Strategy as practice: Recursiveness, adaptation, and practices-in-use

In this article, a social theory framework is developed to explain the common themes of recursive and adaptive practice underpinning the existing strategic management literature. In practice, there is a coexistent tension between recursive and adaptive forms of strategic action that spans multiple levels from macro-institutional and competitive contexts to within-firm levels of analysis to individual cognition. This tension may be better understood by examining how management practices are used to put strategy into practice. Such practices span multiple levels of context and are adaptable to their circumstances of use, serving to highlight both general characteristics and localized idiosyncrasies of strategy as practice. The article develops the concept of management practices-in-use into a research agenda and nine broad research questions that may be used to investigate empirically strategy as practice

Practicing Capitals Across Fields: Extending Bourdieu to Study Inter-Field Dynamics

This essay extends a Bourdieusian perspective on the microfoundations of institutions. Drawing on this perspective, we argue that the recursive dynamics of institutions and action orient actors towards the maintenance of distinct and contradictory practices within, rather than bridging across, different fields. We corroborate our argument with an illustration of how corporate executives strategize within the tax field compared to the philanthropy field. Specifically, we show how actors are simultaneously oriented by different capitals towards apparently contradictory strategies. Our essay provides promising avenues for future research on the microfoundations of institutions, inter-field dynamics, and critical accounting and business ethics studies

Toward a Process Theory of Making Sustainability Strategies Legitimate in Action

We draw on a three-year qualitative study of the processual dynamics of implementing a sustainability strategy alongside an existing mainstream competitive strategy. We show that despite the legitimacy of the sustainability strategy at the organizational level, actors experience tensions with its implementation at the action level vis-à-vis the mainstream strategy, thus creating the potential for decoupling. Our findings show that working through these tensions on specific tasks, enables actors to legitimate the sustainability strategy in action and to co-enact it with the mainstream strategy within those tasks. Cumulatively, multiple instances of such co-enactment at the action level reinforce the organizational-level legitimacy of the sustainability strategy and its integration with the mainstream strategy. We draw these findings together into a dynamic process model that contributes to the literature on integration of dual strategies at the action and organizational levels as a process of legitimacy making

We have to do this and that? You must be joking: Constructing and responding to paradox through humour

This paper adopts a practice approach to paradox, examining the role of micro-practices in shaping constructions of and responses to paradox. Our approach is inductively motivated. During an ethnographic study of an organization implementing paradoxical goals we noticed a strong incidence of humor, joking and laughter. Examining this practice closely, we realized that humor was used to surface, bring attention to, and make communicable experience of paradox in the moment by drawing out some specific contradiction in their work. Humor thus allowed actors to socially construct paradox, as well as - in interaction with others – construct potential responses to the multiple small incidences of paradox in their everyday work. In doing so, humor cast the interactional dynamics that were integral in constructing two response paths: (i) ‘entrenching a response’, whereby an existing response was affirmed, thereby continuing on a particular response path, and (ii) ‘shifting a response’, whereby actors moved from one response to paradox to another, thereby altering how the team collectively responded to paradoxical issues. Drawing on these findings, we reconceptualize paradox as a characteristic of everyday life, which is constructed and responded to in the moment

Sociomateriality is 'the New Black': Accomplishing repurposing, reinscripting and repairing in context

This paper addresses the trend towards sociomateriality in the social sciences generally and management and organization studies specifically with a critique of two main approaches: affordances and scripts. We suggest that if sociomateriality is to be more than a fashion and become an enduring lens through which to understand social phenomena, it needs to go beyond its current preoccupation with the intentions encoded in the objects or materials themselves to examining activities as they are accomplished with objects in a multiplicity of contexts. To support our discussion of accomplishing activity in context, we examine the notions of repurposing and reinscripting objects inherent in the literature, to which we add a third concept of repairing. These 'three Rs' are advocated as a research agenda for sociomateriality in management studies and the wider social sciences

Making markets for uninsured risk: Protection Gap Entities (PGEs) as risk-processing organizations in society

Book synopsis: This volume provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of the latest management and organizational research related to risk, crisis, and emergency management. It is the first volume to present these separate, but related, disciplines together. Combined with a distinctly social and organizational science approach to the topics (as opposed to engineering or financial economics), the research presented here strengthens the intellectual foundations of the discipline while contributing to the development of the field. The Routledge Companion to Risk, Crisis and Emergency Management promises to be a definitive treatise of the discipline today, with contributions from several key academics from around the world. It will prove a valuable reference for students, researchers, and practitioners seeking a broad, integrative view of risk and crisis management

Exploring inter-organizational paradoxes: Methodological lessons from a study of a grand challenge

In this paper we outline a methodological framework for studying the inter-organizational aspects of paradoxes and specify this in relation to grand challenges. Grand challenges are large-scale, complex, enduring problems that affect large populations, have a strong social component, and appear intractable. Our methodological insights draw from our study of the insurance protection gap, a grand challenge that arises when economic losses from largescale disaster significantly exceed the insured loss, leading to economic and social hardship for the affected communities. We provide insights into collecting data to uncover the paradoxical elements inherent in grand challenges and then propose three analytical techniques for studying inter-organizational paradoxes: zooming in and out, tracking problematization, and tracking boundaries and boundary organizations. These techniques can be used to identify and follow how contradictions and interdependences emerge and dynamically persist within inter-organizational interactions and how these shape and are shaped by the unfolding dynamics of the grand challenge. Our techniques and associated research design help advance paradox theorizing by moving it to the inter-organizational and systemic level. This paper also illustrates paradox as a powerful lens through which to further our understanding of grand challenges

Changing competitive dynamics in the reinsurance industry: implications of changes in buyer behavior for reinsurance executives

This paper explores how reinsurers can meet the rapid changes occurring in their industry, arising from primary industry consolidation, and changes in cedent (insurance firm) buyer behavior toward bundled reinsurance products and alternative sources of capital. The paper makes the following suggestions for reinsurers. Reinsures need to be proactive in responding to changing patterns of premium volume and develop partnerships with global clients. Smaller reinsurers, in particular, will need to look to develop competitive niches and joint-ventures in order to be significant to these large cedents. Furthermore, reinsures need to continue investing in analytical expertise and resources in order to address the complex needs of their clients. Finally, reinsurers will be increasingly required to engage in alternative risk transfer products, and there will be early-mover advantages in doing so meaningfull

Trading risks: The value of relationships, models and face-to-face interaction in the global reinsurance market

Over the past 20 years, the reinsurance industry has experienced three profound forces for change. First, technological change has improved information distribution and strengthened connections between global markets. Second, regulatory emphasis on global equivalence in trading practices has generated pressure for convergence across different marketplaces. Third, the widespread acceptance of vendor property catastrophe models has led to more standardised approaches to the evaluation of reinsurance risks, levelling the playing field for decision-making on at least some classes of business. These changes have intensified competition between reinsurance markets. Reinsurance trading centres in remote geographic locations, such as Bermuda, where it is more difficult to transact business face-to-face, have been able to write risk via electronic communications and now have very significant positions in the global reinsurance market. Simultaneously, Lloyd’s of London, one of the original reinsurance markets that is still very much based on the face-to-face approach, has demonstrated its capability to weather financial shocks and downturns and remains an important player in global reinsurance

The social practice of co-evolving strategy and structure to realize mandated radical change

Our paper shows how actions by senior, middle and frontline managers co-evolve strategy and structure in order to realize a mandated radical change. Alignment between strategy and structure has been considered critical since Chandler’s (1962) study showing that a divisional structure enabled firms with a diversification strategy to dominate the competitive environment. Radical change, a rapid and simultaneous, discontinuous shift in the firm’s strategic orientation, such as its products, markets, and ways of competing, and in its associated organizational activities (Tushman & Romanelli 1985), is a particularly critical point in the alignment of strategy and structure. It is a time when the two move together rapidly and simultaneously (Mintzberg, 1990), disrupting the existing strategy-structure alignment (e.g. Amis et al, 2004; Tushman & Romanelli, 1985), with potentially damaging implications for organizational performance (Gulati & Puranam, 2009). Yet few studies discuss how strategy and structure change together over time (Mintzberg, 1990). Rather, most studies examine the unintended consequences of radical change, such as lags between strategic and structural change (Amburgey & Dacin, 1994; Greenwood & Hinings, 1988), oscillations of strategy and structure (Amis et al, 2004; Greenwood & Hinings, 1993), and structural reversals of strategic change (Mantere et al, 2012)