Strategy-as-Practice: Taking Social Practices Seriously

Abstract

This article reviews research in Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) and suggests directions for its development. The power of this perspective lies in its ability to explain how strategy-making is enabled and constrained by prevailing organizational and societal practices. Our review shows how SAP research has helped to advance social theories in strategic management, offered alternatives to performance-dominated analyzes, broadened the scope in terms of organizations studied and promoted new methodologies. In particular, it has provided important insights into the tools and methods of strategy-making (practices), how strategy work takes place (praxis), and the role and identity of the actors involved (practitioners). However, we argue that there is a need to go further in the analysis of social practices to unleash the full potential of this perspective. Hence, we outline five directions for the further development of the practice perspective: placing agency in a web of practices, recognizing the macro-institutional nature of practices, focusing attention on emergence in strategy-making, exploring how the material matters, and promoting critical analysis.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Royston Greenwood for his excellent guidance. We also want to express our gratitude to May Lönnholm and Tina Karme for helping us with the review of previous research and Pikka-Maaria Laine, Saku Mantere, David Seidl and Carola Wolf for insightful comments on the manuscript.

Notes

Our criteria for inclusion are somewhat strict. First, we included only articles appearing in SAP special issues or with explicit and substantial reference to the SAP literature; we leave aside a number of important empirical articles without such reference but which still treat themes close to SAP (Balogun & Johnson, 2004; Howard-Grenville, 2007; Rindova, Dalpiaz, & Ravasi, 2011; Vaara & Tienari, 2008). Second, we draw from journals ranked by the Association of Business School at 3 or 4, adding only Strategic Organization as a rising journal that has been particularly influential in SAP research. Our review is not exhaustive, therefore, and we regretfully exclude a number of valuable studies that are published in book form, in other journals or in languages other than English.