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Institutionalization of the strategy as practice approach:

In February 2001, a group of about 50 researchers convened at the EIASM (European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management) in Brussels, attending a workshop organized by Gerry Johnson, Leif Melin and Richard Whittington, to discuss development in strategys micro-processes. The output of the conference resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Management Studies (Johnson et al., 2003) and, perhaps more significantly, started a conversation about the need for a more practice-based approach to strategy making. In the following years, an action net, to use Barbara Czarniawskas (2002) felicitous phrase, has been constructed that has led to the emergence and partial institutionalization of a strategy as practice group. In its short history, the strategy as practice movement has institutionalized itself quickly and effectively. As the official website www.strategy-as-practice.org states: Strategy as Practice is a community of scholars interested in the practice of strategy. . . . What we are agreed on is the importance of a focus on the processes and practices constituting the everyday activities of organizational life and relating to strategic outcomes, if we are to move our field forward. At the time of writing, it seems apparent that the new strategists are moving from institutionalization to consolidation: a special issue of Human Relations (Vol. 60, No. 1, 2007) on Strategizing: The Challenges of a Practice Perspective, guest edited by Julia Balogun, Paula Jarzabkowski and David Seidl has just appeared. The geographical distinction is preserved all contributions are from European-based authors. At the core of this new approach, as the use of strategizing (interestingly, for such a European approach, the gerund of the intransitive North American English verb to strategize) might suggest, is a concern about what strategic actors actually do and the kinds of activities they do when they strategize (Hendry, 2000; Jarzabkowski, 2003; Johnson et al., 2003; Whittington, 1996, 2002). The practice-based approach investigates the nittygritty of strategy formation the routines of budgeting, the expenditure meetings, 84 STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION 6(1) 087154_SOQ_83-100.qxd 29/1/08 4:35 PM Page 84 the reports and presentations, etc. through focusing on praxis, practitioners and practices (Whittington, 2003). As Johnson et al. (2003: 14) argue, it is time to shift the strategy research agenda towards the micro. That such an approach may seem novel probably tells the reader more about the restricted state of the knowledge communities typically indexed in strategy studies than it does about what strategists do, for similar insights were current in organization sociology from the early 1970s onwards (e.g. Clegg, 1975; Silverman and Jones, 1976). Forty years after Garfinkel, strategy as practice advocates a practical ethnomethodology of organizational life (Garfinkel, 1967). It does so with all the aplomb of a colonialist newly discovering an already peopled continent, for whose existing inhabitants scant regard is given as intrepid explorers gaze on what appears as if it were, essentially, terra nullus. Nonetheless, according to Whittington (2004), the innovation of the strategy as practice framework is to treat strategy as an important social practice as something that organization members do that requires serious analysis. For members of the strategy as practice knowledge community, the practice label can give coherence to a range of existing streams of research (Whittington, 1996: 734) that can be put to work to improve the conduct of strategy. Aligned with this research agenda, Whittington and his colleagues (Whittington et al., 2003) also highlight a concern with heightening levels of reflexivity among strategists, embarking on a programme of reform of strategy among the practitioner and academic community (Cummings, 2003). Before we analyse the intellectual pedigree of the strategy as practice approach, we turn briefly to the institutionalized practices of its theorists and ask, how is it possible that they do the kind of work that they do? A disciplined community of scholars, they convene tracks at major conferences, edit special issues in journals, publish continuously under the common banner of strategy as practice and invite scholars to become official members of the movement. Simultaneously, while, in the past, there had been some contributions to strategy from a sociological/organizational perspective, such as the work of Peter Clark (2000), they remain lone contributions rather than being acknowledged as the basis for the intellectual movement constructing the action net. In so doing, the movement has been extraordinarily successful in constructing and establishing a field. Through enrolling institutions and scholars to its actor network, it has gained credibility and legitimacy. However, institutionalization comes at a price: as institutional theory suggests, the processes of institutionalization give rise to ceremonialism, in which a certain form of rationality and coherence is promoted while at the same time allowing for its interpretive glossing (Garfinkel, 1967; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Moreover, the strategy as practice approach displays a high degree of ambiguity, which is undoubtedly useful for creating a loosely coupled network of actions, ideas and people with different agendas. Indeed, as we know from theories addressing management fashion, a certain degree of ambiguity is necessary to maintain the flexibility of locally meaningful interpretations in changing contexts. However, the very CARTER ET AL.: STRATEGY AS PRACTICE? 85 087154_SOQ_83-100.qxd 29/1/08 4:35 PM Page 85 ambiguity that helped to institutionalize the strategy as practice approach might, at the same time, hinder its theoretical advancement, as improbable glosses accumulate. In the next section, we set out to develop a critical perspective on the strategy as practice approach.2 First, we examine critically the approachs relation to the concept of strategy; second, we scrutinize the concept of practice as developed in the literature.