If you ever want an overview of the development of strategy as a professional field, this book is a good place to start.
Whittington, R. (2019) ‘Opening Strategy: Practices and Professionals’, in Opening Strategy. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198738893.003.0001.
The book takes you on a journey through the development of the academic and professional field of strategy, how practices, praxis, practitioners and the profession has developed since the 60’s until today.
After a very interesting theoretical chapter (focus: ‘strategy as practice’), much emphasis is put on how how the practitioners of strategy – both in companies, but also consultancies have developed and shaped the use of strategy. An interesting reccuring theme is how development of new technology also contributed to development of approaches to use of strategy. In recent times, the whole dimension social network mentality, has both shaped expectations and the tech employed to involve wide groups of an organisation – and beyond – in the strategy process. Thus, from the idea of closed, top-management only thinking about strategy, we are barreling towards much more openness in the whole strategic process.
Very interesting and gives food for thought on where are we heading.
More on “strategy as practice”:
Johnson, 2016. Strategy as Practice:
Research Directions and Resources
Golsorkhi, 2007, Cambridge Handbook
of Strategy as Practice
Jarzabkowski, 2005 Strategy as
Practice: An Activity Based Approach (SAGE Strategy series)
I’m reading up on strategy literature these days, and I found this gem: “Fundamentals of strategy” and I’m very happy that I ordered and read it.
Johnson, Gerry et al. (2018) Fundamentals of Strategy (4th ed). Pearson Education M.U.A.
It’s written with clarity and has interesting examples. It uses a framwork from the preveously published “Exploring strategy” (2017). The framework separates analysis of “strategic position”, “strategic choices” and “strategy in action” – and therefore separates between various analytical approaches to strategy: environment-analysis, capability, stakeholder-analysis, competitive, diversifying, structure, systems and change. I find the book to be a clear and vivid introduction to the field of strategy including a showcase of classical and more recent strategic tools.
Mellahi, K., Frynas, J., Sun, P., & Siegel, D. (2016). A Review of the Nonmarket Strategy Literature: Toward a Multi-Theoretical Integration. Journal of Management,42(1), 143-173.
Reading outside your immediate research-focus can be both bewildering and very rewarding. My focus the past years has been on strategy in regards to public organisations. Certainly there are frequent references to strategy in the private sector – but actually diving into an article like this one, is both bewildering and rewarding.
Superficially, one might think non-market strategy and strategy in public agencies should be quite similar, since public agencies do not interact with markeds the same way as businesses. The illusion of similarity soon dissipates as you read about what non-market strategy is all about. I’ll return to that. Burrowing deeper, however, there are some possible bridges between the literature on non-market strategy in market-place organisations and public agencies. I’ll return to that as well.
First things first. The article delves into research on non-market strategy: especially CSR and CPA (corporate social responsibility and corporate political activity). It details how a selection of 214 articles was chosen and how they were analyzed. 163 of the papers were empirical and 51 were conceptual. Of the empirical papers, 153 were focused on the performance outcomes of CSR and 51 on CPA. There was, in other words, a large amount of research which the authors used as data for this article. The result is a plethora of details which at times is quite a challenge to follow. However: the authors supply an integrative framework which comes to assistance in ordering the huge amount of perspectives.
The article details which theoretical frameworks the underlying articles have used. The most common are Agency Theory, Institutional Theory, Resource-based view (RBV), Resource-dependence theory (RDT), Stakeholder Theory and a group of “Others”. The overview of the use of these theoretical perspectives alone is very helpful in gaining oversight over the academic field of non-market strategy. Then the authors also present an “integrative model of the nonmarket strategy-performance relationship”. Such models clarify and give the readers a mental image of how elements fit together – at least in this paper’s discussion.
A very
interesting chapter was Insights
From Related Non-Business Disciplines – where there are also possible
links to social contract and Habermasian theories as possible avenues forward.
Leaving the directly market-place related content
aside, there is still a lot to gain in this article on strategy for public
sector. I will certainly look closer into how theoretical perspectives are
applied in some of the references papers. Another perspective is the focus on how CPA and CSR may be complementary, the
discussion on mediating factors between CPA, CSR and performance and not least
the effect of contextual factors (legal, political, and social). All these dimensions are in differing ways
applicable also to public agencies
Therefore, for me this article was very helpful –
and it gives me a ton of new articles to look further into.
Study in progress 