Selling the object of strategy:How frontline workers realize strategy through their daily work

This paper explores how frontline workers contribute to an organization’s realized strategy. Using a workplace studies approach, we analyse the work of museum tour guides as a salient example of workers engaged in frontline work. Our findings demonstrate the subtle and intricate nature of the embodied work of frontline workers as they ‘bring into being’ the strategic aims of an organization. We identified five elements as central to this process: (1) the situated physical context; (2) audience composition; (3) the moral order; (4) the talk, actions and gestures of the guide; and (5) the corresponding talk, actions and gestures of the audience. Drawing on these categories, we find frontline workers to demonstrate ‘interactional competence’: assessing and making use of the physical, spatial and material specifics of the context and those they are interacting with, and enlisting interactional resources to uphold a moral order that brings these others in as a working audience, encouraging them to respond in particular ways. Frontline workers thus skilfully combine language, material and bodily expressions in the flow of their work. Demonstrating these dynamics gives a more central role to material in the realization of strategy than previously recognized; demonstrates that ‘outsiders’ have an important part to play in realizing strategy; and highlights the importance of frontline workers and their skilled work in bringing strategy into being

The Lived Experience of Paradox:How Individuals Navigate Tensions during the Pandemic Crisis

This is a dialogue and part of an article series involving many authors. </p

Strategy-as-practice meets neo-institutional theory

Strategy-as-practice and neo-institutionalism offer alternative approaches to studying organizations. In this essay, we examine the foundational assumptions and methods of these perspectives, unveiling different ways in which they could complement each other. In particular, we elaborate three areas of overlap: a focus on what actors actually do, their shared cognitions, and the role of language in creating shared meanings. We show how the two perspectives can inform each other and offer significant learning to organization studies more broadly

Studying paradox as process and practice

This chapter develops a strong process and practice methodological approach to studying salience and latency in paradox. It assumes, first, that both paradoxes and responses to them are socially constructed within people’s moment-by- moment activities and practices. Second, that the experience of paradox as salient or latent is not inevitable but is constructed within these activities and practices. It develops three process- and practice-based indicators, language, emotion, and action, through which the construction of paradox as salient may be identified and studied empirically. It then looks at latent paradox, showing how the study of mundane everyday practices, and the juxtaposition of salience with non-salience across time and within different spaces, provide indicators of latent paradox. It extends existing paradox research by reasserting the need for embedded, qualitative, processual research designs that enable us to go beyond the study of paradox through response, cognition, and discourse

Two decades of revolutionizing strategy research: how strategy-as-practice illuminates the complex, dynamic and consequential ways of doing strategy

Strategy-as-practice (SAP) offers a practice-theoretical perspective on strategy, which is fundamentally different from mainstream strategic management research. This approach has proven especially fruitful in helping us better understand the microlevel processes and practices in strategy work and strategic change challenging many assumptions in mainstream studies. The Academy journals have played a pivotal role in advancing and disseminating SAP research. Therefore, it is now important to summarize and elaborate these contributions by presenting the cumulative insights of SAP as a field of management research. In this introduction, we focus on the key areas of contributions of this body of work, which include (1) identifying the varied and consequential roles and identities of strategic actors, (2) observing the embedded and evolving discursive and sociomaterial practices inherent to strategy work, and (3) challenging the origins, processes and dynamics of strategic change. We use these contributions to draw out opportunities for SAP research to further broaden the set of actors seen as strategists, move beyond the study of single organizations toward studying strategizing on large-scale complex problems, focus more on how issues emerge and become strategic, and recognize the key opportunities and risks in the use of AI and other new technologies in strategy

Intestinal metaproteomics reveals host-microbiota interactions in subjects at risk for Type 1 Diabetes

Dysbiosis of the gut microbiota has been linked to disease pathogenesis in type 1 diabetes, yet the functional consequences to the host of this dysbiosis are unknown. We investigated the functional interactions between the microbiota and the host associated with type 1 diabetes disease risk.We performed a cross-sectional analysis of stool samples from subjects with recent-onset type 1 diabetes ( = 33), islet autoantibody-positive subjects ( = 17), low-risk autoantibody-negative subjects ( = 29), and healthy subjects ( = 22). Metaproteomic analysis was used to identify gut- and pancreas-derived host and microbial proteins, and these data were integrated with sequencing-based microbiota profiling.Both human (host-derived) proteins and microbial-derived proteins could be used to differentiate new-onset and islet autoantibody-positive subjects from low-risk subjects. Significant alterations were identified in the prevalence of host proteins associated with exocrine pancreas output, inflammation, and mucosal function. Integrative analysis showed that microbial taxa associated with host proteins involved in maintaining function of the mucous barrier, microvilli adhesion, and exocrine pancreas were depleted in patients with new-onset type 1 diabetes.These data support that patients with type 1 diabetes have increased intestinal inflammation and decreased barrier function. They also confirmed that pancreatic exocrine dysfunction occurs in new-onset type 1 diabetes and show for the first time that this dysfunction is present in high-risk individuals before disease onset. The data identify a unique type 1 diabetes-associated signature in stool that may be useful as a means to monitor disease progression or response to therapies aimed at restoring a healthy microbiota

A Curated Debate

Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022.One of the raging debates in organization study concerns the use of “templates” in qualitative research. This curated debate brings together many of the players in that debate, who make statements of position relative to the issues involved and trade accusations and counter-accusations about statements they have made that in their view have been misinterpreted or misconstrued. Overall, it is quite a lively debate that reveals positions, points of tension and grounds for disagreement. Denny Gioia wrote the triggering essay that prompted other players to weigh in with their personal and professional views.Peer reviewe