Double Stimulation in Strategic Concept Formation: An Activity-Theoretical Analysis of Business Planning in a Small Technology Firm

Abstract

In this article, we study the relationships between culturally existing general strategy concepts and a small information and communication technology firm's specific strategic challenge in its management team's search for a new strategy concept. We apply three theoretical ideas of cultural historical activity theory: (a) the idea of double stimulation, which we relate to the relationship of culturally evolved artifacts and the problem situation at hand in the processes of problem solving and agency building; (b) the dialectical interplay between the process and the product of generalizing; and (c) the difference between empirical and theoretical generalizations, which is related to the quality and explanatory power of concepts. The analysis shows that the use of empirical generalizations as intellectual tools in strategic planning and the lack of firsthand observational and experiential data about the clients' problems hampered the management team's attempt to find a new strategy to avoid a future crisis for the business.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. We also thank the managers of the case firm and Juha Pihlaja, PhD, for their collaboration and help in the research. The comments given by the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the special issue have greatly helped in focusing and clarifying the article.

Notes

¹The “integrative concept of an activity” comes close to the empirical concept of “organizational archetype” of Greenwood and Hinings (1993, p. 1055), which they define as a set of structures and systems that reflect a single interpretative scheme and use for constructing a typology of organizational forms. In our analysis the theoretical unit is not organization but a system of object-oriented activity, and we want to highlight the theoretical nature (as defined by Davydov, 1990) of the integrative concept of an activity. This concept also comes close to Normann's (1977) systems-theoretical concept of a “business idea,” which, however, does not include the object and motive of the business activity nor the idea of development-engendering inner contradictions in the system.

²The concept of strategic management proposed here applies to the strategic management of an individual business activity and not to the corporation's strategic management of a portfolio of business activities, although the allocation of investment capital to these depends on an analysis of the phase of each business activity in its life cycle.

³By a point in the discussion, we refer to questions, observations, ideas, considerations, and suggestions that initiate new objects of discussion or elaborate on an already initiated object. A turn of talk can contain several points, and several turns of talk can be jointly used to develop a point. If the same or a similar point was made in different parts of the discourse, it was counted as separate. Presentations of background information have not been included in this analysis.