastructure of a particular

community, in the process resocialising the continuing players and reinforcing existing

practice. However, due to their low socialisation to the community, new members also

question the infrastructure, so creating the potential for its re-evaluation and adaptation

(Lave and Wenger, 1991; March, 1991). Even stable communities may be exposed to

adaptation where their members are also members of wider “networks of communities”

(Brown and Duguid, 2001:205), for example, with professionals in other organisations

or in non-work communities. Communities that have largely stable membership, with

limited external networks, and few crises or problems are liable to engage in recursive

practice while the converse situation promotes adaptive practice.

While these examples tend to look at particular subsets of organisations, such as

engineers (Orr, 1996) or insurance clerks (Wenger, 1998), it is probable that such

concepts also hold true for strategic practitioners. For example, it is important to “know

the ‘done thing’ locally” (Whittington, 1996:732) in order to enact strategy in particular

contexts. Strategy as practice is found to be particular to the organisation that

constitutes its community of interpretation (Jarzabkowski and Wilson, 2002) and to be

situated within a “taken-for-granted and highly contextualised rationality” (Spender and

Grinyer, 1996:30). Firms may thus be conceptualised as a strategic community of

practice. However, firms may also be considered a collection of more or less loosely

coupled diverse communities, not all of which are primarily strategic (cf. Brown and

Duguid, 2001). Therefore, there is some question as to the boundaries for a strategic

community of practice (cf. Whittington, 2001b). Strategic practitioners are liable to act

within specific organisational communities, but also to be involved in strategic

‘networks of practice’ outside the organisation (Brown and Duguid, 2001). The first

provides opportunities for locally adaptive practice while the second enables adaptation

through interaction with external contexts.

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Adaptive practice: interplay between contexts in the strategic management literature

The concept of localised practice is present in the resource-based view (RBV), which

posits that localised, and hence distinctive strategic contexts are value-creating. RBV

proposes that firms are heterogeneous with competitive advantage arising from their

unique and idiosyncratic bundling of firm resources (Barney, 1991). In addition to

physical resources, RBV includes intangible assets such as social complexity as a

source of advantage. However, early forms of RBV have been criticised for their

market-based assumptions that commodify socially embedded processes (Cook and

Brown, 1999; Scarbrough, 1998) and ignore the dynamism inherent in strategic action

(Spender, 1996). The learning involved in this type of resource acquisition is

exploitative and resource deepening (Karim and Mitchell, 2000), leading to

recursiveness. Resources may provide competitive advantage at a moment in time but

their adaptation and, thus, the sustainability of competitive advantage in changing

environments, is less apparent suggesting the rigidities and routines of the previous

section (cf. Cockburn et al, 2000).

A more adaptive form of RBV may be found in theories of competitive advantage

based upon knowledge resources (Grant, 1996; Spender, 1996) and dynamic

capabilities (Helfat, 2000; Teece et al, 1997). While continuing to emphasise the

heterogeneity arising from idiosyncratic and localised practice, the knowledge-based

and dynamic capabilities literatures focus more upon the learning and adaptation

involved in competitive advantage. Dynamic capabilities are “processes that use

resources – specifically the processes to integrate, reconfigure, gain and release

resources – to match and even create market change” (Teece et al, 1997). New resource

configurations, that is, adaptive practice, may be generated from the use of existing

resources. Importantly, dynamic capabilities are perceived to generate change inside the

firm and also to lead to market change.

How does this adaptive practice within the micro-context of firm strategy lead to

adaptation in macro-context? With reference to social becoming (Sztompka, 1991),

how does the local context of “what people are doing” interplay with the macro context

of “what is going on in a society” (ibid:96)? If the firm is viewed as a set of loose-tight

coupled communities, each comprising a local context, the strategy literature on

adaptive practice is rather limited. There is a nascent body of research into new forms

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of organising that examines networked, strategically decentralised firms such as ABB,

which begins to capture these phenomena (Whittington et al, 1999). There is also an

increasing interest in micro-strategising (cf. Johnson et al, forthcoming), looking, for

example, at how innovations in firm micro-contexts and peripheries are important to

firm strategy (Johnson and Huff, 1998).

If, however, we take the view that a firm is a micro-context, interaction with the macro

context is examined in strategy process research on change as multi-level phenomena

(for example, Pettigrew, 1987; Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991). There is also a growing

literature linking firm idiosyncrasies to competitive advantage (Barney, 1990; Grant,

1991; Teece et al, 1997). This relationship between within-firm practice and the more

general context of markets offers opportunities for cross-firm and cross-sector

adaptation. Since competition is associated with imitative behaviour, lesser performers

will move to adopt the practices of successful performers, leading to the spread of best

practice (Cockburn et al, 2000). Particular practices will be efficacious across a range

of industries, increasing their uptake from micro-contexts into macro-contexts. Indeed,

even where firms start from quite different positions, they tend to converge upon

similar capabilities over time (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). While best practice

indicates how micro-context practice is transmitted to macro-context and spread

throughout a group of firms, constituting adaptation, it also poses the problem of

institutional isomorphism. That is, best practice is overly concerned with mimetic

behaviour that leads to convergence (Nattermann, 2000).

However, the concept of pluralism is also present in the notion of new markets.

Strategy textbooks abound with cases of firms, such as Honda, Southwest Airlines and

Ikea, which developed divergent strategies and targeted new markets in seemingly

saturated and normatively structured competitive conditions. Adaptation is not simply a

matter of transferring practice between contexts. Rather it is a matter of adaptive

interplay between contexts that may generate new practice. This is perhaps best shown

in the strategy literature on different velocity markets. For example, dynamic

capabilities may be more repetitive and resource deepening in moderately dynamic

markets and involve newly created knowledge in high-velocity markets (Eisenhardt and

Martin, 2000). In high velocity markets, which are characterised by plurality, firm

heterogeneity and localised variations in practice are common. Firms in these markets

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are complex adaptive systems (Pascale, 1999) that display unique solutions and rapidly

changing responses such as patching (Eisenhardt and Brown, 1999), simple rules

(Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001) and time-pacing (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997). These

examples of continuously evolving firms show that rapid interactions between micro

and macro-contexts may result in even radically adaptive rather than recursive practice.

While such recent literatures permit us to understand adaptive practice in high velocity

markets, they focus on a subset of extreme example firms. For most firms,

recursiveness is also important. Firms need both recursive and adaptive practice to

capitalise on routines of success as well as developing the capacity for reinvention.

There is thus a coexistent tension between recursive and adaptive modes of practice.

These coexistent tensions are based in the social interactions that span the plural micro

and macro contexts that comprise the strategy as practice arena. Any given practice

community must be considered in terms of the micro-strategies that constitute reality

for its practitioners but also the community’s interactions with some wider practice

arena that has more general application (Whittington, 2001b). Unique practice in

particular contexts may penetrate wider spheres and so be adopted and adapted to other

contexts stimulating further social movement that contributes to the ongoing chain of

practice. Interaction between contexts is important to a theory of strategy as practice,

permitting us to move between the specific and the general and to understand both

recursiveness and adaptation. However, the many literatures on which we have drawn

illustrate only partial components of recursive and adaptive practice (see Tables 1 and

2). How then, may strategy scholars and practitioners better understand this problem?

Section two: Strategic practitioners and strategic practices-in-use

In this section we propose that a study of the way that strategic practices are used may

furnish a better understanding of recursive and adaptive forms of practice. We theorise

the role of strategic practitioners and the strategic practices they use drawing again

upon Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu (1990) and also incorporating de Certeau’s (1984)

notion of practice as usage and Vygotsky’s (1978) emphasis on the tools used in

practical activity. Using this framing, we posit that strategic practices-in-use are a

methodological entry point for examining recursive and adaptive forms of strategy as

practice (see Table 3).

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Practitioners: Skill and bricolage

In lay terms a practitioner is a professional; one who has undergone training in order to

go into practice, for example legal or medical practice. The practitioner draws upon

‘codes-of-practice’, learned through formal training, to guide professional action. As

individual practitioners become more accomplished, practice also involves tacit

experiential elements that imply differential levels of skill and ability. However, in

strategy the training, skill and experience involved in becoming a strategic practitioner

are rather less obvious. To address this problem, we shall develop a theoretical

orientation for strategic practitioners as skilled actors.

Practitioners as knowledgeable, purposive and reflexive

In structuration theory actors are knowledgeable, purposive, and reflexive and so, able

to enact structure to their own ends (Giddens, 1984). These three concepts are

important to our understanding of how strategic practitioners act. Knowledge resides in

both discursive consciousness and practical consciousness, which are discussed in the

cognition literatures as declarative or ‘fact’ based memory and procedural or ‘skill’

based memory (Cohen and Bacdayan, 1994; Moorman and Miner, 1998). Essentially,

actors have knowledge that they can articulate and skill-based, practical knowledge that

they express through doing. While the cognition and knowledge based literatures have

made considerable ground by examining these as separate forms of knowledge (for

example, Nonaka, 1994), Giddens is more concerned with permeability between the

discursive and the practical and this is the central tenet of the practice perspective on

knowledge. Knowledge is not a possession to be codified and transmitted. Rather, it is

knowing in action, created and shared through social activity (Brown and Duguid,

2001; Cook and Brown, 1999). A strategic practitioner is thus engaged in knowing,

some of it explicit, discursive or declarative, and some of it tacit, practical or

procedural, but all of it occurring through the social medium of practice.

Actors are also purposive and reflexive. Purposive actors have intent, which is essential

to the largely teleological, goal-seeking assumptions underpinning strategy (Van de

Ven, 1992). While the literature on emergent strategy indicates that strategic action

does not always comply with intent (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985), this does not deny

15


its fundamentally teleological nature. As Giddens (1984) notes, intentful action may

have unintended consequences that may shape subsequent intent. The continuously

evolving interaction of the intended and the actual is located within the inherent

reflexivity of actors. They are able to monitor the outcomes of action and consequently

reframe their orientation towards subsequent action. Due to the routinization implicit in

procedural forms of knowing, orientations may be slow to change, suggesting

recursiveness. However, adaptation is enhanced where social activity increases the

dynamic interplay and reflexivity involved in knowing (Cook and Brown, 1999).

Bourdieu (1990) enhances our understanding of both intent and knowing in action.

Using the example of a football game, he discusses skilled action as anticipatory of the

future. A player sees in advance where the game is going and acts in accordance with

that supposition of the future by being in position for the ball. While this may be a

calculated response, based on past experience of this and other games, it is also tacit

and immediate. The practice world that makes up the actor’s reality presents all the

components of interaction from which to make a response that comprises both reason

and intuitive reaction. In the rather limited literature on practitioners this process is

referred to as reflection in action (Schon, 1983). It combines repertoire and

experimentation, using the past to conjecture the present and future and being

spontaneously reflexive in expanding the repertoire in accordance with the outcomes

attained. While reflection may be deliberate and post-action, it is the capacity for

‘thinking on one’s feet’ that characterises differential skill levels in practitioners. These

concepts are applicable to strategic practitioners who position themselves and their

organisation in accordance with anticipation of the future. Skilled practitioners are

liable to have a greater repertoire of strategic practices to draw upon but also to be more

reflexive in their use, displaying routinized or adaptive behaviour as called for by a

situation. Therefore, to understand skilled practice we should look not only at what

strategy is done but also at how strategy is done, the characteristics of usage that may

show the skill of the practitioner.

Practitioners and skill: Bricolage

To elaborate this point, we turn to de Certeau (1984) who examines practice through a

study of ordinary actors engaged in using the artefacts of everyday practice to their own

ends. Practice is the art of combination; “A way of thinking invested in a way of acting

16


… which cannot be dissociated from an art of using” (ibid:xv, emphasis added). Social

structure contains the established artefacts to use for action. These artefacts were

developed with particular intentions. However, artefacts are only guidelines containing

multiple potentialities according to use. The use of artefacts in ways other than

intended may change the artefact, the practice and, over time, the intent associated with

the artefact. Where the intent implied in artefacts complies largely with the intent of

actors, habitual, routinized use may be expected, leading to recursiveness. However,

the appropriation of artefacts for particular, unanticipated outcomes may well involve

their adaptation. This is referred to as bricolage, the making do and “artisan-like

inventiveness” (ibid:xviii), by which actors produce their own intentful activities from

the artefacts that structure everyday activity.

Bricolage, meaning ‘do-it-yourself’, involves improvisation with the materials at hand,

particularly under conditions of resource scarcity (Moorman and Miner, 1998). While

bricolage may involve quite mundane forms of practice, it also involves high levels of

skill and experience to perform the familiar well and, particularly, to deploy the

familiar in novel ways that lead to its adaptation. Bricolage is a point of interaction,

bringing together actor, intent, artefacts and contextual features of time and space,

within an act of usage. It is, therefore, particularly apposite to our concept of practice as

the doing of strategy. For example, some authors have drawn upon de Certeau (1984)

to explore the complex interactions involved in ordinary activities such as cooks doing

cooking (Giard, 1998). Whittington (2001b) suggests that these concepts also apply to

strategists doing strategising, recommending that we examine what constitutes the

ingredients and utensils of strategic practitioners. We explore this notion in our next

section on strategic practices, which we propose are the tools that strategic practitioners

use to do strategy.

Strategic practices-in-use

In this section we posit that strategic practices are a means of examining how strategic

practitioners are involved in recursive and adaptive forms of practice. There is a

distinction between strategy as practice and strategic practices (Jarzabkowski and

Wilson, 2002; Whittington, 2001). Practice is teleological, “an activity seeking a goal”

(Turner, 1994:8) whereas practices are the “ingrained habits or bits of tacit knowledge”

(ibid:8) which constitute the activity. Much of the literature on strategy as practice

17


actually deals with practices, those socio-cultural artefacts through which strategy is

instantiated. For example, Whittington (1996) advises us to look at the form filling and

number crunching involved in doing strategy, and Hendry (2000) recommends strategy

documents and other formalised types of strategic discourse as empirical artefacts that

provide insight into practice. The theoretical rationale for a study of practices may be

found in activity theory.

Activity theory premises that psychological development is a social process arising

from an individual’s interactions within particular historical and cultural contexts

(Vygotsky, 1978). Interaction provides an interpretative basis from which individuals

attribute meaning to their own and others actions (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985).

The outcome of interaction is practical activity, being the purposive, outcome-oriented

work in which actors engage (Kozulin, 1990; Leontiev, 1978; Zinchenko, 1983).

Interaction is enabled through the technical and psychological tools that actors use to

engage with their environments (Engestrom, 1993; Kozulin, 1990). The use of such

tools is practical, being directed towards constructing outcome-oriented activity. Since

these ‘tools’ are used to establish practical activity, they may be defined as the practices

through which activity is constructed.

If we marry activity theory’s emphasis on the practices through which activity is

constructed with de Certeau’s (1984) notions of bricolage, we may better conceptualise

how strategic practices are used by practitioners to construct strategy. Analogously, this

interaction may be considered as the toolkit, the homebuilder, and the ‘do-it-yourself’

project. The homebuilder sets out to build a conservatory with normative

considerations of what this structure is, regulatory influences from town planning

authorities, and personal taste. The resulting edifice will combine these institutional and

individual aspects of intent with contextual features, such as terrain, space constraints,

and existing structure. Equally, however, the outcome will be influenced by

characteristics of use, such as the skill and resourcefulness of the homebuilder in using

the tools and materials available for construction. The tools and materials do not create

the practice but mediate its usage and outcomes in a given context. Similarities in

construction are likely to be due to institutional influences and access to broadly similar

tools and materials while differences will be more attributable to context and the skill

involved in usage.

18


What then, are the tools and practices used by strategic practitioners to construct

strategy? In this paper, we identify the strategy toolkit as those frameworks, techniques

and practices that are the basis of many strategy textbooks and teaching. While other

interpretations of the strategy toolkit might be derived, this definition has resonance

since, in an annual Bain and Company survey into management tools and practices,

senior executives are found to draw upon such tools (Rigby, 2001). There has been a

proliferation of management practices over the last century. These range from the

Taylorist views of efficient labour management, to the planning schools of the 1960s

and 70s that offer rational techniques for strategy formulation and resource allocation,

to the more recent, process focused tools of just-in-time, quality circles and core

competences. These tools have both technical, object-focused uses and psychological,

subject-focused uses. For example, tools such as divisionalisation, enterprise resource

planning, and strategic architecture platforms are oriented towards the arrangement and

coordination of material resources. By contrast, conceptual schema, such as Porter’s

(1980) five forces, Boston boxes, and scenario planning assist strategists to generate

meaning from and impose meaning upon their surroundings. While these distinctions

are not totally discrete, management practices may be seen as the repertoire of

‘strategic utensils’ through which strategic practitioners may display knowledge and

skill in constructing strategic activity.

Strategic practices as mediators of recursive and adaptive practice

Strategic practices are implicated in the recursiveness and adaptation that characterises

strategy as practice. Whittington (2001b) suggests that strategic practices are regular,

socially-defined modes of acting while Jarzabkowski and Wilson (2002) focus upon

them at the within-firm level as the formal operating procedures and planning

mechanisms involved in key strategy processes of direction setting, resource allocation,

and monitoring and control. These two perspectives, one aimed at the macro,

institutionalised uses of practices and one dealing with the micro, localised uses of

practices are key to understanding their role in recursive and adaptive practice. We now

examine each of these in turn.

Strategic practices are part of the macro-contexts of what is going on in a society,

arising from co-production within different communities of practice; industry,

19


academia, consultants, and the press, each with some common points of discourse.

They are diffused through the teachings and research of business schools, their use by

consultancy firms, and through management fashion (Abrahamson, 1996) in which the

popular press plays a part (Mazza and Alvarez, 2000). Particular types of practices may

become institutionalised during different periods of social evolution. For example, the

ideologies underlying prevalent practices have been associated with wider economic

expansions and contractions and broad cultural shifts (Barley and Kunda, 1992).

During an economic upswing when profitability is related to management of capital,

rational practices that focus upon efficient structures and technologies are prevalent.

Conversely, during economic downswings there is emphasis on normative practices

related to the management of labour. This perspective relates management practices to

wider social events and explains their rapid diffusion, or ‘fashion’ during particular

periods, illustrating how ‘best practice’ spreads from macro to multiple micro contexts.

As per our earlier argument, plurality of macro contexts is implied since management

ideologies are characterised by inconsistency and contradiction. Interplay between

ideologies explains the dynamics of ideological change (ibid). Institutional fields are,

therefore, not hegemonous but pluralistic and contradictory, providing opportunity for

variation in management practices (cf. Dacin et al, 2002).

Strategic practices also form part of the localised context of what people are doing.

They occur within particular companies. For example, the introduction of scenario

planning to the business arena is widely attributed to Royal Dutch Shell, where it was

adopted to counteract tendencies for recursiveness in managerial cognition. Some

practices, such as the BCG portfolio matrix, originated in consultancy firms and were

subsequently widely adopted. Practices particular to national cultures have been

recognised as productive and so become more widely assimilated, such as the Japanese

techniques of kaizen and kanban. Still other practices are uniquely associated with a

particular academic, as with the five forces, which are indelibly Michael Porter’s

(1980). Such practices occur in localised ways and then are articulated, evolved, and

given a wider presence through their usage, creating diffusion from micro to macro

contexts. For example, knowledge management is being articulated in a multitude of

practices from core competences to intrapreneuring, self-managed teams, and even

communities of practice (for example, Prahalad and Hamel 1990; Nonaka, 1994;

Wenger and Snyder, 2000), which are associated with a knowledge economy.

20


The proliferation of practices in macro and micro contexts may be considered an

interaction between what people are doing in different communities and the zeitgeist of

what is happening in society, that is, the dominant ideologies of a particular era. While

there is always the urge to converge, evident in terms such as best practice and

benchmarking, there is also ontinual evolution of new practices within particular

communities. While current literatures suggest that firms in high velocity environments

are evolving new strategic practices (for example, Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997;

Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001; Pascale, 1999), Mintzberg

(1993) notes that every turn in strategic management from the design school onwards

has evolved new practices on the premise that their era is characterised by greater

complexity in which the old rules are no longer relevant. Adaptation appears chronic in

the doing of strategy, with communities continuously seeking new practices or ways of

doing strategy in order to evolve better practice. Strategic practices are not beset by the

stasis of attainment implied in best practice, but by the ongoing teleology of

‘becoming’ inherent in better practice. We may therefore study how they are used and

adapted, why they persist or become obsolete, and when new practices are developed,

as a means of penetrating the recursive and adaptive modes of strategy as practice.

Section three: Towards a research agenda for strategy as practice

Building upon the discussion of practices and of practitioners engaged in usage, in this

section we develop a research agenda for strategy as practice based around an

investigation of strategic practices-in-use. While the literature on strategic tools and

techniques is widespread and diverse, rather little is known about tools in use. Extant

research is often prescriptive, using tools and techniques to explain how strategy

‘should be’, but is rather less concerned with how they are actually used in particular

contexts and what influence this has on strategy as practice. Yet a study of strategic

practices-in-use would illuminate practice, bringing to the foreground the interplay

between strategic practitioners and their various communities of practice as they

engage in recursive and adaptive modes of strategic action.

Strategic business planning provides an example of the relationship between strategic

practices and strategy as practice. It has been a prevalent practice in the literature since

the 1960s as both a technical tool for the designation of material resources and a

21


conceptual tool for the interpretation and diffusion of strategic action. Strategic

planning originated as an essentially rational approach to strategising through diagnosis

and forecasting, strategy formulation, resource allocation, and strategy implementation

(cf. Andrews, 1971; Ansoff, 1965; Bower, 1970). Subsequently, it has been the subject

of considerable academic debate, criticised because its predictive assumptions do not

reflect the uncertainty of strategy in practice (Mintzberg, 1990; 1994) and defended

because it was designed to assist practitioners to engage with uncertainty (Ansoff,

1991). While Mintzberg (1987) contends that strategic planning ignores thinking in

action, other authors suggest that planning can indeed aid strategic thinking if it is used

to provide synthesis between thought and action, that is, for putting practitioner

thinking into action (Heracleous, 1998; Liedtka and Rosenblum, 1996). While the

academic community of practice has debated the merits of strategic planning, the

community of strategic practitioners has continued to use it. The annual Bain and

Company survey of management tools and techniques finds that strategic planning is

consistently popular. In 1999 it ranked first out of 25 common practices, being the

principal technique used by 81% of managers worldwide (Rigby, 2001).

How should we interpret this finding? Does it mean that managers are so subject to

recursive modes of thought, either for individual, organisational or institutional reasons,

that they continue to use an obsolete practice from the 1960s? It is more likely that

strategic planning has persisted through the economic and cultural shifts of the past 40

years because it is a flexible practice that may adapt to changing circumstances and

contextual contingencies. Its potential adaptability is as diverse as the contexts in which

it is used. For example, firms in high velocity environments that are characterised by

dynamism and discontinuous change (Bourgeois and Eisenhardt, 1988), such as

telecommunications tend to use strategic planning in less formal, fast-paced and

experience-based ways that enable practitioners to cope with rapidly shifting

environments (cf. Eisenhardt and Brown, 1998; Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001). Firms with

extended value chains are likely to link strategic planning to internal architectures of

enterprise resource planning and data-mining, using it for more efficient coordination

and projection of resources (Pereira, 1999; Teo and King, 1997). Still other firms in

regulated environments, such as privatised utilities and public sector organisations, may

use strategic planning as a means of demonstrating accountability and transparency to

regulators and government authorities (Oakes et al, 1998).

22


These varied institutional and environmental parameters suggest that quite different

uptakes and uses of strategic planning that indicate evolution from its initial theoretical

provenance as a tool for rational action. Inside individual firms, strategic planning may

be further altered in accordance with the intentions of practitioners and the

considerations of context. For example, strategic planning has evolved into strategic

story-telling at 3M to meet the company’s needs for strategy diffusion, creativity, and

innovation (Shaw et al, 1998). This may influence firm actions since the adaptive use

of strategic planning to incorporate strategic creativity has been found to increase the

capacity of firms such as GE Capital to grasp acquisition opportunities (Beinhocker and

Kaplan, 2002). Strategic planning is, thus, a practice with generic characteristics in

macro strategic contexts but also adaptable to the skill and bricolage inherent in micro-

contexts, developing locally specific and contingent uses.

Other examples of adaptive, localised use of strategic practices may be found. For

example, Skandia has developed its own version of the balanced scorecard, the Skandia

Navigator, which attempts to capture and manage intellectual capital and futurizing

within the firm (Earl and Nahapiet, 1999; Nahapiet, 2001). Kostova and Roth (2002)

found that, despite the broader institutional context, there is a strongly localised

component in the adoption and use of TQM practices, even within the same

corporation. These adaptive, localised uses of practices are able to diffuse between

plural macro and micro contexts through international business awards, professional

networks, management teaching cases, academic research and the business media.

Strategic practices thus reflect both the dominant modes of practice in any given era

and also the individual skilled and knowledgeable uses of practices that contribute to

the ongoing becoming of practice.

Operationalising the research agenda: studying strategic practices

In Figure 1, the relationship between macro and micro contexts and strategic practices-

in-use is conceptually modelled. The usage of strategic practices by skilled and

knowledgeable strategic practitioners is positioned at the nexus of plural macro and

micro contexts of practice. Interactions between macro and micro contexts in the usage

of practices generates a stream of strategic action that may either be prone to greater

recursiveness, becoming more stable and practiced, or be involved in the adaptive

23


practice by which strategic action evolves and changes. We maintain that a study of

strategic practices-in-use is a primary entry point to empirically investigate this model.

INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE

Practices provide a more rigorous basis of comparison for strategy as practice than an

attempt to study practice itself or even to study strategic practitioners. Drawing upon

surveys such as that of Bain and Company, commonly used strategic practices may be

defined and their theoretical properties identified in the academic literature, serving as a

benchmark against which to compare their actual use. Through observation of

practices-in-use, we may examine the knowledge, skill and bricolage of practitioners as

they engage in recursive or adaptive modes of strategy as practice. Some research

questions we might ask across a sample of firms are:

1. What strategic practices are commonly used, in order to identify the degree to

which particular practices have diffused into localised contexts;

2. Who uses practices, which would help to define who might be termed a

strategic practitioner and the degree to which usage is distributed throughout the

levels of a firm;

3. Why are these practices used, establishing the practitioner intent and normative

rationales for selecting particular practices;

4. How are the practices used, developing an understanding of the generic and

localised uses of practices, their adaptation to context, and the skill and

bricolage of the practitioners in using them in different situations;

5. Under what circumstances are established practices found to be obsolete, and

why do new practices emerge?

Such questions would provide the basis for robust multiple-site comparison and

contrast of the practice of strategy and the skill of strategic practitioners. By contrast,

an attempt to study either strategy as practice or strategic practitioners in different

contexts is beset by methodological problems in defining comparative criteria on which

to examine the doing of strategy. It is of little benefit to find that ‘strategy is done

differently’ since we wish to know what is done differently, how it is done differently,

why it is done differently and, most importantly, what is the point of generic similarity

24


from which difference may be understood. Practices provide the generic similarity of

identifiable artefacts. As with the example of strategic planning, the study of practices-

in-use illuminates contextual influences upon practice, how individual practitioners

deploy practice, and provides a basis for relating these specific micro-findings to

dominant and changing ideologies in society. Therefore, we propose that the study of

strategy as practice is well served by beginning with strategic practices-in-use as the

primary unit of analysis.

Conclusion

A research agenda into strategic practices responds to recent calls by the academic

community and the research funding bodies for management research that is both

academically challenging and intimately connected with and relevant to the concerns of

practice (cf. Pettigrew, 1996; Rynes et al, 2001; Starkey and Madan, 2001). In

focussing upon strategic practices-in-use, we move the study of strategy as practice

from richly detailed single case studies of doing strategy, that, while fascinating, are

hard to relate to wider circumstances other than at the conceptual level. Instead, we

have a means of developing equally rich but also methodologically robust comparisons

of doing strategy in multiple case studies that may be practically as well as

conceptually related to wider issues. While the former allows us to take strategists and

their work seriously, the latter also permits us to come closer to the concerns of these

strategists to develop better practice. Comparative analysis may highlight more or less

effective uses of practices, differential skill levels, and the applicability, adaptation, or

obsolescence of practices within particular activities or contexts. In particular we may

develop a link between practice and performance by analysing tendencies towards

recursive or adaptive usage of practices and the impact this has upon strategic action

over time. Such analyses are both theoretically important and have practical

implications for cross firm and cross sector learning about the nature and uses of

strategy as practice.

25


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Table 1: Recursive practice in social theory and strategic management literature

Social theories Contributions to strategy as practice Examples in strategy literature

Structuration (Giddens, 1984). Habitus (Bourdieu, 1990).

Practice is durable because of: • Ontological security of actors; • Reciprocal interaction between

agent and structure are embedded within the daily routines of practice;

• Sedimented structures are self-reinforcing;

• Social institutions persist across time and space.

Therefore, strategy as practice is recursive, routinised and prone to inertia.

Individual: • Bounded cognition • Heuristics • Cognitive recipes • Procedural memory Organisational • Strategic routines • Organisational memory • Resource deepening • Core rigidities Social Institutions • Institutional isomorphism • Industry recipes • Cognitive groups

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Table 2: Adaptive practice in social theory and strategic management literature

Social theories Contributions to strategy as

practice Examples in strategy literature

Social becoming (Sztompka, 1991). Modernity, pluralism (Giddens, 1991). Communities of practice (Brown and Duguid, 1991; 2001; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).

• Social movement occurs through interaction between macro and micro contexts.

• There are many macro-contexts, thus social institutions are divergent.

• Micro contexts are prone to adaptation and learning through internal tensions generated from problems or the displacement and renewal of members.

Therefore, strategy as practice is adaptive, flexible and prone to learning and becoming.

• Strategy process • Strategic choice • Resource-based view • Knowledge-based

view • Dynamic capabilities • Organisational

learning • New forms of

organizing • Time-pacing in

dynamic markets • Patching

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Table 3: Social theory contributions to the study of strategy as practice

Entry points Social theory Contributions to the study of strategy as practice

Strategic practitioners

• Giddens (1984)

• Bourdieu (1990)

• de Certeau (1984)

• Practitioners are knowledgeable, purposive and reflexive.

• Practitioners have different skill levels in their ability to anticipate, draw upon and use practice.

• Differential skill is best seen in the context of usage and the bricolage that applies to ordinary, everyday practice.

Therefore, we may study strategy as practice by examining strategic practitioners using the artefacts of practice within a given context.

Strategic practices • Turner (1994) • Vygotsky

(1978) • Engestrom

(1993) • de Certeau

(1984)

• Practice is instantiated through practices. • Practices are the technical and psychological

tools that mediate the objects and subjects of practical activity.

• Practices may be developed with a particular intent that applies to a macro context but this is mutable to the micro-context and circumstances of usage, providing interplay between contexts.

Therefore, we may study strategy as practice by conceptualising strategic practices as management tools and techniques and examining how these are used in different strategic contexts.

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Figure 1: Conceptual model of strategy as practice

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2002 Jarzabkowski Strategy as Practice Recursiveness Adaptation and Strategic Practice in Use 2002

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