Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice -...

Cambridge Handbook ofStrategy as Practice

Now in its second edition, this extended andthoroughly updated handbook introduces researchersand students to the growing range of theoretical andmethodological perspectives being developed in thevibrant field of strategy as practice. With new authorsand additional chapters, it shows how the strategy-as-practice approach in strategic management movesaway from disembodied and asocial studies of firmassets, technologies and practices to explore andexplain the contribution that strategizing makes topeople working at all levels of an organization. Itbreaks down many of the traditional paradigmaticbarriers in strategy to investigate who the strategistsare, what they do, how they do it and what theconsequences or outcomes of their actions are. Thisessential work summarizes recent developments inthe field while presenting a clear agenda for futureresearch.

DAMON GOLSORKHI is Associate Professor ofStrategic Management at Grenoble Ecole deManagement, France.

LINDA ROULEAU is Professor in the Department ofManagement at HEC Montréal.

DAVID SEIDL is Professor of Organization andManagement at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

EERO VAARA is Professor of Organization andManagement at Aalto University School of Businessin Helsinki, Finland, Permanent Visiting Professor atEMLYON Business School, France andDistinguished Visiting Scholar at LancasterUniversity, UK.

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Cambridge University Press978-1-107-07312-8 - Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice: Second EditionEdited By Damon Golsorkhi, Linda Rouleau, David Seidl and Eero VaaraFrontmatterMore information

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CambridgeHandbook ofStrategy asPracticeSecond Edition

Edited by

DAMON GOLSORKHI

LINDA ROULEAU

DAVID SEIDL

EERO VAARA






University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit ofeducation, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

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First published 2010Second edition 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication dataCambridge handbook of strategy as practice / edited by Damon Golsorkhi, LindaRouleau, David Seidl, Eero Vaara. – Second edition.

pages cmIncludes index.ISBN 978-1-107-07312-8 (Hardback)1. Strategic planning–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Golsorkhi, Damon.HD30.28.C348 2015658.40012–dc23 2014050243

ISBN 978-1-107-07312-8 Hardback

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Contents

List of figures ixList of tables xList of boxes xiList of contributors xiiPreface to the Second Edition xxv

Introduction: what is strategy as practice? 1Damon Golsorkhi, Linda Rouleau,David Seidl and Eero Vaara

PART I ONTOLOGICAL ANDEPISTEMOLOGICALQUESTIONS

1 Practice in research: phenomenon,perspective and philosophy 33Wanda J. Orlikowski

2 Epistemological alternatives for researchingstrategy as practice: building and dwellingworldviews 44Robert Chia and Andreas Rasche

3 Making strategy: meta-theoretical insightsfrom Heideggerian phenomenology 58Haridimos Tsoukas

4 Constructivist paradigms: implications forstrategy-as-practice research 78Simon Grand, Widar von Arx andJohannes Rüegg-Stürm

5 Constructing contribution instrategy-as-practice research 95Katharina Dittrich, KarenGolden-Biddle, Elana Feldman andKaren Locke

6 The ongoing challenge of developingcumulative knowledge about strategyas practice 111Ann Langley

v






7 Practical relevance of practice-basedresearch on strategy 128Violetta Splitter and David Seidl

PART II THEORETICAL RESOURCES:SOCIAL THEORY

8 Giddens, structuration theory and strategy aspractice 145Richard Whittington

9 An activity theory approach to strategyas practice 165Paula Jarzabkowski and Carola Wolf

10 A Bourdieusian perspective onstrategizing 184Marie-Léandre Gomez

11 An economies-of-worth perspective onstrategy as practice: justification, valuationand critique in the practice of strategy 199Jean-Pascal Gond, Bernard Leca andCharlotte Cloutier

12 A Wittgensteinian perspective onstrategizing 220Saku Mantere

13 A Foucauldian perspective on strategicpractice: strategy as the art of (un)folding 234Florence Allard-Poesi

14 A narrative approach to strategy as practice:strategy-making from texts and narratives 249Valérie-Inès de La Ville and EléonoreMounoud

15 Actor–network theory and strategy aspractice 265Christopher S. Chapman, Wai Fong Chuaand Habib Mahama

PART III THEORETICAL RESOURCES:ORGANIZATION ANDMANAGEMENT THEORIES

16 An institutional perspective on strategyas practice 283Michael Smets, Royston Greenwood and MichaelLounsbury

vi Contents






17 Relating strategy as practice to the resource-basedview, capabilities perspectives and themicro-foundations approach 301Patrick Regnér

18 Theory of routine dynamics and connections tostrategy as practice 317Martha S. Feldman

19 Identity work as a strategic practice 331David Oliver

20 Sensemaking in strategy as practice: aphenomenon or a perspective? 345Joep Cornelissen and Henri Schildt

21 The communicative constitution ofstrategy-making: exploring fleeting momentsof strategy 365François Cooren, Nicolas Bencherki, MathieuChaput and Consuelo Vásquez

22 Analytical frames for studying power instrategy as practice and beyond 389Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger

23 A critical perspective on strategy aspractice 405Martin Blom and Mats Alvesson

PART IV METHODOLOGICALRESOURCES

24 Using ethnography in strategy-as-practiceresearch 431Ann L. Cunliffe

25 Researching strategists and their identity inpractice: building ‘close-with’relationships 447Julia Balogun, Nic Beech and Phyl Johnson

26 Studying strategizing through biographicalmethods: narratives of practices and lifetrajectories of practitioners 462Linda Rouleau

27 Researching everyday practice: theethnomethodological contribution 477Dalvir Samra-Fredericks

Contents vii






28 Critical discourse analysis as methodology instrategy-as-practice research 491Eero Vaara

29 Studying strategy as practice through historicalmethods 506Mona Ericson, Leif Melin and Andrew Popp

30 Quantitative methods in strategy-as-practiceresearch 520Tomi Laamanen, Emmanuelle Reuter, MarkusSchimmer, Florian Ueberbacher and XenaWelch Guerra

PART V SUBSTANTIVE TOPIC AREAS

31 Strategic planning as practice 547Ann Langley and Maria Lusiani

32 Meetings and workshops as strategypractices 564David Seidl and Stéphane Guérard

33 The role of materiality in the practice ofstrategy 582Jane Lê and Paul Spee

34 Strategy-as-practice research on middle managers’strategy work 598Linda Rouleau, Julia Balogun and Steven W. Floyd

35 Participation in strategy work 616Pikka-Maaria Laine and Eero Vaara

36 The role of emotions in strategizing 632Ethel Brundin and Feng Liu

Index 647

viii Contents






Figures

8.1 Forms of interaction in structurationtheory 148

8.2 A structurationist view on technology-in-practice 154

8.3 A structurationist view on organizationalpractices in a student hall 155

9.1 An activity framework for studying strategy-as-practice questions 170

17.1 An exploded map of strategicmanagement 304

25.1 Practitioners and their praxis: illustratingthe impact of identity 454

26.1 Practices of middle managers inorganizational restructuring (underlyingtypes of knowledge) 469

28.1 Critical discourse analysis asabduction 500

30.1 Word counts as differing attentionallocations, stratified by companies 527

30.2 Optimal matching analysis for sequenceanalysis 531

30.3 Event history analysis for sequenceanalysis 533

30.4 Average abnormal returns of strategic planpresentations 533

30.5 News analytics framework for studyingorganizational behaviour and practices underconsideration of the industry level 537

31.1 A framework for considering strategicplanning as a social practice 549

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Tables

2.1 Contrasting a building and a dwellingepistemology 49

3.1 Action, intentionality and strategy-making:a Heideggerian framework 71

5.1 Opportunities for contribution instrategy-as-practice research 102

7.1 Overview of practice-basedapproaches 132

8.1 Giddens in the study of strategypractice 157

9.1 Exemplars of studying organizationalpractices through an activity theorylens 168

11.1 Boltanski’s four regimes of action 20211.2 Summary description of the common

worlds 20411.3 Consolidated overview of eight ‘worlds’

according to the economies-of-worthframework 205

11.4 Comparison of assumptions betweeninstitutional logics and the economies-of-worth frameworks 208

14.1 Strategy-making from texts andnarratives 259

17.1 Research at the intersection betweenstrategy-as-practice and resource-basedcapabilities and micro-foundationsresearch 307

19.1 Three perspectives on the role of identity forstrategy 334

20.1 Selected studies bridging the strategy-as-practice approach and sensemaking 351

21.1 Key aspects of a CCO perspective onstrategy-making 368

21.2 How a CCO perspective responds toVaara and Whittington’s (2012)research agenda 377

22.1 Summary of analytical framework to studypower and strategy, strategizing and makingthings strategic 392

23.1 A critical research agenda 41624.1 Three problematics 44026.1 Narratives of practices according to

Balogun, Huff and Johnson’s (2003)criteria 467

32.1 The various roles of meetings 56832.2 The effectiveness of workshop designs

in ten organizations 57433.1 Overview of empirical approaches to

materiality 58534.1 Strategy-as-practice research on middle

managers: a sensemaking lens 60134.2 Strategy-as-practice research on middle

managers: a discursive lens 60234.3 Strategy-as-practice research on middle

managers: a political lens 60434.4 Strategy-as-practice research on middle

managers: an institutional lens 60536.1 Core articles on strategizing and

emotion 633

x






Boxes

25.1 Practitioners and their praxis:illustrating the impact of identity 450

30.1 Mechanics explained: computer-aidedtext analysis 526

30.2 Mechanics explained: networkanalysis 529

30.3 Mechanics explained: optimalmatching analysis 530

30.4 Mechanics explained: event historyanalysis 532

30.5 Mechanices explained: event studymethodology 534

30.6 How to source and study corporate newsstreams as a data source 536

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Contributors

Florence Allard-Poesi is Professor of StrategicManagement and Organizational Theory anddirector of the Institut de Recherche en Gestion atthe University Paris–East. Her research focusesprincipally on sensemaking in organizations andthe role that discursive practices play in thiscontext. She also works on the methodological andepistemological problems that these issues present.Her work has been published notably inOrganization, @grh, Management International,M@n@gement and Economies et Sociétés.

Mats Alvesson is Professor of BusinessAdministration at the University of Lund, Sweden,Cass Business School, City University, London,and at University of Queensland Business School,Australia. His research interests include criticaltheory, gender, power, the management ofprofessional service (knowledge-intensive)organizations, leadership, identity, organizationalimage, organizational culture and symbolism,qualitative methods and the philosophy of science.Recent books include The Triumph of Emptiness(2013), Qualitative Research and TheoryDevelopment (2011, with Dan Kärreman),Constructing Research Questions (2013, withJörgen Sandberg), Interpreting Interviews (2011),Metaphors We Lead By. UnderstandingLeadership in the Real World (2011, edited withAndré Spicer), Oxford Handbook of CriticalManagement Studies (2011, edited with ToddBridgman and Hugh Willmott), UnderstandingGender and Organizations (2009, second edition,with Yvonne Billing) and Reflexive Methodology(2009, second edition, with Kaj Skoldberg).

Widar von Arx is Professor of BusinessAdministration at the Lucerne University ofApplied Sciences and Arts, where he leads a

research team on mobility and transportation. Hisresearch interests include organizational change,leadership and innovation in complexorganizations. He works with theoreticalperspectives such as convention theory, socialconstructivism and other practice theories toexplore his ethnographic data on managerialactions and interactions in organizations. Inaddition, he is engaged in many applied researchprojects specifically with public transportcompanies, on issues such as new servicedevelopment, process management and strategy.

Julia Balogun is Associate Dean (Research) andProfessor of Strategic Management at theUniversity of Bath School of Management. Herresearch focuses on strategy as practice with aparticular concern for strategic change andrenewal, predominantly within large maturecorporations. She is particularly interested in howstrategists accomplish their work through political,cultural, cognitive and discursive processes andpractices. She has published widely in the area ofstrategy and strategic change in journals such asthe Academy of Management Journal,Organization Studies, the Journal of InternationalBusiness Studies and the Journal of ManagementStudies. Her book Exploring Strategic Change(2013, with Veronica Hope-Hailey) is in its fourthedition.

Nic Beech is Vice-Principal for Governance,Planning and Policy at the University of StAndrews and Chair of the British Academy ofManagement. His research interests are inmanagement practice, change and the constructionof identity, particularly in music and the creativeindustries and in health services. He is a fellow ofthe Royal Society of Arts, the British Academy of

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Management, the Chartered Institute of Personneland Development and the Academy of SocialSciences. His publications include the followingwith Cambridge University Press: ManagingCreativity: Exploring the Paradox (2010, withBarbara Townley), Managing Change: Enquiryand Action (2012, with Robert MacIntosh) andOrganising Music: Theory, Practice, Performance(2015, with Charlotte Gilmore).

Nicolas Bencherki is an Assistant Professor ofCommunication at the University at Albany, StateUniversity of New York. His current researchfocuses on the contribution of the philosophy ofindividuation and of possession to organizationalcommunication’s understanding of the constitutionand action of organizations, and to its conceptionof themes such as membership, strategy or ethics.His theoretical investigations are informed byethnographic fieldworks among community andnonprofit organizations.

Martin Blom is a Senior Lecturer in StrategicManagement at Lund University School ofEconomics and Management, Department ofBusiness Administration. His research interestscover topics such as strategy, corporate governanceand leadership/followership. His more recentpublications include ‘Leadership on demand:followers as initiators and inhibitors of managerialleadership’ (Scandinavian Journal ofManagement, 2014, with Mats Alvesson);‘Strategy consultants doing strategy: how statusand visibility affect strategizing’ (African Journalof Business Management, 2013, with MikaelLundgren); and ‘Corporate governance’ (with JaanGrünberg, in Management: An AdvancedIntroduction, 2013, edited by Lars Strannegård andAlexander Styhre).

Ethel Brundin is Professor in Entrepreneurshipand Business Development at JönköpingInternational Business School, Sweden. She isaffiliated with the Centre for Family Enterprise andOwnership, which is ranked number one in Europefor family business research and number four in theworld. She is an active research member of theEuropean chapter of STEP (SuccessfulTransgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices – a

worldwide research project. She is a PermanentVisiting Professor at the Witten HerdeckeUniversity in Germany and Extra OrdinaryProfessor at the University of the Western Cape,South Africa. The focus of her research interestis micro-processes, including emotions,entrepreneurship and strategic leadership – oftenin combination. She has published in leadinginternational journals and edited books aboutemotions and strategizing among strategicleaders and entrepreneurs as well as aboutentrepreneurship in the emergent market of SouthAfrica.

Chris S. Chapman is Professor of ManagementAccounting at Copenhagen Business School. He iseditor-in-chief of Accounting, Organizations andSociety. His research has focused on the ways inwhich people work to make accounting relevant tooperational decision-making in a variety ofcontexts, including restaurants and professionalservice firms, and more recently on the design ofcost systems for health care providers.

Mathieu Chaput teaches at the Department ofCommunication of the Université de Montréal,where he earned his PhD in 2012. His researchcovers the communicative constitution oforganizations, the analysis of rhetoric and the studyof interactions.

Robert Chia is Research Professor ofManagement at the Adam Smith Business School,University of Glasgow. He received his PhD inorganizational analysis from Lancaster University.He has published extensively in the topinternational management journals and is theauthor/editor of five books. His latest booksinclude Strategy without Design: The SilentEfficacy of Indirect Action (2009, with Robin Holt,Cambridge University Press) and Philosophy andOrganization Theory (2011, edited with HaridimosTsoukas). His research interests include processthinking in organization theory; strategy practices;east–west philosophies; and managerial wisdom.Prior to entering academia Robert worked forseventeen years in shipbuilding, aircraftengineering, human resource management andmanufacturing management.

List of contributors xiii






Wai Fong Chua is Pro-Vice-Chancellor(Students) at the University of New South Wales,Sydney. She is an editor of Accounting,Organizations and Society and sits on the editorialboards of a range of international journals. Herresearch interests include the operation ofaccounting inscriptions in organizational arenas,the interactions between accounting and affect andthe historical professionalization ofaccounting work.

Stewart Clegg’s career has been spent mostly inAustralia, from where he now travels frequently toEurope, where he is a Visiting Professor at EM-Lyon Business School and the Nova School ofBusiness and Economics in Lisbon, and StrategicResearch Advisor at Newcastle UniversityBusiness School, in the United Kingdom. Widelyacknowledged as one of the most significantcontemporary theorists of power relations in socialscience generally, he is also a well-knowncontributor to organization studies, in which histheoretical interests in power connect with manysubstantive issues. The author and editor of a largenumber of books and hundreds of journal articles,as well as being active in many other fields, he isProfessor and Director of the Centre forManagement and Organisation Studies at theUniversity of Technology, Sydney, which recentlyawarded him a D.Litt. for a thesis entitled ‘Works/words of power’.

Charlotte Cloutier is currently AssistantProfessor of Strategy at HEC Montréal, thebusiness school of the Université de Montréal. Herresearch focuses on understanding strategyprocesses as they unfold in pluralisticorganizations (nonprofit organizations, tradeassociations, hospitals, universities, governmentministries or agencies, etc.), notably from astrategy-as-practice perspective.

François Cooren is a Professor at the Universitéde Montréal, where he is the Chair of theDepartment of Communication. His researchfocuses on organizational communication,language and social interaction, as well ascommunication theory. He is the author of threebooks – The Organizing Property of

Communication (2000), Action and Agency inDialogue: Passion, Incarnation, andVentriloquism (2010) and OrganizationalDiscourse: Communication and Constitution(2015) – and has also edited five volumes. He isalso the author of close to fifty articles, published,for the most part, in international peer-reviewedjournals, as well as more than twenty bookchapters. In 2010–2011 he was the President of theInternational Communication Association, andwas elected a fellow of this association in 2013. Heis also the current President of the InternationalAssociation for Dialogue Analysis (2012–2015).

Joep Cornelissen is Professor of CorporateCommunication and Organization Theory andAssociate Dean for Research at the Faculty ofEconomics and Business Administration, VUUniversity Amsterdam. The main focus of hisresearch is the role of communication andsensemaking in processes of innovation,entrepreneurship and change, but he also has aninterest in questions of reasoning and theorydevelopment in organization theory. His papershave been published in the Academy ofManagement Review, Journal of ManagementStudies, Organization Science and OrganizationStudies, and he has written a general text oncorporate communication – CorporateCommunication: A Guide to Theory and Practice(2014) – that is now in its fourth edition. He is aCouncil member of the Society for theAdvancement of Management Studies and a formergeneral editor of the Journal of ManagementStudies (2006–2012), and he serves on the editorialboards of the Academy of Management Journal,Journal of Management, Journal of ManagementStudies and Organization Studies.

Ann L. Cunliffe is Professor of OrganisationStudies at the School of Management of theUniversity of Bradford, United Kingdom, whereshe has recently been awarded a FiftiethAnniversary Professorial Chair. Her currentresearch lies at the intersection of organizationalstudies, philosophy and communications, andfocuses on examining the relationship betweenlanguage, conversation and responsive and ethicalways of managing organizations. Other interests

xiv List of contributors






include leadership, selfhood, embodiedsensemaking, reflexivity and expanding the reachand rigour of qualitative research.

Katharina Dittrich is a postdoctoral fellow at theInstitute of Business Administration at theUniversity of Zurich. In her PhD studies shefocused on the accomplishment and change oforganizational routines and practices from apractice-theoretical perspective. She carried out aone-year ethnographic study at a start-up companyin the pharmaceutical industry, observinginteractions at the board, management andemployee levels. Her working paper on the role ofmeetings in the strategy process has received the‘Best Student Paper’ award of the SAP InterestGroup at the 2011 Academy of Managementmeeting. In her postdoctoral studies, sheinvestigates how organizational routines interactand how they work together as an ecology ofinterdependent patterns of action.

Mona Ericson is Professor of Strategy andOrganization at Jönköping International BusinessSchool. She received her doctoral degree from theStockholm School of Economics, where she alsoearned an associated professorship. Her principalresearch interests are in strategy practice andchange, with a focus on human activity and apolyphony of voices. Mona is the author of sevenmonographs. She has also published in academicjournals such as the Human Resource DevelopmentQuarterly, International Journal of QualitativeMethods, Management Decision and ScandinavianJournal of Management. Her most recentpublication is ‘On the dynamics of fluidity andopen-endedness of strategy process toward astrategy-as-practicing conceptualization’(Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2014).

Elana Feldman is a PhD candidate inorganizational behaviour at the Boston UniversitySchool of Management. Her primary researchinterests include temporality and relationships atwork. She has also published co-authored articlesand book chapters in the areas of careers and socialchange in organizations. She helped found andserves on the Steering Committee for the PositiveRelationships at Work Microcommunity.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts from BrownUniversity, Providence, Rhode Island.

Martha S. Feldman (Stanford University PhD,1983) is the Johnson Chair for Civic Governanceand Public Management and Professor of SocialEcology, Business, Political Science andSociology at the University of California, Irvine.Her current research on organizational routinesexplores the role of performance and agency increating, maintaining and altering thesefundamental organizational phenomena. She is asenior editor for Organization Science and serveson the editorial boards of several managementjournals. She received the Administrative ScienceQuarterly’s 2009 award for ‘ScholarlyContribution’ and the 2011 Academy ofManagement ‘Practice Scholarship’ award. In2014 she received an honorary doctorate ineconomics from St. Gallen University BusinessSchool, Switzerland, and was listed by ThomsonReuters as a highly cited author.

Steven W. Floyd is the Isenberg Professor ofInnovation and Entrepreneurship at the IsenbergSchool of Management at the University ofMassachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses onthe strategy development process, and much of ittakes a middle management perspective on howstrategy forms. Recent papers focus on groupinfluence activities and networks in strategicinitiatives and the ritualized practices associatedwith deliberate strategy-making. His co-authoredresearch has won the Academy of Management’s‘Sumantra Ghoshal Research and Practice’ awardand the ‘Best Conference Paper’ prize of theStrategic Management Society. He is a formergeneral editor of the Journal of ManagementStudies. Currently he serves on the editorial boardof the Academy of Management Journal and as anassociate editor of the Strategic ManagementJournal.

Karen Golden-Biddle is the Questrom Professorin Management at Boston University’s School ofManagement. Working in the interdependentarenas of large-scale organizational change andtheorizing in research, she has a keen interest in thecultural and relational micro-processes constituting

List of contributors xv






and motivating active, engaged change effortsthat enrich human lives at work and in society.She has received the Douglas McGregor Awardand the Academy of Management’s RobertMcDonald Award for the Advancement ofOrganizational Research Methodology. Her bookComposing Qualitative Research (2007, withKaren Locke) is in its second edition and hasbeen widely used in doctoral programmes acrossthe world.

Damon Golsorkhi is Associate Professor ofStrategy and Innovation at Grenoble Ecole deManagement, France. His research is at thecrossroad of sociology and management, and hefocuses on strategy as practice, power andresistance, and social change. He has published inacademic journals such as Organization,M@n@gement and Revue Française de Gestion.He has also edited several books, including the firstFrench book on strategy as practice (La fabriquede la stratégie, 2006) and Rethinking Power inOrganizations, Institutions, and Markets (2012,with David Courpasson and Jeff Sallaz).

Marie-Léandre Gomez is Associate Professor ofManagement Control at ESSEC Business School,Cergy-Pontoise, France. Her current researchtopics include strategizing, creativity, learning andpower in organizations, with a practice-basedapproach and a process perspective. She isparticularly interested in the role of performanceevaluation tools for professional organizations. Shehas recently conducted empirical fieldwork ingrand restaurants and hospitals.

Jean-Pascal Gond is Professor of CorporateSocial Responsibility at Cass Business School,City University, London. His research mobilizesorganization theory and economic sociology toinvestigate corporate social responsibility. Hisresearch in economic sociology is concerned withthe influence of theory on managerial practice(performativity), organizational approaches tojustification and valuation, and the governance ofself-regulation. He has published in leadingacademic journals, such as Business and Society,Economy and Society, Journal of ManagementStudies, Organization Science and Organization

Studies, and French journals such as FinanceContrôle Stratégie.

Simon Grand is a management researcher,knowledge entrepreneur and strategy designer. Heis Professor of Strategic Management and founderand academic director of the RISE ManagementInnovation Lab at the University of St. Gallen,Switzerland (www.rise.ch), research fellow at theZurich University of the Arts and a member of thesupervisory board of several companies. In hisresearch, he examines the interplay betweenroutine dynamics and strategy processes, and inparticular their managerial enactment, with anempirical focus on entrepreneurial companies andtechnology corporations in various industrycontexts. He also works and publishes on thepractice of executive management and corporategovernance, as well as on their foundation inmanagement and organization theory.

Royston Greenwood is the Telus Professor ofStrategic Management in the School of Business,University of Alberta, and a Visiting Professor atthe University of Edinburgh. He is a fellow of theAcademy of Management and a former Chair ofthe Academy’s Organization and ManagementTheory Division. His research interests focus oninstitutional and organizational change, thoughrecently he has begun to explore the institutionalfoundations of corporate fraud. He has twice wonthe ‘Best Paper’ award from the Academy ofManagement Journal, and has also received the‘Scholarly Contribution’ award from theAdministrative Science Quarterly. He also receivedthe ‘Greif Research Impact’ award from theEntrepreneurship Division and the ‘DistinguishedScholar Award’ from the Organization andManagement Theory Division of the Academy.

Stéphane Guérard is Assistant Professor(Oberassistent) at the University of Zurich. Withan emphasis on processual and qualitative researchapproaches, his research focuses on understandinghow practices and framing activities shapeinstitutions, technology adoption, meetings andstrategy. He has published, among others, inOrganization Studies, the International Journalof Management Reviews and M@n@gement.

xvi List of contributors






For several years he has been teaching coursesentitled ‘The practice of strategy’ and ‘Designingeffective organizations’.

Paula Jarzabkowski is a Professor of StrategicManagement at Cass Business School, CityUniversity, London. Her research takes a practicetheory approach to studying strategizing inpluralistic contexts, such as regulated firms, third-sector organizations and financial services,particularly insurance and reinsurance. She isexperienced in using and extending ethnographicresearch methods in her work. Her research onthese topics and using these methods has beenpublished widely in the leading journals,and she also published the first researchmonograph on strategy as practice, entitledStrategy-as-Practice: An Activity-Based Approach,in 2005.

Phyl Johnson is a psychologist and a VisitingProfessor of Executive Education at StrathclydeBusiness School in Scotland. She is also the SeniorPartner in the Strategy Explorers consulting firm.She works as an executive coach and specializes insupporting senior executives through strategicchange. In her consulting role, she has worked in awide range corporations in Europe. She has heldfaculty positions at Cranfield School ofManagement, England, and Strathclyde BusinessSchool, where her research interests focused on thepsychology of the strategist.

Martin Kornberger received his PhD inphilosophy from the University of Vienna in 2002,followed by a decade at the University ofTechnology, Sydney, where he worked last asAssociate Professor for Design and Managementand Research Director of the Australiangovernment’s Creative Industry Innovation Centre.Currently he works as Professor for Strategy andOrganization at Copenhagen Business School. Heis also a Professorial Fellow at the University ofEdinburgh Business School and a VisitingResearcher at the WU Vienna University ofEconomics and Business.

Tomi Laamanen is Chaired Professor of StrategicManagement, Director of the Institute of

Management, and Director of the PhD Program ofStrategy and Management of the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. He holds two D.Sc. degrees(in strategy and finance). His research focuses onstrategic management, with a special emphasis onstrategy process, mergers and acquisitions,capability dynamics and management’s cognition.His work has appeared in European and NorthAmerican journals, including the StrategicManagement Journal, Journal of Management,Journal of Management Studies, Research Policy,Long Range Planning and Harvard BusinessReview. He is associate editor of the StrategicManagement Journal and a member of theeditorial review boards of the Academy ofManagement Journal, Academy of ManagementDiscovery and Journal of Management. In additionto teaching and research, he has actively workedwith a number of firms as chairman, member of theboard or strategy consultant.

Pikka-Maaria Laine works as an AssociateProfessor of Management at the University ofLapland, Finland. She also holds the position ofAdjunct Professor of Strategic Management at theUniversity of Eastern Finland. She is interested instrategy work, especially its participative anddialogical aspects. In addition to her universityposition she also works as a facilitator in dialogicalstrategy work. Her research interests revolvearound strategy-making, subjectivities, power andresistance, and she has published in academicjournals. She has acted as a leading member of thestrategy-as-practice standing working group at theEuropean Group for Organizational Studies, and asa board member of the Finnish StrategicManagement Society.

Ann Langley is Professor of Management andResearch Chair in Strategic Management inPluralistic Settings at HEC Montréal. Her researchfocuses on strategic change, leadership, identityand the use of management tools in complexorganizations, with an emphasis on processual andqualitative research approaches. She has publishedover seventy articles and six books She is co-editorof Strategic Organization and series editor, withHaridimos Tsoukas, of ‘Perspectives on Process

List of contributors xvii






Organization Studies’, published by OxfordUniversity Press.

Jane Lê is a Senior Lecturer in Work andOrganisational Studies at the University of Sydney.Her research centres on organizational practicesand processes in complex, dynamic and pluralisticorganizations. She is particularly interested insocial processes such as conflict, coordination andinformation-sharing, and has a passion forqualitative research and qualitative researchmethods. She received her PhD from AstonBusiness School, Birmingham. She has publishedin journals such as Organization Science, StrategicOrganization and the International Journal ofHuman Resource Management.

Bernard Leca is Professor of ManagementControl at ESSEC Business School, Cergy-Pontoise. His main research focuses on the wayorganizations or individuals can initiate andimplement institutional change, in particularthrough institutional work. He has published inacademic journals such as Annals of the Academyof Management, Organization Studies,Organization and M@n@gement.

Feng Liu is Assistant Professor of Strategy atWarwick Business School, University ofWarwick, United Kingdom. Her researchinterests focus on top management team andboard team strategizing activities and emotionin organizations. Her recent publications include‘Emotional dynamics and strategizing processes:a study of strategic conversations in top teammeetings’ (with Sally Maitlis, Journal ofManagement Studies, 2014).

Karen Locke is W. Brooks George Professor inthe School of Business Administration at theCollege of William and Mary, Williamsburg,Virginia. She joined the faculty there in 1989 afterearning her PhD in organizational behaviour fromCase Western Reserve University, Cleveland. Shefocuses on developing a sociology of knowledge inorganizational studies and on the use of qualitativeresearch for the investigation of organizationalphenomena. Her work appears in journals such astheAcademy of Management Journal, OrganizationScience, Journal of Organizational Behavior,

Journal of Management Inquiry, OrganizationalResearch Methods and Studies in Organization,Culture and Society. In addition, she has authoredGrounded Theory in Management Research (2001)and co-authored Composing Qualitative Research(with Karen Golden-Biddle, second edition, 2007).Her current work continues her interest in theprocesses of qualitative researching and focuses onexploring and explicating their creative andimaginative dimensions.

Michael Lounsbury is a Professor, ThorntonA. Graham Chair, and Associate Dean of Researchat the Alberta School of Business. He is interestedin the relationship of institutions, entrepreneurshipand innovation. He has published extensively intop journals, such as the Academy of ManagementAnnals, Academy of Management Journal,Academy of Management Review, AdministrativeScience Quarterly, Journal of ManagementStudies, Organization Studies and StrategicManagement Journal. His book The InstitutionalLogics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture,Structure, and Process (with Patricia H. Thorntonand William Ocasio, 2012) received the GeorgeR. Terry book award from the Academy ofManagement in 2013. Formerly he was a co-editorof the Journal of Management Inquiry andOrganization Studies, and associate editor of theAcademy of Management Annals. His PhD is fromNorthwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, insociology and organization behaviour.

Maria Lusiani is Assistant Professor ofManagement at the University of Venice. Shepreviously held a postdoctoral position at HECMontréal within the Canada Research Chair ofStrategic Management in Pluralistic Settings. Sheteaches strategic management, public managementand qualitative research methods. Her researchinterests include management practices inpluralistic settings, management–professiontensions in professional work and new publicmanagement studies. She mainly conductsqualitative research, and has some expertise inethnography, process research and discourseanalysis. Her empirical research focuses on public,professional services in the fields of culture andhealth care.

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Habib Mahama is an Associate Professor ofAccounting at the United Arab EmiratesUniversity. He serves on the editorial boards of anumber of international journals. His researchinterest is in the area of management accounting,with a specific focus on management accountingcontrols in inter-firm relationships, managementcontrol of operational risk and behaviouralmanagement accounting.

Saku Mantere is Associate Professor of Strategyand Organization at the Desautels Faculty ofManagement, McGill University, Montreal. Hisresearch is focused on what makes organizationsstrategic and how strategic managementinfluences organizations. He is particularlyinterested in strategic change, middlemanagement and strategy discourse, as well asreasoning as a methodological issues inmanagement studies.

Leif Melin is Professor of Strategy andOrganization and the Hamrin Professor of FamilyBusiness Strategy at Jönköping InternationalBusiness School. His research interest includesseveral topics related to strategizing and strategicchange applying the strategy-as-practiceperspective, such as strategic dialogues as animportant practice. His publications includeStrategy as Practice: Research Directions andResources (with Gerry Johnson, Ann Langley, andRichard Whittington, 2007, Cambridge UniversityPress) and Sage Handbook of Family Business(with Mattias Nordqvist and Pramodita Sharma,2014), and he has published articles on strategy inthe Strategic Management Journal, StrategicOrganization, Journal of Management Studies,Family Business Review, Entrepreneurship Theoryand Practice, Long Range Planning and Journal ofFamily Business Strategy.

Eléonore Mounoud is Associate Professor inBusiness Strategy and Organization Studies atÉcole Centrale Paris. After graduating inagricultural engineering from INA-PG, in France,she worked as a consultant on environmentalissues and technological change. She holds a PhDin business strategy from HEC Paris. She studiestexts (discourses), talks (narratives) and tools

(management systems) in daily business practice.She is currently co-chairing the ‘Operationalefficiency and management systems’ researchprogramme, sponsored by BNP Paribas, at EcoleCentrale Paris.

David Oliver is Senior Lecturer in Work andOrganisational Studies at the University of SydneyBusiness School. His research interests includeorganizational identity, contemporary strategypractices and tools, and stakeholder engagement.He has worked at HEC Montréal and the IMDBusiness School and Imagination Lab, Lausanne,Switzerland. His publications have appeared inmanagement journals such as OrganizationStudies, the British Journal of Management,Human Relations, Journal of Applied BehavioralScience and Journal of Business Ethics. He is amember of the Strategy as Practice ResearchGroup at HEC Montréal and the OrganisationalDiscourse, Strategy and Change Group at theUniversity of Sydney.

Wanda J. Orlikowski is the Alfred P. SloanProfessor of Information Technologies andOrganization Studies at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology’s Sloan School of Management.She received her PhD from New York University.Her research examines technologies in theworkplace, with a particular focus on the ongoingrelations between technologies, organizingstructures, cultural norms, control mechanisms,communication and work practices. She iscurrently exploring sociomaterial practices insocial media.

Andrew Popp is Professor of Business History atthe University of Liverpool Management School.He has published two monographs, one editedcollection and more than thirty articles. He is Co-Director of the Centre for Port and MaritimeHistory, based in Liverpool, and co-edits the bookseries ‘Studies in Port and Maritime History’ forLiverpool University Press. He is editor-in-chief atEnterprise and Society: The International Journalof Business History . His research interests focusprimarily on the history of business in Britain inthe nineteenth century, including industrialdistricts, regional business networks, trust and

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other forms of social capital, culturalrepresentations of business, commercial salesmenand occupational cultures. Most recently he hasfocused on entrepreneurship and family business,and he is currently beginning a project on oralhistories of entrepreneurship in the 1980s. Inaddition, he has recently developed a focus onsources and methods in business history. His workis characterized by methodological innovation anda desire to examine the relationship betweenbusiness, society and history in the widestpossible terms.

Andreas Rasche is Professor of Business inSociety at the Centre for Corporate SocialResponsibility at Copenhagen Business School(CBS) and Research Director of the CBS World-Class Research Environment on ‘Governingresponsible business’. His research focuses oncorporate responsibility standards (particularly theUN Global Compact), the political role ofcorporations in transnational governance and thegovernance of global supply networks. Heregularly contributes to international journals in hisfield of study and has lectured on corporate socialand environmental responsibility at differentinstitutions. He has co-edited The United NationsGlobal Compact: Achievements, Trends andChallenges (with Georg Kell, 2010, CambridgeUniversity Press) and published Building theResponsible Enterprise: Where Vision and ValuesAdd Value (with Sandra Waddock, 2012). He isassociate editor of Business Ethics Quarterly. Hejoined Copenhagen Business School fromWarwick Business School in August 2012 (moreinformation is available at www.arasche.com).

Patrick Regnér is a Professor of StrategicManagement at the Stockholm School ofEconomics and has been a Director of its Instituteof International Business. His research interestsfocus on strategy creation and change and howpractices, actors, activities and social interactionsshape strategies. His current research examinesnormative institutional embeddedness and socialcomplexities in imperfect imitation and firm’sresponses to institutions. His research is publishedin leading journals, such as the StrategicManagement Journal, Journal of International

Business, Journal of Management Studies,Management International Review, British Journalof Management and Human Relations. He co-authors the leading European strategy textbook,Exploring Strategy: Text and Cases (with GerryJohnson, Richard Whittington, Kevan Scholes andDuncan Angwin, tenth edition, 2013), and is amember of the editorial boards of the Journal ofManagement Studies, Organization Studies andStrategic Organization.

Emmanuelle Reuter Emmanuelle Reuter is apostdoctoral research fellow and lecturer at theUniversity of St Gallen, Switzerland. Her mainresearch interests surround the cognitiveunderpinnings of strategy practices and processes,particularly in changing industry environments,with a particular emphasis on regulatorytransformations and sustainability issues. Herongoing projects focus on how executives attendto and interpret such environments, and makestrategic decisions when faced with changes in it.In her dissertation, a primary focus has been on theprivate banking industry as a research site. Shewon the outstanding reviewer awards by theManagerial and Organizational Cognition divisionat the Academy of Management. Her workingpaper on processes of strategy making inunfamiliar environments has received the ‘2012Best Conference Proposal’ award of the StrategyProcess IG at the Strategic Management Society.

Linda Rouleau is a Professor in the Department ofManagement of HEC Montréal, where she holds aprofessorship in strategy, organization and socialpractices. She teaches strategic management andorganization theories. Her research work focuseson micro-strategy and strategizing in pluralisticcontexts, and she also researches into the strategicsensemaking role of middle managers and leaders.In the last few years she has published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Academy ofManagement Review, Organization Science,Accounting, Organization and Society, Journal ofManagement Studies and Human Relations. She isjointly responsible for the GéPS (Study Group ofStrategy as Practice, HEC Montréal) and researchmember of the CRIMT (a Canadian research centrefocusing on globalization and work).

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Johannes Rüegg-Stürm is Professor forOrganizational Studies and Director of the Institutefor Systemic Management and Public Governanceat the University St. Gallen, Switzerland. He is thefounder and Academic Director of theinterdisciplinary master programme MA inmanagement, organization studies and culturaltheory. His research interests include systemicperspectives on management and organizationstudies; the management of pluralisticorganizations, with a focus on health careorganizations; and management innovation andstrategic change. His work has earned severalacademic awards. He (together with Simon Grand)is author of the forthcoming book The St. GallenManagement Model, which will be published inEnglish in the next few months.

Dalvir Samra-Fredericks is Professor ofOrganization Studies at Nottingham BusinessSchool, United Kingdom, and a Visiting Professorat Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki. Herresearch focuses on blending the ethnographic andethnomethodological stances, and in particularinvolves audio-video recording strategists talking ininteractions over time and space. By accessing suchreal-time interactions, fine-grained analyses of howthey combine an array of elusive linguistic skillsand forms of knowledge to do their work effectivelycan be achieved. This work has been singled out as‘exemplary’, most recently, in a major review(‘Qualitative research in management: a decade ofprogress’, by Dustin J. Bluhm, Wendy Harman,Thomas W. Lee and Terence R. Mitchell, 2011,Journal of Management Studies). She has alsoguest-edited with colleagues two special issues ofOrganization Studies; one was a symposium issue(2008), on the ‘The foundations of organizing’, andthe second captured a central thrust of her work inits title: ‘Re-turn to practice: understandingorganization as it happens’ (2009).

Henri Schildt is an Associate Professor in Strategyat Aalto University, Helsinki, with jointappointments in the Department of ManagementStudies and the Department of IndustrialEngineering and Management. He received hisPhD from Helsinki University of Technology, and

he has previously worked at Imperial CollegeLondon and Hanken School of Economics,Helsinki. His research on topics such astechnology strategy, organizational change andentrepreneurial narratives has been published in theAcademy of Management Journal, OrganizationScience, Strategic Management Journal and otheroutlets. He is currently the principal investigator ina four-year project funded by the Academy ofFinland that studies the strategy practices andstrategy work related to advanced businessanalytics and ‘big’ data.

Markus Schimmer is a postdoc at the Institute ofManagement of the University of St. Gallen,Switzerland, where he received his PhD instrategy. During his PhD studies he was a visitingresearch scholar at the University of Virginia’sDarden School of Business. His research interestsare directed towards firm and industry dynamics,with a focus on the impacts of the digitalrevolution. His research deploys competitivedynamics and industrial organization as theoreticalperspectives. His work has appeared in variousjournals, such as Strategic Organization, theJournal of Strategy and Management and HarvardKennedy School Review. Prior to his studies heworked in the headquarters of a multinationalinsurance group.

David Seidl is a chaired Professor of Organizationand Management at the University of Zurich andResearch Associate at the Centre for BusinessResearch (CBR) at the University of Cambridge.He received his PhD from the Judge BusinessSchool, University of Cambridge, and haspreviously worked at the University of Munich. Heis also a senior editor of Organization Studies andserves on the editorial boards of several journals,including the Journal of Management Studies,Organization, Scandinavian Journal ofManagement and Strategic Organization. In hisresearch he has been interested in strategy aspractice, strategic change, standardization and thephilosophy of science, on which he has publishedwidely in leading international journals.

Michael Smets is an Associate Professor ofManagement and Organisation Studies at the Saïd

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Business School, University of Oxford, where healso received his D.Phil. and a member of theCentre for Professional Service Firms, part of theSaïd Business School. His research focuses on theinterplay of work and institutions, especially onhow professionals at work generate, respond to andresolve institutional complexity in areas such aslaw, consulting and reinsurance. In doing so, hedraws heavily on institutional theory and strategyas practice in order to theorize from richqualitative – often ethnographic – data. Recentpublications in this vein include ‘From practice tofield: a multilevel model of practice-driveninstitutional change’ (with Tim Morris andRoyston Greenwood, 2014, Academy ofManagement Journal) and ‘Reinsurance trading inLloyd’s of London: balancing conflicting-yet-complementary logics in practice’ (with PaulaJarzabkowski, Gary Burke and Paul Spee, 2015,Academy of Management Journal).

Paul Spee is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy at theUniversity of Queensland Business School. Hisresearch interests are underpinned by socialpractice theory and revolve around exploring theuse of artefacts enabling and constraining situatedactivities. Paul received his PhD from AstonBusiness School, Birmingham. His work hasappeared in the Academy of Management Journal,Organization Studies, Strategic Organization andOxford University Press, among others.

Violetta Splitter is a Research Associate at theChair of Organization and Management at theUniversity of Zurich. Her research interests includestrategy as practice, the transferability ofmanagement ideas and concepts, the practicalrelevance of management education and researchand a Bourdieusian perspective on organizationalphenomena. She has published her work in theJournal of Applied Behavioural Science andOrganization.

Haridimos Tsoukas (www.htsoukas.com) holdsthe Columbia Ship Management Chair in StrategicManagement at the Department of Public andBusiness Administration, University of Cyprus,and is a Distinguished Research Environment

Professor of Organization Studies at WarwickBusiness School, University of Warwick, UnitedKingdom. He obtained his PhD at the ManchesterBusiness School (MBS), University ofManchester, and has worked at MBS, theUniversity of Essex, the University of Strathclyde,and at the ALBA Graduate Business School,Greece. He was editor-in-chief of OrganizationStudies (2003–2008). He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the International Symposium onProcess Organization Studies and co-editor of thebook series ‘Perspectives on process organizationstudies’, published by Oxford University Press(both with Ann Langley). His research interestsinclude knowledge-based perspectives onorganizations, organizational becoming, practicalreason in management and policy studies, andmeta-theoretical issues in organizational andmanagement research.

Florian Ueberbacher is a lecturer and SeniorResearch Fellow at the University of St. Gallen,Switzerland. He received his PhD from the sameinstitution. His research encompasses organizationtheory, strategic management andentrepreneurship. He is specifically interested inhow organizations gain and maintain legitimacyand power in contested environments. His researchhas been published in the Academy of ManagementProceedings, Journal of Management Studiesand Technology Analysis and StrategicManagement.

Eero Vaara is a Professor of Organization andManagement at Aalto University School ofBusiness, Helsinki, a Permanent Visiting Professorat EM-Lyon Business School and a DistinguishedVisiting Scholar at Lancaster University, UnitedKingdom. His research interests focus onorganizational, strategic and institutional change,strategic practices and processes, multinationalcorporations and globalization, managementeducation, and methodological issues inorganization and management research. He hasworked especially on discursive and narrativeapproaches. His work has been published inleading journals and several books, and he hasreceived several awards for his contributions.

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Valérie-Inés de La Ville graduated from EM-Lyon Business School in 1985 and has held a PhDin entrepreneurial strategies from the UniversityLyon 3 since 1996. She is currently Full Professorin Strategic Marketing and Business Policy at theUniversity of Poitiers, France. In 2003 she createdthe European Centre for Children’s Products, atraining and research unit focused on youth-oriented markets. Her fields of interest lie inentrepreneurship and strategic innovations inchildren-oriented markets, as well as in the ethicalissues raised by addressing children as consumersor economic actors (http://cepe.univ-poitiers.fr).

Consuelo Vásquez is an Associate Professor in theDépartement de Communication Sociale etPublique at the Université du Québec à Montréal.She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Universityof Costa Rica since 2012 and at the Universitécatholique de Louvain, Belgium, since 2013. In2012 she co-edited a special issue onorganizational communication studies in Diálogosde la Comunicación, the Latin AmericanFederation of Communication School’s journal,which brings together the work of scholars fromEurope and North and South America. Her workhas been published in Communication Theory,Communication Measures and Methods,Discourse and Communication, QualitativeResearch in Organization and Management, theScandinavian Journal of Management and otherinternational peer-reviewed journals. She has alsoserved as an editorial board member of the RevueInternationale de Communication Sociale etPublique and Studies in Communication Sciences.Her current research looks at the constitutive roleof spacing and timing in ‘fragile’ organizations.

Xena Welch Guerra is a Research Associate andPhD student in strategy and management at theInstitute of Management, University of St. Gallen,Switzerland. Her main research interests centre on

mergers and acquisitions, cognitive andbehavioural theories, and research methods.Her dissertation research focuses on serialacquirers and applies a variety of both qualitativeand quantitative approaches to examine theformation and implementation of acquisitionsequences.

Richard Whittington is Professor of StrategicManagement at the Saïd Business School, andMillman Fellow at New College, University ofOxford. He is a board member of the StrategicManagement Society and associate editor of theStrategic Management Journal. He is also a formerChair of the ‘Strategizing activity and practices’interest group at the Academy of Management. Heis co-author of Strategy as Practice: ResearchDirections and Resources (with Gerry Johnson,Ann Langley and Leif Melin, 2007) and a reviewof strategy-as-practice research in the Academy ofManagement Annals (with Eero Vaara, 2012). Heis co-author of a leading strategy textbook,Exploring Strategy: Text and Cases (with GerryJohnson, Kevan Scholes, Duncan Angwin andPatrick Regnér, tenth edition, 2013). He iscurrently working on a book on the long-termtrajectory of strategy as a professional field ofpractice.

Carola Wolf is Lecturer in Strategy at AstonBusiness School, Birmingham. Her researchapplies a sociological perspective on strategyprocesses and practices, with a particular focus onmiddle managers. Her most recent publicationsinclude ‘Strategic planning research: toward atheory-driven agenda’ (with Steven Floyd,forthcoming, Journal of Management), which isbased on her research on the role of strategicplanning processes on middle managementengagement in strategy-making. Her furtherresearch interests include topics such as strategicchange and the emergence of strategy.

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Preface to the Second Edition

We did not anticipate the first edition of the Cam-bridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice to befollowed by a new version this soon. In thefive years since the first edition was published,however, the field of practice-based strategyresearch has moved on considerably. New theoret-ical perspectives have been advanced, alternativemethodologies have been suggested and newtopics have been explored. In reaction to thesedevelopments, we have put this second editiontogether. We have included twenty new chaptersand have substantially revised and updated all theoriginal ones. In addition, the overall structureof the handbook has been changed: We haveadded Part III, covering organization and manage-ment theory perspectives on strategy as practice(SAP), such as the institutional perspective, alter-native strategy perspectives, the routine dynamicsperspective, the identity theory perspective, thecommunicative constitution of organizations per-spective, the power perspective and the criticalperspective. We have also added Part V, on sub-stantive topic areas in strategy as practice research,which includes chapters on strategic planning,strategy meetings, the role of materiality in strat-egy, the strategic role of middle managers, partici-pation in strategy and the role of emotions instrategy. Moreover, we decided to drop the originalPart IV, on exemplary empirical research, as wefelt that it was no longer possible to provide a

representative overview of the wide variety ofempirical studies conducted in the area of strategyas practice. Since the respective empirical chaptersare still of great value to practice-based research-ers, however, we have made them freely availableon the website of Cambridge University Press: toaccess the papers, please visit www.cambridge.org/golsorkhi.

Working on this second edition has been a won-derful journey, as we have had the opportunity tolearn new things and get to know new people. Thisbook project has been an important way for us toparticipate in the development of the SAP agenda,and we are especially happy about the dialoguethat has been established with those who have notusually been considered to be part of the SAPcommunity. All this has required a great deal ofeffort from the authors. We are grateful to theauthors of the previous edition, who without hesi-tation agreed to revise and update their chapters,and to the new ones, for so generously acceptingthe challenge to join us in this great adventure.This second edition literally would not havehappened had not Paula Parish from CambridgeUniversity Press approached us, and she has beena fantastic key person to work with. We also wantto thank all the others in the great CUP teamfacilitating this editing process.

Damon, Linda, David and Eero

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