Strategy as Practice

An Activity Based Approach

Paula Jarzabkowski

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780761944386, 9780761944379
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

`An important and extremely welcome addition to the strategic management field. In this book the author builds on the work of an emerging community of scholars to lay out theoretical and methodological underpinnings of an activity-based framework for applying the practice lens to strategy? - Academy of Management Review

`Paula Jarzabkowski has astutely signaled an agenda for future scholarship that will no doubt fuel the continued growth of this subfield? - Organization Studies

`Pioneering work. As the first book in the new strategy-as-practice field, it offers readers both innovative models and exemplary field research? - Richard Whittington, Professor of Strategic Management, Said Business School, Oxford

?Extends and develops the emerging fields of strategy and practice as well as activity theory. It also demonstrates empirically, using University settings, how activity theory is itself bounded by the wider contexts of organisation, embedded routines and the heavy hand of history? - David C. Wilson, University of Warwick

`An insightful book that would be of use to people interested in the actual practices of strategy and strategizing? - Organization

Bridging the gap between what managers actually do and organizational strategies, this book provides an activity-based framework for studying strategy as practice, with empirical evidence to illustrate the dynamics of this framework in real terms.

PART I: DEFINING AND THEORETICALLY LOCATING AN ACTIVITY-BASED VIEW

The aim of this section is to locate the concepts of an activity-based view of strategy as practice in the literature. Chapter 1 deals with the social theory of practice. Four core themes from social theory that apply to the study of activity are developed. These themes provide a sensitizing framework for thinking about the empirically-grounded material in the following chapters. An activity system framework for analysing activity, which will be used in the empirical chapters, is also developed. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the strategy literature that applies to an activity-based view. Key terms, such as strategy and strategizing, are defined and the core analytic concepts are grounded in the relevant strategy literature. This literature review derives the three research questions that guide the empirical study in Part II.

1	CORE SOCIAL THEORY THEMES IN STRATEGY AS PRACTICE

Key points

• Strategy is situated activity
• Becoming: situated activity is always under construction
• Situated activity is distributed
• Managerial agency: practical-evaluative wisdom in dealing with situated, distributed activity that is becoming
• An activity system framework

In a university planning meeting, the top team is discussing the static research and commercial income figures for the 5-year forecasts.^* This is an issue that has been perplexing them for some time, particularly the research figures, which have been a problem for a couple of years despite various interventions. They agree that static targets are unacceptable. They must set tough goals. Dave emphasizes: ‘It’s simply not good enough. We must set TOUGH surplus plans of an increase each year and we MUST achieve those targets which we have not been tough on in the past.’
Tim agrees and suggests a way to action their goals by altering the current monitoring and control procedures for handling income generation: ‘We need to have two committees; an academic side to handle and sort out academics and research contracts, and an income side to handle the commercial and administrative side.’ The Vice-Chancellor likes the suggestion: ‘Be tougher with academics to pull in more research income and get the commercial income up as well.’ They quickly coalesce around the new goals for the activity and the procedural means for achieving them. Andy points out that ‘It’s unlikely to be achieved by democratic means.’ Dave agrees: ‘It’s got to be authorized or recommended from the top … You want to keep the surplus increasing, which is realistic to ask for.’
Andy reinforces the tough message about income from research, which they have been grappling with for some years. ‘It’s not enough for research just to be good in itself. It has to have financial benefits as well.’ Joe reminds them that the increasingly competitive environment for research funding and for their commercial services means that people are already working very hard to achieve the current figures. Increased financial output is a lot to expect in the current environment. However, he agrees that they need to try.
The team then gets instrumental about who should chair the new committees, the specific commercial and research targets to be agreed with different departments, the incentives and punitive measures that they think might encourage and control the departments, and, based on their personal relationships with individuals, which of them would be best at negotiating the dual targets with each department. Sam raises a point about whether these are contradictory activities: ‘Should we clarify these objectives? We want to have maximum research income but also commercial income. It seems we want it all. Maybe these are not compatible objectives?’ The Vice-Chancellor silences him quickly: ‘We want BOTH.’ The dual goals for research agreed, the team goes on with discussing the various practices they have available to construct activity, which they hope will result in increased research and commercial income over the next 5 years.

* While names are disguised to preserve anonymity, this is an extract from a meeting that I observed personally.

This extract, comprising some 20 minutes of a two-hour meeting, captures top managers in a moment of ‘strategizing’. In it they are using data, developing goals, articulating targets, appraising the environment, reflecting on past practice, modifying control systems, coping with uncertainty, affirming power structures, considering social relationships with others, and legitimizing action. They do so in a practiced way, arriving at a point of sufficient decision to move on to the next agenda item, secure in the knowledge that they have the necessary practices to progress the ‘dual goal’ strategy to the next stage. A small strategizing incident in many such incidents.

In this strategizing incident, we can see many of the issues addressed by a practice agenda. The practice turn places the micro practices and processes that constitute the activity of strategizing at the centre of strategy research (Jarzabkowski, 2003, 2004a; Johnson et al., 2003; Whittington, 2002, 2003). Through a myriad of such micro incidents, comprising the ongoing fabric of strategizing, strategists construct parts of a larger flow of strategic activity. They do so with recourse to the situated practices and artefacts that are meaningful within their context, with little concern for the dichotomies that typically characterize strategy research. Polarizations such as content versus process, intended versus emergent, foresight versus uncertainty, and formulation versus implementation dissolve meaninglessly in practice (Clegg et al., 2004; Johnson et al., 2003). In one simple 20-minute incident of strategizing, we can see both the content and process of the research strategy, the intent embodied in the ‘decision’ for dual goals but also that decision’s emergence from an ongoing process, the practical iteration between hoped for futures and current uncertainty, and the formulation of strategy in a tightly iterative cycle with its implementation. The outcome of the single incident is a contribution to ongoing activity that will trigger interactions with a range of other actors and actions over time, contributing to the strategy of the organization. In studying such practical incidents of strategizing at close range, we can begin to understand how strategy is shaped, the implications of the various practices available for shaping it, and some of the consequences of that shaping.

However, before launching into an analysis of the relationship between strategizing and activity, it is important to outline broadly the theoretical basis of the practice turn. In this chapter, four concepts in the social theory of practice that apply to the study of activity are highlighted:

1. Strategy is explained as situated activity.
2. Situated activity is shown to be in a continuous state of construction.
3. Construction of situated activity is distributed amongst multiple participants, which poses particular problems for those whose job is to ‘manage’ strategy.
4. For managers, strategizing involves practical-evaluative agency in the face of situated, distributed activity that is in a continuous state of construction.

As these four concepts are discussed, their application to an activity-based view of strategy as practice is developed, leading to an activity system framework that guides the empirical study.

STRATEGY IS SITUATED ACTIVITY

‘Situated’ is a key practice term that populates the literature with little or no definition, as if its essential meaning is understood. However, ‘situatedness’ is a deeply embedded concept that has multiple layers of meaning, many of which have been sacrificed to the superficial context of interpersonal interactions (Contu and Willmott, 2003). Situated refers to the way that activity both shapes and is shaped by the society within which it occurs. Since all activity is situated activity, actors cannot be considered separately from the context or situation in which they act. Suchman, one of the primary proponents of situated activity, defines the relational nature of actor and situation:

First, cognitive phenomena have an essential relationship to a publicly available, collaboratively organized world of artifacts and actions, and secondly, that the significance of artifacts and actions, and the methods by which their significance is conveyed, have an essential relationship to their particular concrete circumstances. (1987: 50)

This definition of situatedness captures the fundamental character of practice; individual cognition that both constructs and is constructed by a shared world on an ongoing basis. It also highlights two important aspects of situatedness; that situation provides an interpretative context and that this context imbues artefacts and actions with meaning. First, situation provides an interpretative context for action (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Lave and Wenger, 1991). That is, any particular action derives meaning, ‘significance’, from the situation in which it is enacted: ‘In so far as actions are always situated in particular social and physical circumstances, the situation is crucial to action’s interpretation’ (Suchman, 1987: 178). The interpretative nature of situation comprises two important elements, social embeddedness and history.

Let us think about these terms in relation to the above extract, top managers in a university considering how to increase income from research and commercial revenue streams. The situation that lends meaning to these goal-directed activities is deeply embedded. Economically and politically, the need to pursue two concurrent but potentially contradictory goals of research income and commercial income is situated in a 20-year historical trend in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries of declining state-funding and increased market-based competition in the public sector generally and the higher education sector specifically. This situation provides a set of contextual conditions that generate urgency about strategy for team members. The economic and political situation means that all of their activities must provide revenue within the context of increasing competition for resources. This realization extends to their more localized situation, which is the University’s success in generating revenue from various activities. Historically the University has good research rankings, but it has struggled to raise the percentage of revenue from research for three years, despite attention and various modest interventions by the top team. This situated nature of research activity lends particular weight to their decision to ‘get tough’ on research income. The embedded and historical nature of the situation is inextricably involved in the way the top team wishes to shape research activity strategically.

The embedded nature of situation is explained by broader social phenomena, such as social institutions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Giddens, 1984). The reason that many organizations appear similar, particularly from the outside, is due to their situatedness in social, political and economic contexts that provide broadly similar concepts of what an organization is. However, situatedness also serves to explain the localized nature of activity in which institutional codes of conduct are not uniform. Local situatedness explains why, from the inside, organizations look so different. For example, all three cases in this book have similar concerns about managing the tensions between research and commercial activity, because of the economic and political climate in which they are located. To this extent, situatedness is a broad institutional concept responsible for common forms of social practice in different localities. However, internally the universities pursue similar streams of activity in quite different ways, with different outcomes due to both the different historical connotations of those activities and also the practices available to enact them within their local context. Practice must, therefore, take into account both the broad social situation that provides institutionally embedded codes of conduct and the micro interpretations of that situation in constructing activity within an organization (Jarzabkowski, 2004a). This embedded construction of situated activity is termed ‘praxis’. Praxis is a chain of social events ‘where operation and action meet, a dialectic synthesis of what is going on in a society and what people are doing’ (Sztompka, 1991: 96). Praxis comprises the interaction between macro and micro contexts in which activity is constructed (Whittington, 2002). Macro or wider societal contexts constitute a current of social movement, ‘what is going on in a society’ (Sztompka, 1991: 96). Micro contexts comprise any given group engaged in their own local construction of practice, ‘what people are doing’ (1991: 96). Strategy is a situated activity that is located within this praxis; constructed by actors in interplay with broader social, economic and political institutions.

A second consideration arising from Suchman’s definition is ‘the significance of artefacts and actions’, which refers to the situated practices available for action. For example, organizations have a multitude of artefacts, such as planning procedures, resource allocation mechanisms, committees, logos, acronyms, presentations and templates, which have particular significance in that organization. These artefacts have technical purposes, such as allocating and organizing resources, and also social purposes, such as legitimizing activity and signifying power relationships within the organization (Bechky, 2003). Artefacts are thus inherently associated with actions and actors. For example, in his attempts to increase control over revenue from a commercial initiative owned by a department, a senior university manager, in an interview, explained to me the use of committees, auditors and audit statements:

I had a go on my own and was unable to do it … So my next strategy was to use the Resource Committee which has more legitimacy in financial matters than I do but even then we had to use auditors … to actually prove that there was a case. They’ve got the internal audit to suggest that there is a lack of standardization … doesn’t fit normal good practice in terms of control systems and there’s also a lack of effectiveness.

This extract shows power relationships in the use of artefacts and professional roles in order to ascribe legitimacy to an act of resource authorization between top managers and a department, with the broader objective of shaping the commercial income strategy. This is not solely a feature of potentially politicized artefacts, such as audit statements. Other studies have found that even seemingly apolitical and acontextual artefacts, such as whiteboards and Post-it notes, are important social, political and technical mediators of activity in organizations because of the social interactions involved in their use (Blackler et al., 2000; Eden and Ackerman, 1998). The artefacts are not meaningful in isolation but in the way they are used to lend meaning to a situation. Artefacts are thus situated social and technical tools that are inherently entwined with the activity of doing strategy in a particular context. This will hardly be surprising to practitioners, since the skilled use of existing organizational practices as resources for collaborating with, co-opting or coercing others is one way in which they display their competence as strategists; because they know the done thing, they are able to get things done (Whittington, 1996).

Finally, Suchman’s definition of the ‘essential relationship’ of activity and artefacts ‘to their particular concrete circumstances’ alerts us to a key ontological issue in strategy as practice. The term ‘practice’ suggests that strategy arises out of daily experiences that assume reality for the people participating in them. That is, ‘in practice’ is commonly understood as ‘in reality’, indicating that we need to get inside the lived experience of practitioners as they are doing strategy, understanding the multitude of actions and practices that constitute their ‘reality’ in doing strategy. The practice turn’s obsession with getting inside ‘lived experience’, ‘reality’ or ‘concrete circumstances’ does not indicate an objective reality that we could understand if only we could study it in sufficiently micro-detail. Rather, the practice turn perceives reality as situated activity over time: that activity comprising reality for the people participating in it as it moves over time in context. It is thus largely constructivist in nature, despite its diverse epistemological foci and underpinnings.¹ This ontological perspective is adopted in this book, referring to strategy as socially constructed activity.

An activity-based view con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Quick Reference Guides
• List of Exhibits
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction. Strategy as Practice: A New Perspective
• PART I: DEFINING AND THEORETICALLY LOCATING AN ACTIVITY-BASED VIEW
• PART II: SHAPING STRATEGIC ACTIVITY IN PRACTICE
• PART III: THEORIZING AN ACTIVITY-BASED VIEW OF STRATEGY AS PRACTICE
• Appendix: Research Method
• References
• Index