Strategy-as-Practice standing working group at EGOS 2009: Passion for
Creativity and Innovation
INDIVIDUALITY IN STRATEGIZING ACTIVITY AND PRACTICE: FORMULATORS,
IMPLEMENTERS, INNOVATORS
Convenors:
Saku Mantere, Hanken School of Business
Julia Balogun, Lancaster University Management School
Paula Jarzabkowski, Aston Business School
Guest panelist: Jean Bartunek, Carroll School of Management at Boston
College
Organizations do not create or realize strategies: people do. People who
invest their talent, creativity and energy to service strategic
activities. There are also people in organizations who are unable to
contribute to strategy work for a variety of reasons – indeed,
“creativity” and “innovation” are important social constructions,
fuelled by organizational discourses, such as strategy, which construct
boundaries around who participates and who doesn’t. In fact, there are
many ways of drawing the distinction within an organization between
strategists and non-strategists; formulators and implementers; ‘us’ and
‘them’. Understanding people in strategy is one of the key issues in
strategy-as-practice research, as “the focus of this approach is on
strategy as a social ‘practice’, on how the practitioners of strategy
really act and interact.” (Whittington, 1996: 731). Our track addresses
how individuals express their creativity within the strategy process,
how they advance their interests, what obstructs those interests and how
the activities of strategizing and organizing attract or suppress
individual creativity and innovation. We invite participants to examine
1) a range of different types of individual within strategy work, and 2)
how these individuals express passion, creativity and innovation with
strategy work.
Research into strategy-as-practice reinvigorates interest in the
individual, lost during the micro-economics revolution in the 1980’s. We
ask who strategists are, how they make sense of their worlds, how they
learn and how they construct themselves within the work of strategy. In
particular, strategy-as-practice excites interest in a wider range of
individuals as potential strategic actors, including middle managers,
peripheral organizational actors, external actors, such as consultants,
analysts, regulators and others. While not all individuals have a formal
strategy role, many construct themselves as strategic actors, through
their desires to take part and the practices that they draw upon. Some
individuals, despite not having a strategy role, become key strategic
actors because the work that they do, often on the peripheries, sparks
innovation in the organization. Others, often middle managers, play a
strategic role through their centrality in the implementation of
strategy, but remain unrecognized due to the predominance of a
traditional top-down discourse on strategy. Still other individuals have
a formal strategy role, which they may use to express passion, exercise
personal creativity and innovation and support or suppress those
characteristics in others.
We invite papers from a range of theoretical and methodological
approaches that address the individual in strategizing activity and
practice. Theoretical and, in particular, empirical papers are invited.
Authors might consider, but are not restricted to the following themes:
• Who are the strategists? We invite a range of approaches to defining
which individuals may be considered strategic actors
• What resources do individuals draw upon to construct themselves as
strategic actors and / or to have strategic effects? For example, what
discourses or other multi-modal forms of interaction, such as
positioning, gesture and movement enable individuals to construct
themselves as strategic actors?
• How do individuals build their identities as strategic actors,
regardless of their formal roles?
• What roles do individuals assign themselves within strategy work and
how does this enable or constrain their ability to contribute to that work?
• How do individuals express passion, desire and emotion in the doing of
strategy and with what implications for themselves as strategic actors
or for the strategizing activities in which they are engaged?
• What work do strategists do and, in particular, how does strategy work
vary across different strategists?
• How do individuals learn to be strategists?
• What factors enable and suppress individuality and dialogue in
strategy work and discourse?
• What research methods enable us to better access and understand the
individual as a strategic actor?
The suggested topics outlined above give room for a variety of possible
contributions to the Sub-theme. As EGOS has acted as an important forum
for the development of the Strategy-as-Practice scholarship through the
work conducted within the stranding working group, we will also consider
papers beyond the scope of the current theme. We do hope, however, that
the present agenda would inspire exciting new research on strategy.
Best regards,
Saku Mantere
--
Saku Mantere (PhD, M.Sc, MA)
saku.mantere@hanken.fi
Professor (acting), Management and Organization
Hanken
http://www.sakumantere.fi/