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14 - A narrative approach to strategy as practice: strategy-making from texts and narratives

from Part II - Theoretical Resources: Social Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2015

By
Valérie-Inès De La Ville  and
Eléonore Mounoud
Edited by
Damon Golsorkhi ,
Linda Rouleau ,
David Seidl  and
Eero Vaara
Valérie-Inès De La Ville
Affiliation:
University of Poitiers, France
Eléonore Mounoud
Affiliation:
École Centrale Paris
Damon Golsorkhi
Affiliation:
Grenoble School of Management
Linda Rouleau
Affiliation:
HEC Montréal
David Seidl
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Eero Vaara
Affiliation:
Svenska Handelshögskolan, Helsinki
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Summary

The narrativizing of practices is a textual ‘way of operating’, having its own procedures and tactics. […] Shouldn't we recognize its scientific legitimacy by assuming that instead of being a remainder that cannot be, or has not yet been, eliminated from discourse, narrativity has a necessary function in it, and that a theory of narration is indissociable from a theory of practices, as its condition as well as its production.

De Certeau (1988: 78)

Introduction

The strategy-as-practice approach requires a close and detailed scrutiny of practitioners’ activities. Such a micro-level approach enables us to depart from the conventional perspective and delve ‘inside the process to examine intimately the kind of work that is actually being done’ (Whittington and Cailluet 2008: 244), to study in more detail ‘individual’ rather than ‘organizational’ performance (Samra-Fredericks 2003). Moving attention away from macro-processes towards various aspects of the minutiae of strategy-making has changed the discourse used by researchers to explain how strategy is conceived, explained and communicated (Whittington 2007; Vaara and Whittington 2012). In practice, strategizing is essentially considered as micro-processes – that is, the actual activities carried out by individuals within their organized contexts: ‘[S]trategy is something that people do’ (Jarzabkowski and Whittington 2008: 282, emphasis added).

Although social practice theory tends to emphasize the tacit and informal dimensions of practices and praxis, SAP research has focused on ‘the work, the workers and tools of strategy’ (Jarzabkowski and Whittington 2008: 285), leading to the privileging of explicit practices, especially on operating procedures and standards (Jarzabkowski 2004; 2005), norms of appropriate strategic behaviour set by industry recipes (Spender 1989) and legitimizing discourses (Barry and Elmes 1997). Furthermore, while social practice theory advocates ‘agency’ for everyone in everyday life, strategy-as-practice research pays attention mainly to special events (Hendry and Seidl 2003) and top management (Samra-Fredericks 2003). Thus, the approach's achievement has been largely a change in the method of observing strategic management, and not the basic categories of thought (Jarzabkowki, Balogun and Seidl 2007; Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington 2011). So far, strategy-as-practice research has mainly focused on the visible part of the iceberg: people, events and explicit tools. The actual practice in itself, which ‘involves a constant parsing out of the individual, the local and the societal’ (Whittington 2011: 185), has not yet been sufficiently investigated.

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Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice , pp. 249 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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