Practice, strategy making and intentionality:
A Heideggerian onto-epistemology for strategy-as-practice
Haridimos Tsoukas
ALBA, Greece & University of Warwick, UK
[email protected]
[email protected]
This paper will appear in Golsorkhi, D., Rouleau, L., Seidl, D. and Vaara, E. (eds.), The
Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009
1
“A little strategy goes a long way. Too much can paralyze or splinter an organization.
That conclusion derives from the possibility that strategy-like outcomes originate from
sources other than strategy”
Karl Weick (2001:345)
Research on strategy from a practice perspective has been steadily gaining momentum as
attested by, among other things, several journal Special Issues, an increasing number of
publications (including this volume), and longstanding conference streams. Although it
has been a mainly European pursuit, it is also spreading to other academic milieus in
other continents. Strategy-as-practice (s-a-p) calls for nothing less than a re-orientation of
the field of strategy research. By re-conceiving strategy as not something organizations
have but as something organizations do, s-a-p is shifting the focus of analytical attention
towards the making of strategy (Whittington, 2006), thus departing from traditional
variance-model approaches (Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2002).
Insofar as this is the case, s-a-p shares important assumptions with an earlier
perspective in strategy research, namely the process approach. Both s-a-p and process
research do not treat strategy as a dependent variable, the variance of which is to be
explained through the construction of a model consisting of a set of contributory
variables, each one of which has its own variance (Langley, 2007; Pettigrew, 1992; Van
de Ven and Poole, 2005). The main research question these two perspectives seek to
address is: How do organizations make strategies (or fail to do so)? Focusing on and
accounting for process is of great importance if we are to understand how strategy is
created (Langley, 2007).
2
Given their strong affinities and overlaps, what more does s-a-p add to the process
approach? For some researchers, s-a-p advances process theorizing by overcoming the
limitations of the process perspective. What are they? Johnson et al (2003:10-13) have
suggested that process research suffers from six shortcomings. First, process researchers
have largely relied on second-hand retrospective accounts rather than on ethnographic
research methods that stay close to actual work that makes up organizational life.
Secondly, process research has focused too strongly on managerial agency at the expense
of other actors. Thirdly, process research has tended to be mainly descriptive, offering
little practical advice to managers. Fourth, process research has forced a dichotomy
between process and content. Fifth, process research often lacks explicit links to strategy
outcomes. And sixth, by focusing heavily on the particular, process research has
eschewed offering generalizable frameworks, thus impeding knowledge accumulation.
It is worth noting, however, that even if some, or all, of these criticisms are
accepted, there is nothing inherent in the process approach that would stop it from taking
them on board. Such a critique does not impinge on the “hard core” (Lakatos, 1978) of
process research. To use Lakatos’ terms, all the preceding critical points can be
accommodated within the “protective belt” (Lakatos, 1978) of process research. What is,
for example, in the process approach that would stop researchers from employing
ethnographic methods, extending the reach of their empirical research to actors other than
managers, being more prescriptive as well as generic in their theories, or bringing
together process and content issues (Langley, 2007)? Hardly anything.
For other researchers, the distinctive feature of s-a-p is “the sociological eye”
(Whittington, 2007) it brings to the study of strategy. The chief characteristic of the
3
sociological eye is the treatment of social processes not as unique but as consisting of the
playing out of generic roles, embedded in broader contexts, as well as sensitivity for the
neglected, the unintended, and the unexpected. No one can fairly criticize the process
approach for insensitivity to the unintended, the unexpected and the neglected. Indeed,
Mintzberg and his associates (Mintzberg ad McHugh, 1985; Mintzberg and Waters, 1982,
1985), to take the most prominent advocates of a process perspective on strategy, have
done a lot to sensitize us to the importance of the emergent features of strategy. What,
however, Whittington usefully adds is the concern with the social embeddedness of
strategy making, which has, admittedly, been missing from much of process research. By
social embeddedness Whittington means seeking connections between firm-level changes
with broader, society-level changes, such as, for example, the rise of neo-liberal ideology
in the political sphere and the introduction of new public management in the public
sector, or strategic changes within a firm (such as ICI) and broader changes leading to the
professionalization of management in the UK in the 1980s. This is useful and interesting,
yet, at the same time, it has been the least studied feature of strategy making. Most s-a-p
researchers have focused on strategy practitioners within the organization, refraining
from systematically connecting organizational changes with extra-organizational
contexts. In so far as this has been the case, it is not particularly clear how s-a-p research,
as currently practiced at least, differs from that of their process cousins.
Moreover, much as looking into generic roles and the social embeddedness of
strategies is important, this should not be at the expense of looking into the creative
process of strategy making, which is inextricably tied to local contexts of action and to
experiential trials and errors in perceived unique conditions (Mintzberg, 1987, 1990;
4
Weick, 2001). This is where the process approach has been at its best. The challenge is
both to retain sensitivity to local conditions and actors’ responses to them and to the
social embeddeness and inter-connections across levels of analysis. How can this be
achieved? What kind of onto-epistemology is needed to frame inquiry accordingly?
For a third stream of researchers, s-a-p is beset by the same weaknesses as process
research, chief among which is adherence to methodological individualism, namely the
explanation of strategic behavior in terms of self-contained agents consciously acting on
their environment. The patterns researchers note are thought to be generated by agents
conceived in individualistic terms, hence the emphasis on what individual agents say or
do to one another. Analytical primacy is given to actors’ visible doings rather than to
“culturally and historically shaped tendencies and dispositions acquired through social
practices internalized by the actors” (Chia & MacKay, 2007:226). Moreover, as it will be
argued later in this paper, the individualist bias of most versions of s-a-p research is
shown when “strategy making” is identified with “strategizing” (Jarzabkowski, Balogun
and Seidl, 2007). It is not often appreciated that while the making of strategy may occur
in both non-deliberate and deliberate ways, strategizing is a conscious activity, typically
involving deliberate actions. By conflating the two, an important distinction is leveled.
Methodological individualism should be avoided and the focus should shift to
“trans-individual social practices”, argue Chia & MacKay (2007:226) convincingly,
drawing inspiration from Heideggerian phenomenology (see also Chia and Holt, 2006).
Change should be seen as immanent in things and human situations, not as externally
brought about. Individuals are primarily defined by their membership of practices, which
are carriers of cultural dispositions and tacit understandings. Consequently, for the
5
proponents of this view (“post-processual” as Chia & MacKay (2007), call it), individual
actions are less the outcomes of individual choices and more the unselfconscious
responses to surrounding circumstances. Strategies are secondary stabilized effects of
culturally transmitted practices. To put it simply, actors are culturally predisposed to act
in particular ways due to their membership of practices. Once observers retrospectively
recognize consistency in actors’ actions, they label the resulting pattern strategic. But this
is a secondary characterization, imposed retrospectively by observers; actors themselves
primarily act non-deliberately. What observers secondarily recognize as strategy is the
outcome of the primary propensity to act non-deliberately in particular ways; strategy is
immanent in practical action (Chia and Holt, 2006).
The “post-processual” approach is undoubtedly promising in so far as it allows for
trans-individualist explorations of strategy and for non-deliberate modes of action to be
taken into account. However, unless further developed, it risks pushing us too much in
the opposite direction. When Chia & Mackay (2007:235) argue that “strategy subsists on
each and every mundane and seemingly isolated act we perform”, they are right, but tell
only part of the story. Another part is about deliberate action, which, although recognized
in passing in their paper, is not analytically related to non-deliberate action. While it is
true that the infusion of practitioners with an internalized style of engagement, grounded
in culturally transmitted social practices, affords action consistency over time and, thus,
apparent purposefulness, it is also true that goal-directed actions and reflexive monitoring
are not only possible but systemically built into formal organizations (Giddens, 1991:16).
Strategy away-days, for example, or scenario planning exercises, aim at creating the sort
of reflective distance between the non-deliberate mode of ordinary, improvisational,
6
practical coping and the more explicitly articulated, deliberate mode of acting that is
characteristic of strategic episodes. Clearly, we have evidence of both: patterns of
practical-coping actions that retrospectively can be seen as forming a strategy and
deliberate actions that commit (or fail to do so) an organization to a new course of action.
How can we be attentive to both? How can we make room for both types of engagement?
To be sure, for all their differences of vocabulary, Whittington and Chia &
MacKay agree that s-a-p will live up to its name, and thus differentiate itself from process
research, in so far as it widens its attention to embrace the broader contexts that make
organizational patterns of actions possible. They both argue for the need to “de-centre”
(Whittington, 2007: 1578) the organization as the locus of strategy making. Whittington
points to the levels of industry and society over and above the organization, while Chia &
MacKay to “practice complexes” (2007:233), namely to extra-organizational techniques,
language, artifacts and canonical examples through which propensities to act in particular
ways are transmitted.
I will argue here that an onto-epistemological framework inspired by
Heideggerian phenomenology (see Dreyfus, 1991a, 1991b, 2000; Heidegger, 1962;
Spinosa et al, 1997; Schatzki, 2000, 2005) enables us to see how the organization may be
“de-centered” and how strategy making may be studied in its various manifestations. It is
hoped that such a framework will (a) enable s-a-p researchers to overcome the
individualist bias Chia and MacKay have rightly identified in dominant conceptions of sa-p, while allowing space for creative action; (b) analytically relate non-deliberate and
deliberate types of action; and (c) suggest how s-a-p, conceived along Heideggerian lines,
differs substantially from the process approach, at least as the latter has been traditionally
7
practiced. Below, I will outline a Heideggerian vocabulary, which will be applied in the
subsequent section to s-a-p. Finally, in the conclusions the argument presented here is
summarized and the benefits of a Heideggerian onto-epistemology are discussed.
Practice, Coping, and Awareness: A Heideggerian Vocabulary
Human agency is necessarily (i.e. non-contingently) exercised in the context of
sociomaterial practices. Sociomaterial practices are organized, open-ended human
activities transpiring within material arrangements, unfolding in time, carried out by
skillful agents whose actions are based on: tacit understandings, explicit rules, and
teleoaffective structures; the bodily coordination and orientation of an agent to the task at
hand; and the incorporation of tools within the field of an agent’s bodily comportment
(Dreyfus, 1991b:27; Orlikowski, 2007; Reckwitz, 2002:249; Rouse, 2000:9; Schatzki,
2005:471).
Particular human activities and particular sociomaterial practices are mutually
constituted. The practice of grading students’ scripts in a university, for example, consists
of particular activities such as pondering grades and recording them. The activities are
moments of the practice; one cannot exist without the other. Broadly speaking, grading is
a sociomaterial practice that incorporates certain tacit understandings of how to grade; is
based on certain explicit rules about grading; it incorporates a teleoaffective structure
consisting of the appropriate ends to be pursued (assessing and developing students
through grading their written work, for example), activities to be pursued for these ends
(e.g. pondering and recording grades), and acceptable uses of relevant equipment. Thus, a
particular episode of grading consists of the activities of pondering and recording grades,
8
which are inextricably tied to a particular grading sociomaterial practice. Similarly, what
a particular grading practice is depends on the exercise of the particular grading activities.
In scrutinizing a grading episode, one scrutinizes the practice, and vice versa (Schatzki,
2005:468).
To enter a sociomaterial practice – to become, say, an academic, a manager, or a
surgeon – is to enter a practice whose identity is constituted through the normative use of
language, body and equipment (Hardy, Lawrence and Grant, 2005:61; Harré and Gillett,
1994:28-29). To be a human agent is to experience one’s situation in terms of already
constituted meanings and acceptable emotions, articulated through the discourse that
defines the practice (Dreyfus, 1991a:Ch.5; Taylor, 1985b:27; Taylor, 1985a:54-55). This
is so because a human being is, in Taylor’s (1985a:45) well known phrase, a “selfinterpreting animal”. It is a being for whom things matter; whose identity is constituted
by qualitative distinctions made in language, worked out within a form of life (Dreyfus,
1991a:23). The self-descriptions underlying human action situate humans relative to
some standards of excellence, obligations (MacIntyre, 1985:187-194; Taylor, 1991:305),
or “normative boundaries” (Kogut and Zander, 1996:515).
For example, Gawande (2002:13-15), a surgical resident at a hospital in Boston,
describes the sense of “ineptitude” he felt when, in his fourth week in surgical training,
he tried for the first time to install a central line into a patient’s chest so that the patient
could be fed intravenously (see also Benner, 1994:137-140). The trainee surgeon’s felt
inadequacy came from the realization, following an exchange with the chief resident who
was supervising the procedure, of not having done certain things as well as he should –
not having attained a level of professional competence.
9
This example is instructive in reminding us that to have an experience, such as
“ineptitude” in this case, involves the application of a particular meaning concerning
work standards – namely, seeing that certain descriptions apply, along with the associated
emotions they typically come with – and an appropriate use of bodily skills and
equipment. No wonder why, later, Gawande (2002:14) chastised himself: “I failed to
check his platelet count”; “I forgot to bring the extra syringe for flushing the line when
it’s on”. Admissions of perceived inadequacy or failure are possible in so far as certain
standards of excellence are not achieved or normative boundaries are transgressed.
Practitioners are initiated into a sociomaterial practice by learning to make
relevant distinctions in practice (Benner, Hooper-Kyriakidis and Stannard, 1999:30-47;
Polanyi, 1962:101). Gawande gives a vivid account of his initiation in medical practice.
Through dealing with particular incidents of patients, initially under the supervision of,
and later in collaboration with, more experienced members of his practice, the trainee
surgeon was learning to use the key categories implicated in a surgeon’s job; to make
proper use of the relevant equipment; and to bring his body into a certain level of
coordination with the task at hand. Through his participation in this practice he was
gradually learning to relate to his circumstances “spontaneously” (Wittgenstein, 1980a:
§699), that is to say, non-deliberately: to use medical equipment, to recognize certain
symptoms, to relate to colleagues and patients. The needles and how to use them in
patients´ chests, the X-rays and how to read them, and his relationships to others were not
objects of thought for him, but “subsidiary particulars” (Polanyi and Prosch, 1975:37-8) taken-for-granted aspects of the normal setting in all its recognizable stability and
regularity. As Wittgenstein (1979:§473-479) aptly noted, the basis of a sociomaterial
10
practice is activity, not knowledge; practice, not thinking; certainty, not uncertainty. With
the help of more experienced others we first learn to act, that is to accept the certainties
of our particular sociomaterial practice (e.g. to use needles, to recognize the symptoms of
pulmonary disease, to relate to patients) and, thus, relate spontaneously to our
surroundings, and later we reflect on them. Experience comes first, knowledge later.
“Language”, as Wittgenstein (1980b:31) famously remarked, “is a refinement, ´in the
beginning was the deed´”.
The “spontaneous” aspects of the activities practitioners undertake are primary
and constitute what Wittgenstein (1979:§94) calls the “inherited background” against
which practitioners make sense of their particular tasks (Shotter and Katz, 1996: 225;
Taylor, 1993:325, 1995:69). Practitioners are aware of the background but their
awareness is largely “inarticulate” (Taylor, 1991:308) and implicit in their activity (Ryle,
1963:40-41). The background provides the teleoaffective structure that renders their
explicit representations comprehensible and makes certain emotions acceptable (Dreyfus,
1991a:102-4; Taylor, 1993: 327-8; 1995: 69-70). As Dreyfus (1985:232) notes, “What
makes up the background is not beliefs, either explicit or implicit, but habits and customs,
embodied in the sort of subtle skills which we exhibit in our everyday interaction with
things and people. […] We just do what we have been trained to do. […]” (emphasis
added). In other words, the exercise of particular skills within sociomaterial practices is
non-deliberate – an array of spontaneous responses to the developing situation at hand.
At the same time, this non-deliberate activity is oriented towards attaining certain ends
that determine it as the activity it is.
11
For example, explaining s-a-p to students in class and, for the sake of being an
effective communicator, a lecturer uses the whiteboard in order to draw a chart. This is
non-deliberate (spontaneous) acting oriented towards a particular end. Not unlike driving
a car, the lecturer, immersed in his activity, does what the situation calls for without
paying attention to his actions. The teleological structure of the sociomaterial teaching
practice makes the particular act of drawing a chart on the board sensible. As Schatzki
(2000:33) notes:
“These “in order tos”, “toward whichs”, and “for the sake ofs” – in more
conventional terms, purposes, tasks, and ends – orient [the teacher’s] activity in
the sense of structuring what he is up to: in conjunction with the current situation,
they specify that writing on the board makes sense – that is, is the appropriate and
needed thing (given the situation and the purposes and ends involved). They
determine, in other words, what might be called the practical intelligibility that
informs nondeliberate activity”.
To sum up, when agents act non-deliberately, they respond spontaneously to
circumstances in order to get on with the tasks at hand. They do not pay explicit attention
to what they do – they do what makes sense to them. However, what makes sense to them
is teleologically structured – their sense making is oriented towards certain ends. That is
why it can be said that agents act purposively without having a purpose in mind (Chia
and MacKay, 2007:235; Schatzki, 2000:33).
When responding spontaneously to the solicitations of the task at hand, agents not
only do not pay attention to what they do, they do not, moreover, have a representation of
the goal they pursue (Wakefield and Dreyfus, 1991). Non-deliberate acting is practical
12
coping with the situation at hand: it is not mediated by mental representations; it results
from an ongoing integration of one’s activity as a teacher, a manager, a physician, etc,
within a sociomaterial practice (Rouse, 2000:12). When language is used in practical
coping, as is often the case, it is used as equipment assimilated in the activity and, thus, it
functions in a non-propositional way. When, for example, in the middle of an operation, a
surgeon says “scalpel” and a nurse hands him one, he uses language non-propositionally,
namely in a way to enable him get on with the task at hand rather than make assertions
about the task or the world at large (Dreyfus, 2000:317).
When practical coping is interrupted by a “breakdown”, intentional directedness
takes over, and it can take two forms - explicit awareness and thematic awareness. With
explicit awareness agents pay attention to what they do when their activities run into
trouble. The computer does not respond as expected and the operator cannot do what she
wants, the violinist finds she is unable to play smoothly because a string has broken, or a
teacher is facing a rather unresponsive class. In such instances of breakdown the agent
becomes aware of her activity, of what she was trying to accomplish, the equipment she
was using – she starts acting deliberately. When the situation requires attention, mental
content arises, consisting of beliefs, desires and propositional attitudes. Subject-object
polarity emerges and now the deliberate agent is oriented towards her activity through
mental states causing deliberate actions. Drawing on an illustration by Dreyfus
(1991a:69-70), Schatzki (2000:35) aptly notes:
“When the door knob sticks, one’s focused efforts to move it are caused by the
desire to open it in conjunction with the belief that greater force will accomplish
this, and repeated attempts are guided by the intention in action to budge it. […]
13
The content of each of these mental states – what one is up to, how things work,
what needs to be done – is explicit to the actor. Hence not only does deliberate
action differ from its nondeliberate cousin by virtue of actors paying attention to
their activity; whereas nondeliberate action rests on the exercise of skills,
deliberate action is caused by mental states (where mental states are causally
efficacious states of being explicitly aware of something). As a result, when
someone deliberately acts purposively, she has a purpose in mind, that is, she is
explicitly aware of what she is out to accomplish (this purpose can be said to
constitute the content of one’s desires)”.
Moreover, when someone is explicitly aware of something, that act of awareness
is brought to one’s awareness too - the agent is aware that he is aware. By contrast, when
the agent is absorbed in the task, as is the case with practical coping, namely when the
agent is non-explicitly aware of something, the agent is not aware that he is aware of it.
Self-consciousness and the accompanying subject-object split have not yet arisen
(Schatzki, 2000:36).
Notice that when practical coping is interrupted, the agent stays involved in the
activity, although he now pays attention to what he does. Explicit awareness is still
oriented towards practical ends. When, however, the agent detaches himself from a
specific practical situation and stares at it from a reflective distance, aiming to know its
properties, then the practical situation becomes occurrent and the agent develops
thematic awareness. The latter brackets particular, immediate practical concerns and aims
at finding out about, or reflecting on, abstract properties of the situation at hand. Thus,
whereas in explicit awareness the physician might say “this scalpel is not sharp enough”,
14
thus becoming explicitly aware of its limited sharpness, in thematic awareness the
physician comes to know that the object she has been using as a scalpel is an object with
the property “sharpness”. Whereas in the former case the proposition refers to a situated
aspect of the scalpel (“it is not sharp enough for me to do the job”), in the latter case it
refers to a desituated property of the scalpel (i.e. it has “bluntness” in any situation) and,
thus, to scalpel in general (Dreyfus, 2000:317-8). With thematic awareness the agent
moves from aspects to properties and from practical to quasi-theoretical understanding.
There is one more kind of thematic awareness to be briefly discussed here, and
that is theoretical understanding. It concerns more theorists than practitioners. Recall that
in practical coping language is used as a situational coping skill; in explicit awareness it
is used propositionally to refer to a particular aspect of a situation, with a particular
practical purpose in mind; and in thematic awareness it is used propositionally to make
assertions about properties that bear no relevance to a particular practical situation, but
enabling one to refer to things and events in the rest of the world. Now, when not only a
practical situation is bracketed but a shared meaningful world of a particular
sociomaterial practice is bracketed too (e.g. the world of clinical medicine), then we can
talk of theoretical understanding, in which an object is “de-worlded” and re-integrated
into theory, and, in so far as this is the case, reinserted into a different world – the world
of theory (Dreyfus, 2000:317). The scalpel is not just an occurent object with the property
“sharpness”, but an entity whose material composition, design and making may be
studied independently, and a system of causal relationships ascertained. Theoretical
understanding goes beyond thematic awareness in so far as it goes beyond merely
detaching an object from a practical situation and re-contextualizes it into a corpus of
15
theory. For example, organizational properties such as “decentralization”, “cost
leadership”, “dynamic capabilities”, etc, when studied by organization theorists, are
concepts that are parts of theories (and of the world of theories), not of the (business)
world.
This Heideggerian phenomenological line of thinking has important
implications for how we view strategy and, crucially, it helps furnish s-a-p with an ontoepistemology that makes room for different types of action and intentionality. In the next
section I will show its relevance for s-a-p.
Strategy-as-practice From a Heideggerian Perspective
As Mintzberg and his associates’ research has shown, when streams of actions may be
identified over time, one can speak of an emergent strategy. Whether we talk about
Steinberg’s entrepreneurship, McLaren’s films in the National Film Board of Canada
(Mintzberg and Waters, 1982, 1985), or the inductive-cum-exploratory strategies
developed in the organizational periphery in Regner’s (2003) firms, we talk about
strategy ex post facto. Notice, however, that practitioners do not necessarily have the
sense that they strategize – this is, usually, researchers’ attribution. More likely,
practitioners respond spontaneously, that is to say, non-deliberately, to the developing
practical situation they find themselves in. The label for a particular “strategy” they
pursue is given to a patterned stream of actions either by practitioners themselves when
they retrospectively make sense of what they do (Weick, 1995:76-80; 2001:354), namely
when they become explicitly aware of what they do because of some difficulty or
16
interruption they have encountered, or by theorists who “de-world” the stream of action
they study and re-insert it in their world of theory.
The ex post facto ascription of “strategy” is clearly shown in the analysis of
Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller (1989) of 17 high quality manufacturers of knitted
outwear, predominantly from the Hawick area in Scotland. As the authors note, the
Scottish firms are embedded in a part of the UK that has had a long history in the
production of wool, with formal wool trade associations dating as far back as the mid
1600s. Scottish expertise in the preparation of cashmere and its use in the production of
knitted and woven garments has been historically strong. The industrial revolution
facilitated the establishment of several Scottish knitwear manufacturers. The 17 firms
studied have been following a long tradition of wool production; they buy the dyed yarn
from local spinners and employ mostly local people, trained in several local, wellrespected colleges.
Against such a background, Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller (1989:404) describe
the “strategy” their firms have followed as follows:
“In Porter's (1980) terms, the Scottish knitwear manufacturers seem to be
following a 'focus' strategy by concentrating their efforts upon a narrow segment
of the retail market. The aim is to sell premium quality, expensive garments
through specialist distribution channels to a limited number of high income
consumers. Two aspects of this strategy are noteworthy. First, the strategy seems
more evolutionary than planned, having developed over several decades in
response to problems encountered in the marketplace. Ten years ago, the Scottish
firms sold in fewer international markets and with a more limited product range
than is currently the case. They have gradually been forced by competing
knitwear firms to expand both their range and their international customer base.
Although the Scottish firms manufacture with up-to-date electronic knitting
equipment, they have historically used traditional, labour intensive methods of
hand finishing. Such methods permit the manufacture of very high quality
sweaters, and the pool of skilled workers available to these companies has
allowed them to exploit fully the traditional methods. On the other hand,
traditional methods are not as efficient as more modern manufacturing techniques.
17
As other domestic and foreign firms began to produce lower cost, higher volume,
and lesser quality garments, the Scottish manufacturers, intendedly or
unintendedly used the 'high quality' strategy to defend their position in the market.
This strategy seems to be based upon certain beliefs about the nature of demand
for Scottish products and the skills necessary to satisfy such demand”.
A number of points are worth noting in this account. First, the “focus strategy” namely, “sell[ing] premium quality, expensive garments through specialist distribution
channels to a limited number of high income consumers” (op.cit) -, is the researchers’
ascription in an effort to make sense of the patterned stream of actions they found in the
behavior of the Scottish firms. Secondly, the researchers perceptively note that this
“strategy” developed over a long stretch of time, in a piecemeal, pragmatic way, “in
response to problems encountered in the market place” (op.cit). We are not given
historical evidence as to what these responses were responses to, but we are usefully told
that the sociomaterial practice of knitwear manufacturing has, among other things, been
historically using traditional, labour-intensive methods of hand finishing. The Scottish
firms have been drawing on the “inherited background” - the resources of the
environment they have found themselves embedded into -, in order to produce their
knitwear. They had to make do with whatever was available to them and, in that sense,
their actions were non-deliberate, but shaped by historically and culturally transmitted
propensities. The practical coping with the surrounding situation (i.e. to produce knitwear
in that particular environment) was shaped by what Chia and MacKay (2007:232) aptly
call, drawing on Bourdieu (1990), a “sociality of inertia” – namely, the social, cultural,
and technological tradition these firms found themselves in, which infused practical
coping and enabled agents to act appropriately (namely, according to the norms and with
the materials at hand), although not necessarily deliberately. Approached this way, Chia
18
and MacKay (2007:236) are certainly right in construing strategy making “as a collective,
culturally shaped accomplishment attained through historically and culturally transmitted
social practices and involving dispositions, propensities and tendencies”. This type of
analysis meets Whittington’s criterion of “de-centering” upwards the organization, since
it shifts the focus from the activities within particular organizations to the historically and
culturally transmitted fields of sociomaterial practice that are constitutive of those
activities.
Empirical research on the making of strategy, informed by a Heideggerian ontoepistemology, would seek to describe the practical-coping activities of agents embedded
within a broader field of sociomaterial practice: how agents spontaneously (nondeliberately) draw on particular sociocultural norms and material resources available to
respond to developing practical situations. Such studies could range from microsociological studies of the practical-coping activities of particular people in particular
circumstances of situated interaction (as, for example, in the case of Honda’s senior
managers efforts to sell the 50cc Supercubs in the US in the late 1950s – see Pascale,
1984) to more historically or anthropologically oriented studies aiming at describing the
mutual constitution of a sociomaterial practice and its component activities (Langley,
2007:273-4). In both cases, “strategy” is a second-order label aiming to capture, in
retrospect, a pattern of actions coping with a developing practical situation over time, as
for example, in the phrase: “[traditional, labour intensive methods of hand finishing]
permit the manufacture of very high quality sweaters, and the pool of skilled workers
available to these companies has allowed them to exploit fully the traditional methods”
(Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller, 1989:404). However, the rationalizing language of
19
retrospectively accounting for strategy should be minimal so that it does not obscure the
practical coping involved when agents act in the context of broader, open-ended
sociomaterial practices.
The non-deliberate acting that is associated with practical coping may be
interrupted by breakdowns, crises, or unexpected events and developments, several of
which are caused by competitors, technological change, and/or governmental
interventions. In such cases, deliberate coping takes over, whereby agents pay explicit
attention to what they do; it marks the beginning of strategic thinking. For example,
when costs became an issue - namely when a “breakdown” occurred -, and Scottish
knitwear manufacturers were forced to think explicitly about what it is that had enabled
them to develop with success so far and what might give them the edge from now on.
Thus, they consciously articulated what they had been doing all along as a strategy of
“high-quality” (Weick, 1995:78). Porac, Thomas and Baden-Fuller (1989:404) note: “On
the other hand, traditional methods are not as efficient as more modern manufacturing
techniques. As other domestic and foreign firms began to produce lower cost, higher
volume, and lesser quality garments, the Scottish manufacturers, intendedly or
unintendedly used the 'high quality' strategy to defend their position in the market. This
strategy seems to be based upon certain beliefs about the nature of demand for Scottish
products and the skills necessary to satisfy such demand”. As Weick (1995:78) playfully
notes, “how can I know what I’ve made until I see how it’s sewn?”.
On this view, strategy making is articulating or re-interpreting what an agent has
already been doing as a matter of course (i.e. non-deliberately). Capitalizing on
retrospective reframing is what effective strategists do all the time, notes Weick
20
(1995:78). Articulating occurs when a hitherto non-deliberate activity is brought into
sharper focus - when an aspect of an activity is revealed (Spinoza, Flores, and Dreyfus,
1997:24-25). Re-interpreting occurs when an aspect of an activity is embedded within a
new conversation and acquires new meaning. The case of Scottish knitwear
manufacturers is a case of articulating. The now legendary story of how 3M developed its
famous Post-it notepads is a case of re-interpreting. Here is how the story goes according
to Sawyer (2007:45).
Spence Silver, a research scientist at 3M, tries to improve the adhesive used in
tape. As a research scientist he acts non-deliberately, pretty much like the lecturer
explaining s-a-p to her students, discussed earlier. The kind of new adhesive he develops,
however, bonds rather weakly and thus is not quite the improvement he was hoping.
Silver describes the new adhesive to several colleagues for five years, but no one could
think of ways of using it into a product. No one, except Art Fry, working in new product
development, who, frustrated by paper bookmarks falling out of his hymnal when singing
in church, realizes that Silver’s adhesive could be used to make the sort of bookmark he
had always wanted. The now-legendary Post-it note was invented!
Notice that the new adhesive Silver had created assumed importance in retrospect
- after it was taken up by someone else. The organizational significance of a new
initiative cannot be assessed except in retrospect, namely after the initiative has been
discursively woven into other ideas and initiatives created by others. A mundane change
today may turn out to be important tomorrow, or may give rise to further, more
consequential, changes later. Serendipity is the name we normally give to the process of
favorable consequences arising while aiming at something else. But consequences are
21
recognized as being favorable in retrospect, namely after they are embedded in
subsequent conversations and projects. Spencer’s new adhesive had not been recognized
as usefully new until another organizational member could see it as relevant to his
practical concerns. Strong adhesives were what 3M had been making all along, until it
saw potential in weak adhesives - that is to say, until it distanced itself from (i.e.
reinterpreted) the habitual (i.e. non-deliberate) way of approaching adhesives.
Retrospective reframing – articulating or reinterpreting the premises of nondeliberate actions - discloses an aspect of the practice and enables an agent to be
explicitly aware of it. The agent now forms beliefs, desires and propositional attitudes
concerning the task at hand. The agent’s actions are no longer solicited by the practical
task at hand but deliberately caused by mental content – certain desires and beliefs.
Moreover, as discussed in the previous section, when a practical situation is looked at
from a reflective distance, detached from a specific practical concern, the latter becomes
occurrent, and the agent develops thematic awareness. This is typically the case with
strategizing (strategic planning sessions, scenario planning interventions, and strategic
episodes at large).
Planners and strategy practitioners at large, especially consultants, look at the
organization as a detached object whose properties may be discerned and/or re-described.
Unlike the case of explicit awareness, in which practitioners try to coherently find their
way around by articulating or re-interpreting what they do, planners bracket any
immediate, particular practical concern, aiming to highlight relatively abstract
organizational properties, such as organizational strengths and weaknesses, capabilities,
past strategies, competitors’ strategies, or scenario-based threats and opportunities, in
22
order to articulate their strategic intent. This bracketing is often symbolically manifested
in day-away strategy meetings, in which the hurly-burly of organizational life is pushed
back to create space for detached, analytical thinking, whereby those involved try to
experience the organization as occurrent and, thus, bring it to their thematic awareness as
an object of reflection.
For example, in the case of the Scottish firms, a strategy for “premium quality”
was at some stage deliberately articulated. Furthermore, certain organizational-cumenvironmental properties, such as “expensive garments”, “specialist distribution
channels”, “high-income consumers” (see Porac, Thomas & Baden-Fuller, 1989:404)
were highlighted and sought to be related to one another in a coherent and mutually
reinforcing manner. Similarly, as Jarzabkowski and Wilson (2002:363-364) found in their
study of the strategy making of the top management team at Warwick University, the
strategic intent of consolidating and maintaining the institution’s position as a leading
research university in an increasingly competitive environment was clearly articulated in
the Warwick Strategic Plan, which included four main areas of strategic action. The
language of such a plan was relatively abstract and included setting targets, highlighting
properties (e.g. strengthen the capacity for income generation, achieve research
excellence, etc), and describing an array of actions to operationalize the plan. Coherence
between strategic intent and actions was noted by the researchers.
In strategic planning routines and strategizing episodes, formal representations
that depict the organization and its environment in abstract terms are typically used and
reasoning tends to acquire a quasi-syllogistic form (Regner, 2003: 71-74). Thematic
intentionality, abstract language, and desituated organizational properties and their
23
relationships are developed. Looked at as an outcome, strategy forms a quasi-theoretical
framework, namely a relatively abstract description of the organization causally related to
some desired outcomes, whose components, ideally, are consistent with one another. The
aim is for action to be guided by an explicit intentionality, often centrally formulated,
which sets priorities and deadlines, commits resources, and outlines actions for the
organization to implement in order for particular outcomes to be attained. Setting strategy
amounts to achieving coherent thematic awareness in a way that will enable strategic
clarity and intent to be realized coherently through prioritized actions.
If the outcome of a strategizing episode is a strategic plan, or at least the elements
of a strategic orientation, a s-a-p perspective can shed light on how such a plan (i.e. a
discursive object) is generated, and how it is further related to the rest of the organization.
How do actors interact and what broader practices do they draw upon? (Jarzabkowski,
Balogun and Seidl, 2007:8). What particular issues are brought to the attention of what
organizational members (especially senior and middle managers), in what ways? How are
issues framed, by whom, and why? (Laine and Vaara, 2007; Rouleau, 2005). Different
theories, such as actor-network theory, conventionalist theory, communication theory, etc
may be used to address these questions (Denis, Langley and Rouleau, 2007).
In other words, the very process of developing thematic awareness merits
attention in its own terms, and it is here where, predominantly, s-a-p has usefully
contributed so far. Maitlis and Lawrence (2003:125), in their case study of the (failed)
attempt to develop an artistic strategy in a British symphony orchestra, allude to this
when they note: “As actors begin to discuss [an] issue, both formally and informally, it
becomes a strategic organizational issue – an event, development or trend that is seen as
24
having organizational implications”. An issue becomes strategic in so far as actors begin
developing thematic awareness about it, namely when actors bracket any immediate,
particular practical concern and focus on relatively abstract organizational properties.
This is far from being a straightforward process, as is shown by Maitlis and Lawrence
(2003).
For example, for some the orchestra was lacking a “commercially viable strategy”
(Maitlis and Lawrence, 2003:125), for others the problems laid with an “incoherent
artistic product” (op.cit), while for the musicians “the artistic strategy had neither
coherence nor commercial viability” (op.cit). Each one of these statements pointed to an
“issue” that was brought, in rather abstract terms, to the thematic awareness of the people
involved in strategizing. Clearly, how language is used to frame issues, how certain
organizational events are rhetorically mobilized, how outside influences and
developments are rhetorically brought “into” the organization, how relevant meetings are
conducted, how objects and artifacts (e.g. PowerPoint presentations, flip charts, etc) are
used, how emotions are handled, and what forms of knowledge are mobilized, are all
highly relevant facets of strategizing episodes that merit empirical investigation,
especially with the help of ethnographic and ethnomethodological methods (SamraFredericks, 2003).
Conclusions
Let me summarize the argument put forward in this paper. To appreciate what s-a-p has
to offer strategy researchers, and to fully realize it potential, s-a-p needs to be grounded
on an onto-epistemology that acknowledges the various ways through which strategies
25
qua practices may develop as well as the various modes of intentionality and language
use that, crucially, underlie strategy making. S-a-p will go beyond the valuable insights
offered by the process approach to the extent it de-centers the organization in order to
focus on the macro-practices agents draw upon as well as the micro-practices they engage
in. S-a-p researchers should be particularly alert to exploring the tacit understandings and
internalized styles of practical coping; the body and its constitutive involvement in skilled
action; and the use of tools (including language) by agents. At the same time, s-a-p
should make space for deliberate modes of acting, which have been traditionally ignored
by process researchers and, more recently, by scholars who privilege trans-individualistic
analyses. I have tried to show in this paper that a fully developed Heideggerian ontoepistemological framework provides a coherent way for different types of strategy
making to be researched from a practice perspective.
More specifically, my argument has been as follows (see Table 1). As members of
sociomaterial practices, agents act on the basis of distinctions they have internalized
through their involvement in practice(s). Such distinctions constitute an inherited
background which enables agents to relate spontaneously to the solicitations of the tasks
at hand and, therefore, to act non-deliberately. Non-deliberate acting is practical coping
with a developing situation: it is not mediated by mental representations and comes about
from an ongoing integration of one’s activity as a practitioner within a particular
sociomaterial practice. The latter has a teleoaffective structure, making action within it
purposive and sensible. The patterned action that is often discernible in practical coping
is mainly due to agents’ acting from the same inherited background that shapes their
actions. Strategy here emerges over time from the coherent coping of actors with
26
developing practical situations. Although one may speak of strategy as a pattern in a
stream of actions, one may not speak of strategic thinking or strategizing. In practical
coping language is not used propositionally but as a situational coping skill.
Table 1 about here
When actors encounter breakdowns in the spontaneous flow of their activities,
they develop explicit awareness and move to deliberate coping: they pay explicit
attention to what they do and retrospectively try to make sense of it through articulation
or re-interpretation. Strategy here is retrospective reframing. Capturing those reframings
in action – describing “the ways in which new interpretations of old actions bubble up in
ongoing events” (Weick, 1995:78) – shows an additional way through which patterned
action may emerge over time. Now it is not merely the acting out of taken-for-granted
assumptions and propensities but, also, the deliberate thinking about past patterns of
actions in order for them to be further advanced or reconstituted. Strategic thinking
emerges as a process of deliberately looking-back-in-order-to-look-forward, and it arises
from a practical concern with the task at hand. Language is now propositionally used to
refer to a particular aspect of a situation, with a particular practical purpose in mind.
Creativity here is potentially at its highest in so far as meaning is attributed to past actions
in order to provide the basis for future actions.
Finally, when agents develop thematic awareness about the organization, the latter
becomes a detached object of reflection to be described in terms of abstract properties.
Here is where strategic thinking proper, or to be more precise, strategizing, takes place,
27
typically in strategic planning sessions, strategy away-days, and strategic episodes at
large. In strategizing, agents move from deliberately coping with situational aspects of
practical situations to being thematically aware of desituated properties of occurrent
objects of attention. Strategy-making practitioners (typically senior managers as well as
internal and external consultants) bracket immediate, task-related practical concerns, in
order to discern relatively abstract organizational properties which, when systematically
and coherently interrelated, will make up strategic intent. Thinking is rather analytical,
deductive and forward-oriented. The organization is represented through abstract
formulations, and explicit beliefs and desires are articulated. Although strategizing
involves abstraction and the formulation of intentionality, this is still a sociomaterial and
thoroughly political process involving the use of tools, especially language. In thematic
awareness language is used propositionally to make assertions about properties that bear
no relevance to a particular practical situation, but enable one to refer to things and events
both to the organization as an occurrent object and to the rest of the world. Strategic
learning is an outcome of such a use of language.
The Heideggerian onto-epistemology advanced here overcomes some of the
problems in process and s-a-p strategy research correctly identified by Whittington, and
Chia and MacKay. Whittington has rightly criticized process research for reifying
organizations and for not paying sufficient attention to strategic intent. In his words:
“first, by defining strategy as what the organizations does, [Mintzberg] denies the sense
of strategy as a kind of work that people do; second, by stressing how organizational
outcomes are so frequently detached from strategic intent, he reduces that strategy work
to a vain, even absurd endeavor to control the uncontrollable. […] For Mintzberg, why
28
bother to explore the actual roles, adaptations and impacts of planning in practice, if
strategic plans are typically not realized in organizational outcomes?” (Whittington,
2007:1581).
They are both very sensible points, which can be accommodated within the
framework offered here. More specifically, strategy has been shown to emanate from the
practical coping, deliberate coping, or strategizing of individuals situated in sociomaterial
practices. In practical coping the inherited background of sociomaterial practices is the
launching pad for non-deliberate actions in response to a practical situation at hand
(recall the Scottish knitwear firms in their early days, discussed earlier). In deliberate
coping, both the inherited background and the explicit awareness of individuals are
intertwined in the face of breakdowns. Strategy is making retrospectively sense of what
has been going on in order to consolidate, further refine, or change a pattern of actions
(think of the Post-it notepad story discussed earlier). In strategizing, the organization is
an occurrent object, which enters the thematic awareness of the participants, and its
desituated properties are identified (think of strategic planning meetings conducted at the
British symphony orchestra mentioned earlier). Notice that each one of these three modes
of strategy making involves work that is carried out within sociomaterial practices
consisting of tacit understandings, bodily involvement, and tools (especially language).
How such work is organized and carried out over time, with what effects, is an important
theme s-a-p researchers typically aim at exploring.
Chia and MacKay (2007) have rightly criticized both the process approach and
the dominant understanding of s-a-p for individualistic bias, which tends to portray
strategy making as the doing of purposeful agents. Subscribers to a Heideggerian onto-
29
epistemology are alert to the tacit understandings, embodied capacities and historically
shaped tendencies that reside in extra-organizational sociomaterial practices. That much
is eloquently said by Chia and MacKay, who also share a Heideggerian ontoepistemology. What, however, they seem to underestimate (although they mention its
possibility without developing it – see Chia and Mackay, 2007:238) is deliberate action
and the associated practice of strategizing. From a Heideggerian phenomenological
perspective, strategizing, namely the process of forming thematic awareness, is a
distinctive moment of being-in-the-world that comes about when people step back from
immediate practical tasks and reflect on an entity in a detached manner, seeking to
identify its properties in abstracto. How thematic awareness develops, with what results,
is a fascinating topic to study from a practice perspective.
It should be noted, however, that thematic awareness, although aiming at decontextualization, detached analytical thinking and abstraction, it itself constitutes a
practical task. Detached reflection does not come ready-made but involves work and,
thus, draws on relevant sociomaterial practices and skills: like any practice, it relies on
tacit understandings, the body, and particular tools. Thematic awareness is a social
accomplishment. How people argue, how they abstract, how they draw each other’s
attention to certain things, how they relate to others, etc are activities shaped by broader
sociomaterial practices on which people draw (Latour, 2007). Chia and MacKay
(2007:229) are right in pointing out that a particular strategist’s relational-rhetorical
skills, as studied by Samra-Fredricks (2003), are no mere individual traits but social
accomplishments, namely ways of arguing and relating that worked in this particular case
in so far as they drew on established practices with which the rest of participants could
30
identify. The micro-practices people engage in (i.e. the patterns of interactions locally
instantiated) and the macro-practices people draw upon (i.e. the tacit understandings, the
bodily comportment, and the tools used) are important topics to study, although it may
not be always possible to do both things at once.
Finally, a Heideggerian framework enables us to avoid circular definitions of
strategy that so often beset the field. Jarzabkowski, Balogun and Seidl (2007:8) argue that
“an activity is considered strategic to the extent that is consequential for the strategic
outcomes, directions, survival and competitive advantage of the firm”. The problem with
such a definition, however, is that it conflates “strategy making” with “intentionality” –
two distinct and contingently linked phenomena. Some types of activity are considered
“strategic” because participants define them as such, as for example strategic planning
sessions, strategy away-days, etc, not because they are necessarily consequential for the
organization. This is what has been described in this paper as strategizing and is
necessarily linked with intentionality and thematic awareness. However, Mintzberg
(1994) was right to point out that it is not uncommon for strategic planning exercises to
be just that – ritual exercises -, bearing no clear relationship to organizational outcomes.
What is intended is not necessarily consequential.
Reversely, what may turn out to be of major consequence for the competitive
advantage of a firm, may not be an outcome of a “strategic” activity as such (namely, an
outcome of strategizing) but may emerge from a pattern of actions practically coping
with a developing situation, as for example was the case of the Scottish knitwear firms
relying on traditional methods of hand finishing their sweaters. Or a competitive
advantage may emerge from a stream of practical-coping activities after they have been
31
retrospectively made sense of by practitioners. Non-deliberate practical coping, although
purposive, is not directed at generating particular (consequential) outcomes and, thus, it is
not purposeful; it merely enacts a particular inherited background over time. Deliberate
coping meshes spontaneous responses to a developing practical situation with articulating
or reinterpreting the emerged pattern of actions. What is consequential is a retrospective
attribution.
In conclusion, keeping “strategy making” separate from “intentionality” is
beneficial, since it allows us to better see their connections. “Strategy” was traditionally
considered to be identical with senior managerial intentionality and its manifestations
(i.e. strategic plans). The process approach widened our appreciation of “strategy” by
enabling us to see how patterns in streams of non-deliberate actions can be seen as de
facto forming a strategy. Whereas traditional approaches attributed a coherent pattern of
organizational actions to the strategic intent of relevant practitioners, process researchers
bracketed that assumption in search for patterns of action independently of their origin. Sa-p can further contribute, first by bringing intentionality under scrutiny and showing
how it is constructed in strategizing episodes through practitioners drawing upon
particular sociomaterial practices (something which the process approach refrained from
doing); and secondly, by showing the inherited background from which practitioners
engage in coherent practical coping and exploring how aspects of the inherited
background are brought to explicit awareness in the face of breakdowns, with what
effects (something which has been immanent in the process approach but not fully
realized, nor explicitly theorized, due to its individualist bias). A Heideggerian ontoepistemology does not of course solve all problems related to strategy research but it
32
provides us with the vocabulary to better understand what it is that strategy-as-practice
should be researching.
References
Benner, P. (1994) The role of articulation in understanding practice and experience as
sources of knowledge in clinical nursing. In J. Tully (Ed.), Philosophy in an Age of
Pluralism: 136-155, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Benner, P., Hooper-Kyriakidis, P. & Stannard, D. (1999). Clinical Wisdom and
Interventions in Critical Care. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders
Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity
Chia, R. and Holt, R. (2006) Strategy as practical coping: A Heideggerian perspective,
Organization Studies, 27/5:635-656
Chia, R. and MacKay, B. (2007) Post-processual challenges for the emerging strategy-aspractice perspective: Discovering strategy in the logic of practice, Human Relations,
60/1: 217-242
Denis, J.-L., Langley, A. and Rouleau, L. (2007) Strategizing in pluralistic contexts:
Rethinking theoretical frames, Human Relations, 60/1:179-216
Dreyfus, H. (1985) Holism and hermeneutics. In Robert Hollinger (ed.) Hermeneutics
and Praxis, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, pp.227-247
Dreyfus, H. (1991a) Being-in-the-world. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press
Dreyfus, H. (1991b) Reflection on the Workshop on “The Self”, Anthropology and
Humanism Quarterly, 16:27-31
Dreyfus, H. (2000) Responses. In Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (eds.), Heidegger,
Coping, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp.313-349
Gawande, A. (2002) Complications. New York: Metropolitan Books
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity
Hardy, C., T.B. Lawrence, D. Grant (2005) Discourse and collaboration: The role of
conversations and collective identity. Acad. Management Rev., 30(1) 58-77
Harré, R & Gillett, G. 1994. The Discursive Mind. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. New York: Harper and Row.
33
Jarzabkowski, P. and Wilson, D. (2002) Top teams and strategy in a UK university,
Journal of Management Studies, 39/3:357-383
Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J. and Seidl, D. (2007) Strategizing: The challenges of a
practice perspective, Human Relations, 60/1:5-28
Johnson, G., Melin, L. and Whittington, R. (2003) Guest Editors’ Introduction: Micro
strategy and strategizing: Towards an activity-based view, Journal of Management
Studies, 40/1:3-22
Kogut, B. & Zander, U. (1996) What firms do? Coordination, identity, and learning.
Organ. Sci., 7:502-518
Laine, P.-M. and Vaara, E. (2007) Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of
strategic development in an engineering group, Human Relations, 60/1:29-58
Lakatos, I. (1978) The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In J. Worrall
and G. Currie (eds.), Philosophical Papers (Vol.1), Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Langley, A. (2007) Process thinking in strategic organization, Strategic Organization,
5:271-282
Latour, B. (2007), Reassembling the Social, Oxford: Oxford University Press
MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue. (2nd ed.). London, UK: Duckworth.
Maitlis, S. and Lawrence, T.B. (2003) Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark: Understanding
failure in organizational strategizing, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1:109-140
Mintzberg, H. (1994) The Rise and fall of Strategic Planning, New York: Free Press
Mintzberg, H. (1990) The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic
management, Strategic Management Journal, 11:171-195
Mintzberg, H. (1987) Crafting strategy, Harvard Business Review, 65:66-75
Mintzberg, H. and McHugh, A. (1985) Strategy formation in an adhocracy,
Administrative Science Quarterly, 30:160-197
Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J.A. (1982) Tracking strategy in an entrepreneurial firm,
Academy of Management Journal, 25/3:465-499
Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J.A. (1985) Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic
Management Journal, 6:257-272
34
Orlikowski, W. (2007) Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work,
Organization Studies, 28:1435-1448
Pascale, R. (1984) Perspectives on strategy: The real story behind Honda’s success,
California Management Review, 26/3:47-72
Polanyi, M. (1962) Personal Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of the Chicago Press.
Polanyi, M. & Prosch, H. (1975) Meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Porac, J.F., Thomas, H. and Baden-Fuller, C. (1989) Competitive groups as cognitive
communities: The case of Scottish knitwear manufacturers, Journal of Management
Studies, 26: 397-416
Reckwitz, A. (2002) Towards a theory of social practice: A development in cultural
theorizing, European Journal of Social Theory, 5/2:243-263
Regner, P. (2003) Strategy creation in the periphery: Inductive versus deductive strategy
making, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1:57-82
Rouleau, L. (2005) Micro-practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How
middle managers interpret and sell change every day, Journal of Management Studies,
42: 1413-1443
Rouse, M. (2000) Coping and its contrasts. In Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (eds.),
Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, pp.7-28
Ryle, G. (1963). The Concept of Mind. London: Penguin
Samra-Fredericks, D. (2003) Strategizing as lived experience and strategists’ everyday
efforts to shape strategic direction, Journal of Management Studies, 40/1:141-174
Sawyer, R.K. (2007). Group Genius. New York: Basic Books
Schatzki, T. (2005) The sites of organizations, Organization Studies, 26/3:465-484
Schatzki, T. (2000) Coping with others with folk psychology. In Mark A. Wrathall and
Jeff Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press, pp.29-52
Shotter, J., & Katz, A.M. (1996). Articulating a practice from within the practice itself:
Establishing formative dialogues by the use of a ‘social poetics’. Concepts and
Transformation, 1: 213-237.
Spinosa, C., Flores, F., & Dreyfus, H.L. (1997). Disclosing New Worlds. Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press
35
Taylor, C. (1985a). Human Agency and Language. Vol.1, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Taylor, C. (1985b). Philosophy and the human sciences. Vol.2. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The dialogical self. In D.R. Hiley, J.F. Bohman, & R. Shusterman
(Eds.), The interpretive turn: 304-314, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Taylor, C. (1993). Engaged agency and background in Heidegger. In C. Guignon (Ed.),
The Cambridge companion to Heidegger: 317-336, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press
Taylor, C. (1995). Philosophical arguments. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Tsoukas, H. & Knudsen, C. (2002). The conduct of strategy research. In A. Pettigrew, H.
Thomas & R. Whittington (Eds.), Handbook of Strategy and Management: 411435, London: Sage
Wakefield, J. and Dreyfus, H. (1991) Intentionality and the phenomenology of action. In
Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick (eds.), John Searle and his Critics, Oxford:
Blackwell, pp.259-270
Weick, K. (2001) Substitutes for strategy. In K. Weick, Making Sense of the
Organization, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.345-360
Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Whittington, R. (2006) Completing the practice turn in strategy research. Organization
Studies, 27/5:613-634
Whittington, R. (2007) Strategy practice and strategy process: Family differences and the
sociological eye, Organization Studies, 28/10:1575-1586
Wittgenstein, L. (1979). On Certainty. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von
Wright. Translated by D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell
Wittgenstein, L. (1980a). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol.II, Edited by
G.H. von Wright & H. Nyman, Translated by C.G. Luckhardt & M.A.E. Aue, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press
Wittgenstein, L. (1980b). Culture and Value. Edited by G.H. Von Wright & H. Nyman.
Translated by P. Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
36
Table 1: Action, Intentionality and Strategy Making: A Heideggerian framework
Type of Action
Practical
coping
Deliberate coping
Detached coping
Type of
Intentionality
Tacit
understanding
(non – deliberate)
Explicit awareness
• Articulation
• Reinterpretation
Thematic
awareness
Type of Language
Use
Situational Coping
Skill
Propositional (aspects)
Propositional
(properties)
Type of Strategy
Making
Emergent pattern
of actions
Retrospective
reframing
Strategizing
37