Resources

Jarzabkowski, P., Seidl, D., & Balogun, J. (2022).
From germination to propagation: Two decades of strategy-as-practice research and potential future directions. Human Relations, 75(8), 1533-1559.
This paper analyses the development of SAP and distinguish three phases, each associated with different types of agenda work: Germination (agenda-setting), Blossoming (community work), and Harvesting (agenda-confirming work). Moreover, a possible a new Propagating phase that offers exciting potential to cross-pollinate within the SAP field and across other areas is discussed. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267221089473

Seidl, D., Ma, S., & Splitter, V. (2024)
What makes activities strategic: Toward a new framework for strategy‐as‐practice research. Strategic Management Journal, 45
This paper outlines four different views on what makes activities strategic. For each view it outlines the implications for the research process both in terms of types of research questions and in terms of its onto-epistemological positions. Together, the four views offer a framework for SAP research.

Kohtamäki, M., Whittington, R., Vaara, E., & Rabetino, R. (2022).
Making connections: Harnessing the diversity of strategy-as-practice research. International Journal of Management Reviews, 24(2), 210-232.
This review suggests four ‘crossing strategies’ for integrating SAP research: micro and macro, sociomaterial and discourse, critical and more mainstream, practice and process.
https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12274 

Whittington, R. (2006).
Completing the practice turn in strategy research. Organization Studies, 27(5), 613-634.
This paper argues that the practice turn in strategy research is incomplete in that researchers currently concentrate either on strategy activity at the intra-organizational level or on the aggregate effects of this activity at the extra-organizational level. The paper proposes a framework that integrates these two levels based on the three concepts of strategy praxis, strategy practices and strategy practitioners.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840606064101 

Balogun, J., Jacobs, C., Jarzabkowski, P., Mantere, S., & Vaara, E. (2013).
Placing strategy discourse in context: Sociomateriality, sensemaking, and power. Journal of Management Studies, 51(2), 175-201.
This paper reviews research on discursive aspects of strategy, focusing on six major bodies of discursive scholarship: post-structural, critical discourse analysis, narrative, rhetoric, conversation analysis, and metaphor.
https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12059 

Hardy, C., & Thomas, R. (2014).
Strategy, discourse and practice: The intensification of power. Journal of Management Studies, 51(2), 320-348.
This paper explores how power relations shape the constitution of strategy, identifying the mechanisms whereby discourse bears down on strategy through intensification practices, different forms of resistance, and the way in which strategy objects and subjects reproduce (or undermine) discourse.
https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12005 

McCabe, D. (2009).
Strategy-as-Power: Ambiguity, contradiction and the exercise of power in a UK building society. Organization, 17(2): 151-175.
This paper shows how power is exercised in ambiguous and contradictory ways that both supports and thwarts managerial endeavors.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508409338885 

Paroutis, S., & Heracleous, L. (2013).
Discourse revisited: Dimensions and employment of first-order strategy discourse during institutional adoption. Strategic Management Journal, 34(8), 935-956.
This paper shows that first-order strategy discourse – the group of statements about strategy employed by strategists – is characterized by certain institutionalized central themes and understandings that are both constraining as well as enabling. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2052

Vaara, E., & Fritsch, L. (2022).
Strategy as language and communication: Theoretical and methodological advances and avenues for the future in strategy process and practice research. Strategic Management Journal, 43(6), 1170-1181.
This paper takes stock of studies of the role of language and communication in strategic decision-making and strategy work. It is argued to not treat language merely as a window into other aspects of strategic phenomena but as a central means through which strategies are shaped and made sense of.
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3360 

Dameron, S., Lê, J. K., & LeBaron, C. (2015).
Materializing strategy and strategizing material: Why matter matters. British Journal of Management, 26(S1), S1-S12.
This paper argues materiality shapes strategy because of its affordances, i.e., that the materiality of an object favors, shapes or invites, and at the same time constrains, a set of specific uses.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12084 

Jarzabkowski, P., & Kaplan, S. (2015).
Strategy tools-in-use: A framework for understanding “technologies of rationality” in practice. Strategic Management Journal, 36(4), 537-558.
This paper conceptualizes strategy tools as tools-in-use and offers a framework for examining the ways that the affordances of strategy tools and the agency of strategy makers interact to shape how and when tools are selected and applied. The variety of outcomes that result, not just for organizations but also for the tools and the individuals who use them are highlighted. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2270 

Kaplan, S. (2011).
Strategy and PowerPoint: An inquiry into the epistemic culture and machinery of strategy making. Organization Science, 22(2), 320-346.
This paper deeper treats PowerPoint as a technology embedded in the discursive practices of strategic knowledge production and suggests that these practices make up the epistemic or knowledge culture of the organization. It is shown that the affordances of PowerPoint enable the difficult task of collaborating to negotiate meaning in an uncertain environment, creating spaces for discussion, making recombinations possible, allowing for adjustments as ideas evolved, and providing access to a wide range of actors.
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0531 

Knight, E., Paroutis, S., & Heracleous, L. (2018).
The power of PowerPoint: A visual perspective on meaning making in strategy. Strategic Management Journal, 39(3), 894-921.
This paper shows how how visuals help strategists broker divergent interpretations of a strategy and give rise to new understandings, especially when issues are politically sensitive or analytically complex.
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2727

Werle, F., & Seidl, D. (2015).
The layered materiality of strategizing: Epistemic objects and the interplay between material artefacts in the exploration of strategic topics. British Journal of Management, 26, S67-S89.
This paper conceptualizes strategic topics as epistemic objects that become instantiated in multiple material artefacts, i.e., partial objects, which not only represent the epistemic object but also energize and direct the exploration process. Based on this conceptualization, different types of objectual and non-objectual material artefacts are outlined and it shown how their interplay shapes the dynamics of the strategizing process.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12080 

Jalonen, K., Schildt, H., & Vaara, E. (2018).
Strategic concepts as micro-level tools in strategic sensemaking. Strategic Management Journal, 39(10), 2794-2826.
This paper shows how strategic concepts are used in meaning-making, and how such concepts may be mobilized for the legitimation of strategic change. Strategic concepts are argued to be as a missing micro-level component of the language-based view of strategic processes and practices.
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2924 

Kaplan, S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2013).
Temporal work in strategy making. Organization Science, 24(4), 965-995.
This paper develops a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action.
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0792 

Rouleau, L. (2005).
Micro‐practices of strategic sensemaking and sensegiving: How middle managers interpret and sell change every day. Journal of Management studies, 42(7), 1413-1441.
This paper explores sensemaking and sensegiving micro-practices by which middle managers interpret and sell strategic change. Middle managers contribute to renewing links with stakeholders, in particular clientele, by four micro-practices: translating the orientation, overcoding the strategy, disciplining the client, and justifying the change.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2005.00549.x 

Rouleau, L. & Balogun, J. (2011).
Middle managers, strategic sensemaking, and discursive competence. Journal of Management Studies, 48(5): 953-983.
This paper explores how middle managers contribute strategically to the development of an organization by examining how they enact the strategic roles allocated to them, with particular reference to strategic change. Two situated, but interlinked, discursive activities, ‘performing the conversation’ and ‘setting the scene’, are found to be critical to the accomplishment of middle manager sensemaking.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00941.x 

Seidl, D., & Werle, F. (2018).
Inter‐organizational sensemaking in the face of strategic meta‐problems: Requisite variety and dynamics of participation. Strategic Management Journal, 39(3), 830-858.
This paper focuses on inter-organizational collaboration that enable firms to pool the participants’ different perspectives and to grasp the problem at hand more comprehensively. It is shown how the selection of specific problem issues influences who joins or withdraws from the collaboration as well as a mechanism that explains dynamics of the sensemaking process over time is identified.
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2723 

Dameron, S., & Torset, C. (2014).
The discursive construction of strategists’ subjectivities: Towards a paradox lens on strategy. Journal of Management Studies, 51(2), 291-319.
This paper focuses on the question of what it means to be a strategist. It is suggested that that strategizing can be conceptualized as the art of balancing tensions and that multiple strategists’ subjectivities within a paradox lens on strategy may in fact co-exist. Four main tensions that emerge from strategists’ discourses on strategizing work: the social tension, the cognitive tension, the focus tension, and the time tension.
https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12072 

Dick, P., & Collings, D. G. (2014).
Discipline and punish? Strategy discourse, senior manager subjectivity and contradictory power effects. Human Relations, 67(12), 1513-1536.
This paper shows that strategy discourses provide senior managers with the authority to speak and enact strategy but, at one and the same time a strategy discourse renders this group highly visible and vulnerable.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726714525810

Laine, P. M., & Vaara, E. (2007).
Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering group. Human Relations, 60(1), 29-58.
This paper develops a discursive struggle approach to subjectivity. To understand the complex subjectification and empowering/disempowering effects of organizational strategy discourse, this approach focuses on organization-specific discourse mobilizations and various ways of resistance.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726707075279 

Mantere, S., & Whittington, R. (2021).
Becoming a strategist: The roles of strategy discourse and ontological security in managerial identity work. Strategic Organization, 19(4), 553-578.
This paper uncovers tactics through which managers mobilize the strategist identity: the self-measurement tactic, the self-construction tactic uses, and the self-actualization tactic. We find that strategy discourse can play both disciplinary and emancipatory roles, influenced by managers’ sense of ontological security.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127020908781  

Splitter, V., Jarzabkowski, P., & Seidl, D. (2022).
Middle managers’ struggle over their subject position in Open Strategy processes. Journal of Management Studies. forthcoming.
This paper examines middle managers’ struggle over their subject position as strategists in the context of participative strategy processes. It is shown how the wider inclusion of front-line employees in developing new strategy undermines the traditional subject position of middle managers.
https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12776