The Political Dynamics of Opening Participation in Strategy: The role of strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness

Abstract

Practices of open participation in strategy-making share assumptions that enlarging participation outside the traditional circle of strategy specialists ensures a larger set of strategic options and a stronger commitment to strategy implementation. However, a greater variety of participants belonging to different organizational fields implies that different ways of understanding and doing strategy encounter during open participation processes and are likely to generate political struggles. We build on practice theory to conceptualize the enactments of open participation practices as the sites where more or less autonomous and powerful organizational fields encounter and where practices of open participation ‘mesh’ with other strategy, management and occupational practices and the local organizational context. Because ‘opening’ participation suggests that strategy used to be closed, we first focus on the organizational field of strategy and strategy specialists – who are expected to welcome the participation of people from other fields. We explain why strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness play a key role in patterning enactments of open participation practices. Then, we build on these two dimensions to stylize the political aspects of opening participation along with four ideal-typical enactments, namely exclusion, domination, conversation and controversy. Eventually, we discuss how management practices – such as dividing labour, coordinating and controlling – and provisional material arrangements orientate ‘actual’ enactments of open participation towards those four ideal-typical forms of enactments and how the participants’ learning during enactments affects subsequent enactments and cumulatively contributes either to the reinforcement or the decline of the strategy field in the organization’s hierarchy of power. Our article then provides a conceptual framework for analysing the political aspects of the enactments of open participation in strategy-making and contributes to a ‘post-processual’ understanding of strategy.

Keywords

disposition to openness identity legitimacy open participation power practice theory strategist

Is strategy everyone’s business? Practices of open participation in deliberate strategy-making have spanned, among others, from good old strategic planning to strategic management, scenario planning, and most recently, open strategy (Whittington, 2019). As ‘temporally evolving, open-ended set[s] of doings and sayings linked by practical understandings, rules, teleoaffective structure, and general understandings’ (Schatzki, 2002, p. 87), practices of open participation encompass recognizable sets of collective doings (Barnes, 2001), such as meeting during large workshops, jamming and consulting through wikis; they share an interest with the future of the organization and assumptions that broad participation is necessary to ensure better strategic options and stronger commitment. Opening participation and ‘massively raising’ the number of participants (Whittington, 2015) are indeed thought to rejuvenate organizational strategy through increased creativity, larger sets of options and a stronger commitment to strategy implementation (Seidl, von Krogh, & Whittington, 2019; Stieger, Matzler, Chatterjee, & Ladstaetter-Fussenegger, 2012).

However, achieving such results is a long path. Because opening participation in strategy processes suggests that these processes used to be closed, those who used to be in charge – strategy specialists, such as chief strategy officers, corporate planners or members of strategy departments – have to depart from effortless discussions with fellow specialists to welcome non-specialists, such as employees, line managers and middle managers, in their strategy work. Opening participation to a greater variety of participants belonging to different organizational fields implies that different ways of understanding and doing strategy encounter, and this is likely to generate political struggles. Indeed, processual and practice-based strategy research reports ongoing difficulties, dilemmas and tensions between heterogeneous participants in open participation processes (Hautz, Seidl, & Whittington, 2017; Mantere & Vaara, 2008; Smith, Callagher, Crewe-Brown, & Siedlok, 2018). Yet, to date, we know little about the political aspects of open participation (Vaara, Rantakari, & Holstein, 2019), despite repeated calls for exploring these aspects in strategy-as-practice research (Burgelman et al., 2018; McCabe, 2016). This is surprising since practice theory (Hui, Schatzki, & Shove, 2017; Schatzki, 2002; Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001) provides a conceptual apparatus for theorizing what happens politically when different fields of practices intersect (Bourdieu, 1985, 2005; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Hui, 2017; Schmitz, Witte, & Gengnagel, 2017; Watson, 2017).

We propose a practice-based conceptual framework of the enactment of open participation practices in strategy-making that illuminates the political tensions between an organization’s strategy specialists and non-specialists. We explain how open participation in deliberate strategy-making provides opportunities for participants to enact practices in ways that assert, reinforce or equalize the hierarchy of their respective fields through disputes over meanings, values and status (Belmondo & Sargis-Roussel, 2015; Contu, 2014; Levina & Orlikowski, 2009). We focus on strategy specialists – i.e. the ‘key practitioners’ (Mantere & Vaara, 2008), ‘formal strategists’ (Hautz et al., 2017) and ‘traditional strategists’ (Smith et al., 2018) – who are expected to open participation to newcomers. First, we explain how the autonomy of the field of strategy vis-a-vis other intra-organizational fields affects strategy specialists’ disposition to openness and their willingness to accept deviant meanings from newcomers; and how its position in the organizational hierarchy of power affects strategy specialists’ legitimacy and their ability to impose their own meanings onto newcomers. Second, we intersect these two dimensions and conceptualize four ideal-typical enactments of open participation in strategy-making, namely exclusion, domination, conversation and controversy. Eventually, we discuss the management practices – such as dividing labour, coordinating and controlling – and the provisional variations in material arrangements that orientate ‘actual’ enactments of open participation practices towards the ideal-typical forms, as well as how the participants’ learning during enactments affects subsequent enactments and cumulatively contributes either to the reinforcement or decline of the strategy field in the organization. Altogether, our article provides a conceptual framework for analysing the political aspects of the enactments of open participation in strategy-making and contributes to a ‘post-processual’ understanding of strategy (Chia & MacKay, 2007).

Strategy Specialists’ Disposition to Openness and Legitimacy as Part of the Material Arrangements around Open Participation Processes

Organizations as nexuses of fields of practices and the opening of participation

Fields of practices denote partly autonomous segments of the social space encompassing individuals who engage in specific nexuses of practices (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015; Schmitz et al., 2017) – i.e. a hierarchical set of interconnected practices¹ that feature specific sets of practical understandings and rules, a teleoaffective structure and general understandings (Schatzki, 2002, 2005, 2012). Like other ‘social microcosms [. . .] structured by their own histories and internal logic’ (Townley, 2014, p. 42), an organization is a social field of practices composed of a nexus of different intra-organizational sub-fields that hold their own specific logic and practices (Bourdieu, 2005; Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Townley, 2014). Intra-organizational sub-fields (‘fields’ in the remainder of this article) feature a varying degree of autonomy (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Kislov, Hyde, & McDonald, 2017; Schmitz et al., 2017) and a position in the organizational hierarchy of power (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Kislov et al., 2017; Rouse, 2001; Watson, 2017). Such sub-fields include the field of strategy and other fields, such as finance, sales or operations. The field of strategy encompasses a specific nexus of strategy practices that are linked with an interest in the future of the organization (Whittington, 2019) and shared assumptions that rationality is necessary to define and design means to attain such a future (Grandy & Mills, 2004). Examples of strategy practices include designing strategy processes (e.g. through strategic planning), using strategy tools (e.g. Porter’s five forces), formulating strategy, and so on. The willingness and ability of strategy specialists to enforce their own way of practising strategy during open participation depends on the field of strategy’s autonomy and position in the organizational hierarchy of power.

A field’s autonomy denotes its members’ historical ability to set clear-cut boundaries between insiders and outsiders and establish an internal structure of power (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015; Schatzki, 2018; Schmitz et al., 2017), which in turn affects the strength of practitioners’ field-specific identities, their normative submission to their field’s practices and their flexibility towards deviant actions (Geiger, 2009; Hilgers & Mangez, 2015; Hui, 2017): ‘The more autonomous a field, the more it produces an autonomous and specific language, representations and practices, and the more the perception of realities is subject to the logic specific to the field’ (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015, p. 7).

The organizational hierarchy of power denotes how some fields’ practitioners have accumulated social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital that enforces their field’s relative domination over other fields (Bourdieu, 1985; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Kislov et al., 2017; Schmitz et al., 2017; Uphoff, 1989) such that ‘at any given moment in the life of such organizations, one or the other kind of competence commands more respect and deference from the majority of members’ (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008, p. 25). Therefore, practitioners of the dominant fields have developed greater legitimacy to impose their meanings in cross-field processes and to reach the upper echelons of the organization. For example, being a member of the top management team does not grant legitimacy because of a high hierarchical position, but rather, it denotes pre-existing greater legitimacy (Bunderson & Van der Leyt, 2018; Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Levy & Reiche, 2018).

Since the 1970s, the increasing number of organizations that feature a chief strategy officer in their top management team, corporate planning functions or corporate development and strategy functions (Menz & Barnbeck, 2017) indicates the emergence of relatively autonomous strategy fields that rank high in the hierarchy of power of their organization. Practitioners in the strategy field become strategy specialists – i.e. in-house corporate strategists, corporate strategic planners or members of strategy departments (Gomez, 2010; Paroutis & Heracleous, 2013; Whittington, 2019) through developing field-specific mental states and identities (Bourdieu, 2005; Schatzki, 2002, 2017). They identify themselves and are identified by other organizational members as strategists ‘whose primary responsibility is not day-to-day operations but the overall futures of their employing organizations’ (Whittington, 2019, p. 3) and distinct from those ‘who have day-to-day operational responsibilities as well’ (p. 21).

When strategy ‘opens up’, those practitioners in charge of closed exclusive processes (Whittington, Cailluet, & Yakis-Douglas, 2011) must collaborate with practitioners from other fields. Thus, opening participation can be conceptualized as the site where more or less autonomous and powerful fields encounter and where practices of open participation ‘mesh’ with other strategy, management and occupational practices and the local organizational context (Herepath, 2014; Schatzki, 2005, 2006). Strategy specialists project their field-related identity and legitimacy (Paroutis & Heracleous, 2013) and dispute how strategy should be done and what viewpoints should be retained in their organization’s strategy, so that opening participation unfolds as a political process of confrontations (Herepath, 2014; Vaara et al., 2019) between practitioners from the strategy field and practitioners from other fields. In this context, building consensus is likely to result in ‘a hegemonically stabilized outcome of a power play of social forces’ rather than ‘an expression of unforced agreement’ (Contu & Willmott, 2003, p. 292).

Field-related identity and the legitimacy of strategy specialists are components of the material arrangements in which open participation happens. Opening participation in strategy-making means enacting practices of open participation – i.e. performing a succession of activities that are patterned by bundles of practices–material arrangements (Schatzki, 2005, 2006, 2012). Material arrangements are ‘the sets of “human beings, artefacts, other organisms and things”’ (Schatzki, 2005, p. 472). For example, a specific process of open participation occurs in a complex array that arranges together human beings (strategy specialists, top managers, middle managers, employees, etc.), artefacts (computers, meeting rooms, etc.), non-human living organisms (office plants, mosquitoes and flies, etc.) and things (natural environment around organizational premises, e.g. mountains, beaches, etc.).

Practices and material arrangements form persistent and complex – and persistent because complex – bundles (Schatzki, 2005, 2006, 2012), up to the point that Schatzki (2006, p. 1868) talks of ‘persisting practice structures’. Practices pattern material arrangements, including artefacts (Hui, 2017) and people’s dispositions and abilities (Schatzki, 2017). Material arrangements reciprocally pattern enactments of practices through the durability and affordances of artefacts and through the (slow) learning of people and their resulting dispositions and abilities (Schatzki, 2006, 2017). Artefacts and people pattern each other too: Material artefacts provide more or less affordances for participants to interact and impose their meanings and therefore affect both their dispositions and abilities, including their identity strength and legitimacy.

Among the practices whose cumulated enactments affect the persistent bundles that surround the enactment of open participation, management practices are most significant. Management practices are a specific nexus of practices linked with the general interest of ensuring the firm’s governability and shared assumptions that management decisions have causal impacts that can be calculated and optimized (Schmidt-Wellenburg, 2013). Examples of management practices include dividing labour (e.g. through organizational charts and attributing decision rights), coordinating (e.g. creating guidelines and formal procedures), controlling (e.g. through ratios), and so on. Management practices have a significant influence on the unfolding of open participation because they are linked with the organization’s governability, and hence, the distribution and control of power. As such, they pattern the respective positions of fields in the organizational hierarchy of power (Rouse, 2001; Watson, 2017) and the degree of the fields’ autonomy – and hence, the varying levels of strategy specialists’ legitimacy and identity strength (more on this in a later section).

The strength of strategy specialists’ identity and their disposition to openness

The identity strength of strategy specialists is consequential for how opening participation unfolds. A strong strategist identity limits the willingness to accept beliefs and meanings that are too far away from the array of acceptable actions² because accepting deviance requires questioning one’s identity as a strategy specialist (Adams, 2006; Chia & Holt, 2006). Therefore, it orientates the way strategy specialists promote or impede the participation of others (Mantere, 2005).

Through learning, training and legitimate peripheral participation (Chia & MacKay, 2007; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Schatzki, 2012), people progressively internalize field-specific mental states (Akram & Hogan, 2015; Chia & Holt, 2006; Reckwitz, 2002) and develop a field-specific identity that encompasses their competences and willingness to comply with the rules and values inscribed in their field (Alkemeyer & Buschmann, 2017; Chia & Holt, 2006; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Their identity is continuously strengthened by further enactments within their field because those enactments, if always informed and competent (Barnes, 2001), are most often unreflexive (Chia & MacKay, 2007; Geiger, 2009; Rouse, 2001) and reinforce the normative submission of practitioners to their field’s practices (Alkemeyer & Buschmann, 2017; Laine, Meriläinen, Tienari, & Vaara, 2016). By being competent members of strategy departments and repeatedly participating in strategy processes with fellow strategists, strategy specialists internalize strategy-specific mental states that include mastery of strategy theories, tools and language (Loewenstein, 2014; Mantere, 2013); a goal orientation towards deciphering and patterning the future of their organization (Whittington, 2019); and intentions and desires that express responsibility, discretion, virtuosity and pride (Allard-Poesi, 2015; Tsoukas, 2018; Whittington, 2019).

Participation in autonomous fields therefore leads to developing a specialist identity that is less flexible to welcome the meanings of outsiders and less willing to tolerate variations (Geiger, 2009; Hilgers & Mangez, 2015; Hui, 2017) that ‘[question] the underlying norms of good practice’ (Geiger, 2009, p. 140). However, the field of strategy in an organization is never completely autonomous and exhibits varying degrees of overlap with other fields (Kislov et al., 2017; Schmitz et al., 2017). Fields’ overlap leads to strategy specialists holding more flexible identities that ease inter-field collaboration, making them more comfortable with accepting divergent or equivocal views. The degree of strategists’ flexibility can be rightfully captured by the notion of disposition to openness or closure (Burt, Mackay, van der Heijden, & Verheijdt, 2017) as a ‘provisional attitude’ that denotes an ability (or inability) to accept sensemaking that challenges one’s identity (Schildt, Mantere, & Cornelissen, 2020). This allows for ontologically conceptualizing strategy specialists from being totally submitted to their field to hybrid individuals who are ‘flexible in their manner of adopting and dealing with the fluidity of organizations and fields’ (Abdelnour, Hasselbladh, & Kallinikos, 2017, p. 1789), thereby considering the variety of identities that strategists develop (Laine et al., 2016; Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003; Tsoukas, 2018).

The legitimacy of strategy specialists in driving strategy

When practitioners from different fields collaborate, their interactions take the form of legitimacy claims intended to influence the acceptance by others of the meanings they want to put forward (Geiger, 2009; Uphoff, 1989). Strong legitimacy enables strategy specialists to make their meanings acceptable to others, whereas more counterweighted legitimacy favours considering non-specialists’ meanings.

The legitimacy of strategy specialists depends on the position of the strategy field in the organizational hierarchy of power. Fields are power structures (Bourdieu, 2005; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Schmitz et al., 2017; Watson, 2017), and they provide practitioners with symbolic capital that supports their legitimacy claims outside their field because the capital is visible and recognized as significant by outsiders (Bourdieu, 1985; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Kislov et al., 2017; Schmitz et al., 2017). Practitioners of the dominant fields obtain higher status positions in their organization because of the social, cultural and symbolic capital they have accumulated (Bunderson & Van der Leyt, 2018; Levy & Reiche, 2018), which contributes to the reinforcement of their field in the organizational hierarchy of power, which in turn helps practitioners accumulate further capital. However, practitioners need to continuously fight to secure and improve their field’s position and impose their form of capital as more legitimate than the others (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Kislov et al., 2017). A field’s position in the organizational hierarchy of power then depends on the specific history of the organization and its members’ historical ability to accumulate capital. Therefore, this position is neither uniform across organizations nor stable (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015; Pratap & Saha, 2018; Schmitz et al., 2017).

Historically, strategy fields have benefited from the development of a strategy toolkit (Mueller, 2018) and the diffusion of the strategy discourse outside strategy departments (Carter, 2013); and strategy specialists have been successful in accumulating cultural and symbolic capital that is highly valued in their respective organizations. This accumulation translates into the growing incidence of chief strategy officers in C-suites (Menz & Barnbeck, 2017) and heads of strategic planning departments ranking among top managers. Lower-level strategy specialists ostensibly put forward status cues, such as reporting to high-level strategy specialists, mastering strategy language and tools, assertiveness and self-confidence (Paroutis & Heracleous, 2013). Consequently, strategists’ claims are deemed legitimate, and they can advance their distinctive meanings during strategy processes (Mueller, 2018; Samra-Fredericks, 2003).

However, strategy specialists’ symbolic capital is not always visible or distinctive enough. In some organizations or (remote) parts of organizations, the field of strategy may not rank highly in the organizational hierarchy of power (Balogun, Bartunek, & Do, 2015; Levy & Reiche, 2018; Thomas, Sargent, & Hardy, 2011 – more on this in a later section). There, the legitimacy of strategy specialists is counterweighted by the legitimacy of other organizational actors, and they face difficulties ‘sustain[ing] the reality that they are not a bunch of clowns, but a group of knowledgeable, trustworthy and effective professionals who act with high standards of integrity and competence and that what they have to sell actually works’ (Mueller, 2018, p. 19).

A Political View on Strategy-Making: Four Ideal-Typical Enactments of Open Participation

The central concepts presented in the previous section – namely, strategy specialists’ disposition to openness and legitimacy – make it possible to build four ideal-types of the enactments of open participation practices in strategy-making that put forward their political aspects (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Political aspects of open participation practices: Four ideal-typical enactments according to strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness.

Working with ideal-types facilitates discussions on their generating conditions, internal momentum and consequences. Ideal-types can then be used as polarized templates to analyse reality. In this section, we describe the stylized political activities that occur between strategy specialists and other participants for each ideal-type. Then, in the next section, we discuss the generating practices that contribute to orientating enactments towards one or the other ideal-type. Indeed, ideal-types are rarely met in reality. ‘Actual’ enactments of open participation navigate somewhere between the ‘ideal-typical’ enactments presented in Figure 1 because material arrangements and organizational history move the needle between the extremes – i.e. strategy specialists are never perceived as the only legitimate ones nor as not legitimate at all, and they never exhibit full openness or full closure.

Exclusion

When strategy specialists hold strong legitimacy, it is likely that some will be appointed by the CEO and the top management team (which is also likely to include a strategy specialist) to design and lead the overall strategy process (McCabe, 2010; Tavakoli, Schlagwein, & Schoder, 2017). If, in addition, they exhibit a disposition to closure, they will pattern participation – whether consciously or unconsciously – in a way that prevents the expression of meanings they do not want to hear (McCabe, 2010).

Non-specialists may be rendered silent when strategists assertively put forward their own values, interests, knowledge and ways of doing, such that they feel neither competent (Jarzabkowski & Balogun, 2009) nor safe participating (Bunderson & Reagans, 2011). Strategists can exclude non-specialists through their mastery of strategy language (Mantere, 2013; Mantere & Vaara, 2008), which contributes to enacting practical authoritativeness and delegitimating the contributions of other participants (Allard-Poesi, 2015; McCabe, 2016). Samra-Fredericks (2003) illustrates how strategy specialists can discard others’ contributions by framing them as ‘non-strategic’: ‘SA [Strategist A] was the most active in terms of attempting to speak the parameters of what should constitute strategic as opposed to management practice in the here-and-now’ (p. 156). They can also do so by reasserting their legitimacy: ‘What was being contested was which criterion should be invoked to legitimate actions/decisions, and second, how the “membership category” of accountants should be hierarchically subordinate to “company policy”, the latter arising from the efforts of strategists’ (Samra-Fredericks, 2003, pp. 157–158).

If strategy specialists hold a strong legitimacy and a low disposition to openness, then opening participation will hardly bring new unthought-of insights, and other participants will not react to their exclusion, although there may be pockets of individual backstage resistance (Mumby, Thomas, Martí, & Seidl, 2017; Ybema & Horvers, 2017). Beyond indifference (Christensen, Kärreman, & Rasche, 2019) and silence (Suominen, 2009), this includes being secretive (Pratap & Saha, 2018; Toegl, Levy, & Jonsen, 2021), distancing with irony (Alcadipani, Hassard, & Islam, 2018) and grumbling about strategists being in an ‘ivory tower’ (Suominen, 2009). Therefore, exclusion is most likely to result in feeble strategic innovation and to generate disappointments so that resistance resurfaces later (Tavakoli et al., 2017).

Domination

When strategy specialists exhibit a disposition to openness in addition to a strong legitimacy, they may support and even enforce non-specialists’ participation. As in the exclusion ideal-type, strategists are likely to be the ones appointed to design and lead the process. At the difference of the exclusion ideal-type, non-specialists’ participation is welcomed and expressed. However, it is made inconsequential for two reasons. First, the greater legitimacy of strategists makes their arguments more convincing (Mueller, 2018; Samra-Fredericks, 2003). Second, because they lead the whole process, strategists frame the initial context, engage in continual framing during discussions – through chairing sessions and text holding (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008) – and make the ultimate decision. Therefore, they are able – whether consciously or not – to orient what meanings are expressed so that non-specialists’ inputs remain within acceptable boundaries (Mueller, 2018; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011) and select which ones are retained or rejected for subsequent sequences (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011). Participation then allows achieving a final consensus (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008) but yields outcomes that correspond to strategists’ initial views (Knight, Paroutis, & Heracleous, 2018; McCabe, 2010).

Van der Steen (2017) gives an example of domination in which ‘sensemakers’ stated that entrepreneurship was the key strategic issue for their organization and participants elaborated on this statement without questioning its relevance. Although employees expressed their personal experiences, the result was a reinforced feeling of the importance of entrepreneurship as a strategic issue rather than its rejection or enrichment with other possible issues. As Van der Steen (2017) reports, the project leader stated before the process began: ‘I have a pretty good idea of what the outcome of the ROM [Results Oriented Management] process is going to be. However, the added value is in the process itself, and not the result, which we could have dictated top-down; probably with little effect’ (pp. 777–778).

Domination leads to putting forward strategists’ meanings without fully considering non-specialists’ contributions. However, in contrast to the exclusion ideal-type, non-specialists’ participation increases their willingness to participate and their commitment to the company’s strategy (Luedicke, Husemann, Furnari, & Ladstaetter, 2017) such that strategy implementation is easier in later sequences.

Conversation

The conversation ideal-type occurs when strategy specialists demonstrate a disposition to openness and the knowledge of all participants is deemed legitimate for solving contradictions such that ‘individual perspectives can be shared with others, and collective insight can be built’ (Burt et al., 2017, p. 22). The conversation ideal-type requires that all participants exhibit the ability not only to express and share their insights but also to comment on and evaluate the insights of others (Hutter, Nketia, & Füller, 2017), for example, through voting on and ranking ideas (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008; Stieger et al., 2012). Conversations occur through talks (Thomas et al., 2011), texts (Stieger et al., 2012) and interactions between the two (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011). However, conversations may be difficult to initiate or sustain, as shown in Bjelland and Wood’s (2008) analysis of IBM’s 2006 Innovation Jam. The jam was aimed at reflecting on how to put IBM’s new technologies on the market; it resulted in thousands of ideas from 150,000 employees. Employees were familiar with the jam format and eager to participate. Strategy executives designed the process centrally with the aims of fostering the emergence of ideas through no initial framing, sustaining ongoing strategic conversations, and with websites providing a plethora of information. Yet, in most conversations, people were more interested in putting forward their ideas, and they resisted building on the ideas of others. Overall, it was a slow process, and IBM strategists found that few ideas were truly novel. However, the collation of all these ‘small ideas’ facilitated the generation of new strategic businesses.

The conversation ideal-type is supposed to encourage the clarification of disagreements and produce new insights and increased commitment from non-specialists. However, conversations take time and are difficult to manage. They generate hardly any new valuable insights, some of which are irrelevant – such as the ‘quality of canteen food’ (Stieger et al., 2012, p. 61) – because non-specialists lack the competences necessary to fruitfully contribute to the discussion, specifically to corporate strategic issues (Luedicke et al., 2017). Conversations also generate unsubstantial consensus because disagreements are clarified without questioning the participants’ underlying beliefs (Maitlis & Lawrence, 2003), and the eventual outcome (e.g. a strategic plan or a SWOT analysis) is usually quickly forgotten (Hill & Westbrook, 1997). Some non-specialists may be reluctant to engage in strategic conversations and they may allege additional work and cognitive load (Dobusch & Kapeller, 2018). However, others will still be willing to engage, even if their participation can be considered ceremonial (Vaara et al., 2019).

Controversy

Controversy designates enactments of open participation where strategy specialists hold a strong field identity and their legitimacy is counterweighted by other participants’ legitimacy. Participants then openly confront their meanings with arguments and values that belong to different fields and make legitimacy claims to impose their own views and discredit the claims of others (Kaplan, 2008). Controversies escape enduring conflicts if participants translate their knowledge into a network of meanings that accommodates all of them. This process of translation necessitates the evolution of both the beliefs and identities of the participants (Callon, 1984). Therefore, it is a difficult process, which can follow three paths: bending to a preferred system, making a provisory local arrangement around specific decisions, or building an overarching common good (Boltanski & Thevenot, 1991/2006; Taupin, 2012).

Bending

Non-specialists may stick to their field and refuse to try building a consensus. They attempt to delegitimate the discourses of specialists by making critical statements (Dick & Collings, 2014), trying to enrol non-specialist top managers (Kaplan, 2008; Toegl et al., 2021) and promoting their own meanings (Kaplan, 2008; Levina & Orlikowski, 2009). In doing so, they provide alternative discourses (Hardy & Thomas, 2014; Laine & Vaara, 2007) with the hope that they can divert the process away from the strategy field into a field where they hold stronger legitimacy. Many studies report how medical professionals sometimes successfully resist the attempts of strategy specialists to conduct strategic planning in hospitals by reasserting the pre-eminence of the medicine field over the strategy field (e.g. Lozeau, Langley, & Denis, 2002).

Agreeing provisionally

Participants may strive to agree without departing from their fields of practices and build a provisory ‘fragile local agreement’ (Jagd, 2011, p. 346). This implies that they succeed in achieving sufficient ambiguity such that all participants can interpret the agreement according to their own general understandings (Abdallah & Langley, 2014). For example, Lozeau and colleagues (2002) analyse how strategic planning in hospitals would typically end with a consensus that ‘rarely had any teeth’, stating that ‘this was reflected in the large number of developmental recommendations noted and also in the striking vagueness of their formulation’ (p. 548). Such high levels of ambiguity allow for bypassing the problem of legitimacy pluralism and lack of openness but result in unstable compromises, and problems are likely to resurface later (Abdallah & Langley, 2014). Agreeing provisionally resembles the conversation type, although the outcomes are more ambiguous than mundane.

Building an overarching common good

Eventually, strategy specialists and non-specialists may end up building a negotiated order that reconfigures and articulates the various general understandings such that shared meanings are deemed appropriate and acceptable to both strategists and non-specialists. For example, Thomas and colleagues (2011) report the never-ending sterile discussions and enduring controversies around customer orientation between strategists from headquarters and the engineers of a local plant, where engineers had strong local legitimacy and no history of relationships with the headquarters. They kept on ‘challenging, reiterating, holding to account and undermining’ (p. 32) strategists’ views. Discussions escaped sterility when the possibility of an overarching common good linked to the sustainability of the organization emerged. Intermediate agreements on new meanings could then deepen and result in a new strategic orientation. Interestingly enough, the middle manager who mediated the proposition was neither an engineer nor a strategy specialist.

In the controversy ideal-type, negotiations can be long and conflictual until a way out is found, if it ever is. However, succeeding in building an overarching common good allows for both generating innovative strategic insights and increasing non-specialists’ commitment to the organization’s strategy.

Variations in the Enactments of Open Participation in Strategy-Making

Exclusion, domination, conversation and controversy are four ideal-types that provide an analytical apparatus for understanding how practices of open participation in strategy-making unfold. However, there are many ways of opening participation, and any specific one has its own characteristics and pockets of conversation, controversy, domination and exclusion, shaped by participants and their manoeuvres. In this section, we discuss what orientates ‘actual enactments’ towards ideal-types (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Variations in the enactments of open participation.

Next we reflect on the management practices – those practices linked with the organization’s governability – that pattern the degree of the strategy field’s autonomy and its position in the organizational hierarchy of power in a specific organization such that strategy specialists exhibit levels of disposition to openness and legitimacy that are never at their highest or lowest. This corresponds to the side rectangles in Figure 2 and relates to the organization’s persistent bundle of material arrangements and practices obtained through the cumulated enactments of management practices.

Practice-arrangement bundles do not fully determine the unfolding of open participation. Material arrangements can be marginally modified on the spot by manoeuvring around people and materiality, producing what we call provisional arrangements (the central arrowed square in Figure 2). We then discuss those provisional arrangements and how they orientate the enactment of open participation towards different zones.

Eventually, cumulated enactments of open participation contribute to participants’ learning (the spiral arrow in Figure 2). We first discuss the conditions of such learning during a specific enactment, including how it develops according to the zones the spiral goes through and its consequences for further enactments of participation. We then discuss cumulative learning by non-strategy specialists across enactments and its long-term consequences for the reinforcement or decline of the strategy field in the organizational hierarchy of fields.

Management practices and the origins of legitimacy and disposition to openness

Management practices are significant for the autonomy of organizational fields and their position in the organizational hierarchy of power, which we discuss in this section. Cumulated enactments of management practices have balanced effects on fields’ autonomy and the strength of practitioners’ field-specific identities, and thus, on the disposition to openness of strategists.

On the one hand, division of labour practices and some coordination practices – for example, those enforcing sequential interdependencies – draw and reify boundaries between fields and limit their overlap. By strictly allocating people to a specific function, organizational charts and standard operating procedures contribute to developing specific work identities: people are in the IT department, the strategy department or the marketing department; gradually, they become IT specialists, strategists or marketing specialists. Such practices contribute to the strength of field-specific identities by favouring enactments within specific isolated functions and by reinforcing normative pressures on when and how to participate; this orientates the enactment of open participation practices towards the exclusion or controversy zones.

On the other hand, some management practices decrease the tendency to closure such that organizational fields never entirely overlap and are never entirely autonomous, and strategists’ disposition is never totally closed or totally open. Practices that promote collaboration outside functional units (e.g. inter-functional projects or open strategy) contribute to field overlap rather than field autonomy by familiarizing participants with the practices of other fields such that normative pressures are alleviated (Reckwitz, 2002). Practices that affect identity development (e.g. frequent organizational changes or specific human resources policies) prevent people from engaging in legitimate peripheral participation for a sufficient duration to develop a strong disposition to closure. Organizing high turnover or multi-occupation career paths and recruiting junior rather than tenured strategists are management practices that influence strategists’ disposition to openness or closure. For example, short tenure in strategy departments makes junior strategists feel less like strategy specialists than seasoned strategists do. Eventually, practices that contribute to building strong organizational overarching values limit dispositions to closure by enabling people to develop shared meaning and values. Then, open participation is more likely to unfold in the domination or conversation zones or to ease the productive settlement of controversies.

Management practices pattern the organizational hierarchy of power by affecting the distribution of all forms of capital. Establishing budgeting rules controls the distribution of economic capital, and allocating specific budgets for organizational development to strategy departments provides strategists with some control over the economic capital of other departments. Whereas all practitioners possess functional expertise – and therefore cultural capital – their valuation outside the boundaries of their field depends on practices that signal organizational priorities, such as attributing decision rights, differentiating salaries and showcasing certain fields.³ The same practices that promote collaboration outside functional units also result in practitioners increasing their social capital. In some organizations, successive enactments of management practices have been beneficial to the field of strategy, such that strategy specialists have accumulated economic, cultural and social capital, and open participation unfolds mostly in the exclusion or domination zones. Including strategists in the executive committee and giving priority to strategy processes in corporate meetings contribute to enhancing the value of the strategists’ cultural capital. Past strategy processes that involved participants outside the strategy field (e.g. strategic planning and other forms of open participation), particularly if considered successful, extend strategists’ social capital and contribute to the visibility and diffusion of their symbolic capital in other fields (Watson, 2017), as well as to non-specialists valuing strategy expertise.

Conversely, other management practices counterweight the accumulation of capital by strategy specialists. For example, labelling processes or Excel sheets as ‘digital’ or ‘financial’ lessens the strategists’ visibility and signals a declining position of the field of strategy in the organizational hierarchy of power along with the financialization of organizations. While strategists’ localization in corporate headquarters provides them with symbolic capital, it also prevents them from accumulating social capital. For example, in multinational companies, corporate strategists may lack social or cultural capital and may not be perceived as legitimate enough by subsidiaries’ members to enforce specific meanings (Balogun et al., 2015; Levy & Reiche, 2018; Thomas et al., 2011). Thus, open participation unfolds in zones of controversy or conversation. Eventually, the strategy field in professional organizations or in pluralistic settings (Denis, Langley, & Rouleau, 2007) exhibits less cultural capital than professional fields. Thus, enactments in the controversy zone are more likely in pluralist organizations where managerialization is recent and the professional fields are autonomous – for example, in hospitals, arts organizations and universities.

Provisional modifications of material arrangements and their consequences

The enactment of open participation practices exhibits local variations according to what artefacts are used – because they provisionally affect the visibility of symbolic capital – and who is participating – because it provisionally affects overall disposition to openness or closure.

The physical localization of the process – close or far from strategists, in or outside organizational premises, online or off-line – has provisional consequences for the extent to which people feel entitled to speak (Healey, Hodgkinson, Whittington, & Johnson, 2015; Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008). Designing and using liminal or hybrid spaces (Perkmann, McKelvey, & Phillips, 2019) orientate towards controversy or conversation rather than domination or exclusion. Conversely, the existence of ‘backstage’ spaces where ‘informal backroom negotiations’ happen (Ringel, 2019, p. 715) orientates towards exclusion or domination.

Language and tools also matter. Attributing the charge of process design and idea selection to strategy specialists will orientate the process towards domination or exclusion. Conversely, attributing the leadership of participation processes to departments, such as HR or communication (Whittington, 2019), will orientate towards conversation or controversy because formal authority is another cue for legitimacy. Furthermore, labelling the process as ‘cultural’ or ‘financial’ rather than ‘strategic’ and limiting the use of formal strategy tools drive the process outside the strategy field and counterweight the visibility and legitimacy of strategists. Conducting a five-force analysis is not the same as playing with Lego. The former symbolically frames towards strategy and orientates towards exclusion or domination, whereas the latter frames towards team building or creativity and conversation or controversy.

Choosing who does or does not participate and their grouping or isolation are also factors that influence the ability to form coalitions and consequently the array of political manoeuvres that participants can undertake. Scattered localizations or online consultations make coalition building more difficult for those who are not leading the process. Furthermore, the broader the range of the audience, the more difficult co-localizations and face-to-face interactions become: Conversations occur more easily in communities than in crowds (Dobusch & Kapeller, 2018).

Therefore, the enactment of open participation will unfold differently according to whether it involves the participation of (isolated) strategy specialists or non-specialists or the participation of pre-existing organizational groups, as well as whether their participation is planned for the entire process or in isolated chunks. If non-specialists cannot form a coalition because they are scattered across the organization or because their needs and interests are not easy to reconcile, then it will be easier for strategists to promote their own meanings. Conversely, non-specialists will more easily mobilize managerial resources, such as organizational rules and procedures or TMTs (Pratap & Saha, 2018), if they can form coalitions. Here, material arrangements that afford non-specialists’ search for help and participation (Luedicke et al., 2017; Tavakoli et al., 2017), or conversely, that contribute to their isolation – for example, online consultations or the suppression of anonymity in web-based contributions (Denyer, Parry, & Flowers, 2011) – are key to provisionally orientating an enactment towards one or the other ideal-type.

In turn, patterning material arrangements that allow open participation practices to unfold in one zone or the other depends on the enactment of specific management practices by top and senior managers, such as selecting who participates, where and when they participate and the physical setting of the process. Therefore, the diversity and inequality of the top and senior management, and particularly the top management team (Bunderson & Van der Leyt, 2018), is consequential for the outcomes achieved by open participation because people tend to enact practices that contribute to reinforcing their position and the position of their field in the hierarchy of power (Bourdieu, 2005; Hilgers & Mangez, 2015). When the field of strategy holds a strong position in the organizational hierarchy of power, it is likely that the patterning of material arrangements will reinforce an orientation towards exclusion or domination. Conversely, patterning material arrangements towards controversy or conversation is a way for top and senior managers from other fields to gain legitimacy over strategy top and senior managers.

Learning during open participation

Scholars consider that enactments of open participation practices generate learning for both strategy specialists and non-specialists (Healey et al., 2015) that eases subsequent participation. Strategists are supposed to move towards a disposition to openness and develop new abilities, such as fostering effective relationships with non-specialists (Angwin, Paroutis, & Mitson, 2009; Hautz et al., 2017). Non-specialists are expected to develop new understandings related to strategy (Vilà & Canales, 2008).

A specific enactment of open participation practice indeed provides occasions for non-specialists to socialize with strategy specialists, thereby initiating legitimate peripheral participation in the field of strategy and providing possibilities for learning. However, learning does not occur straightforwardly and depends on one’s willingness to learn (Schatzki, 2017) and accept adaptations in what one considers the right way of enacting practices (Alkemeyer & Buschmann, 2017). As habituated practitioners with internalized dispositions, both strategy specialists and non-specialists are likely to be reluctant to deviate, even partially, from the normativity inscribed in their own fields of practices because they fear potential conflicts between occupational and strategist identities (Mantere, 2005; Schildt et al., 2020) and marginalization in their field (Gomez, 2010). Yet, opening participation constitutes special circumstances in which both must accept discrepancies between their field-specific dispositions and the adaptations they need to make.

Practice scholars have extensively discussed why some practitioners are able to cope with the discrepancies outlined above and why some are not (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015). They stress that practitioners are not socialized in only one field, develop ‘hybrid’ dispositions (Abdelnour et al., 2017; Adams, 2006; Bresnen, Hodgson, Bailey, Hassard, & Hyde, 2019) and are able to mobilize various repertoires of actions according to circumstances (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015). However, hybrid dispositions are a double-edged sword: On the one hand, they allow for flexible identities (Abraham & Ingram, 2013) and reflexive abilities (Adams, 2006); on the other hand, they can generate tensions and negative emotional responses (Friedman, 2016).

Both Friedman (2016) and Abraham and Ingram (2013) argue that entering a new field slowly rather than quickly helps in limiting negative feelings. This suggests that progressively enlarging the participation of non-specialists during a specific enactment of participation or across successive enactments will help foster learning for non-specialists. Friedman (2016) further demonstrates that keeping sporadic contact with one’s original field mitigates negative feelings; this suggests that strategy specialists should be offered the possibility of excluding non-specialists from time to time. In addition, the ability to develop hybrid dispositions depends on the extent to which practitioners experience a safe learning climate (Grohnert, Meuwissen, & Gijselaers, 2019; Schatzki, 2017; Shore et al., 2011). Therefore, safeness-oriented management practices (Shore et al., 2011) that provide ‘ontological security’ (Mantere & Whittington, 2020) are needed such that the strategist identity appears accessible to non-specialists, strategy specialists accept variations in their internalized normative ways of doing strategy and learning takes place.

Altogether, the possibilities for learning will differ according to where the enactment of participation unfolds. In the exclusion zone, non-specialists are most likely to experience feelings of exclusion that jeopardize learning and subsequent participation (Shore et al., 2011). Indeed, some open-strategy scholars (Dobusch & Kapeller, 2018; Luedicke et al., 2017) report a decreasing willingness to participate among all participants because of disappointments linked to poor outcomes, conflicts or interpersonal tensions. Therefore, previous enactments in the exclusion zone reinforce the probability that ensuing participation will also occur in the exclusion zone. Conversely, Luedicke and colleagues (2017) suggest that conversations at the beginning allow for domination at a later stage without provoking reactions from non-specialists. Eventually, enactments in the controversy zone are characterized by an unsafe learning climate and strong emotional responses so that learning may appear unlikely. However, they are also the locus for breakdowns and create possibilities for identity work (Adams, 2006) and reflexivity (Herepath, 2014) to the extent that emotion work is supported (Hibbert, Beech, Callagher, & Siedlok, 2021). If not, then subsequent enactments are likely to revert to exclusion.

Contrary to Angwin et al.’s (2009) and Hautz et al.’s (2017) suggestions, top and senior managers, rather than strategy specialists, should learn to foster effective relationships within organizations and develop competences in process management and motivation. Indeed, they have a greater ability to pattern material arrangements and encourage management practices that facilitate the introduction of breaches and a safe learning climate. They are more able to sustain fruitful tensions between the field of strategy and other fields if open participation is to deliver its promise of larger sets of options and stronger commitment. However, the ability of top and senior managers to balance other organizational fields against the field of strategy, or vice versa, depends on the relative position of their field in the organizational hierarchy of power.

Long-term consequences of opening participation

Across enactments, strategy specialists and non-specialists cumulate learning. In this section, we discuss the uncertain consequences of participants’ learning on the autonomy of the strategy field and its position in the organizational hierarchy of fields.

On the one hand, repeated enactments of participation practices – particularly in the domination zone – contribute to the diffusion of strategy tools and language among non-specialists, and consequently, they contribute to the visibility of the symbolic capital attached to strategy in other fields (Schmitz et al., 2017). Non-specialists’ learning of strategy makes them internalize the rules, general understandings and teleological structure infused in strategy practices so that they can be enrolled as supplementary resources by seasoned (top and senior) strategists to sustain and increase their own legitimacy. In turn, the increased legitimacy of top and senior strategists may result in a more widespread use of strategy tools and language, resulting in a never-ending circle of reinforcement of the strategy field and contributing to the ‘strategization’ of the organization (Carter, 2013). Contrary to Hautz and colleagues’ (2017, p. 307) proposition that opening strategy may undermine strategy specialists’ legitimacy and remove status differences between ‘formal strategists’ and ‘ordinary participants’, this suggests that it reinforces the recognition of strategy specialists’ specific competences and status. This has consequences for non-specialists, particularly middle managers, because they acculturate to the field of strategy while still being mostly involved in day-to-day operations rather than their organization’s future. This may cause discrepancies (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003) and difficulties in sustaining peaceful identities (Thomas & Linstead, 2002) because participating in two fields with different understandings, rules and time horizons requires intense identity work loaded with stress and anxiety (Bresnen et al., 2019; Friedman, 2016). This explains the ‘burdening of empowerment’ (Hautz et al., 2017), where opening participation results in increased workload and cognitive and emotional loads. This acculturation may also cause fantasies (Sveningsson & Larsson, 2006) that explain the ‘escalation of expectations’ (Hautz et al., 2017) because middle managers enter the strategy field as newcomers holding the lowest positions and ‘recognize the legitimacy of a symbolic order that is unfavourable to them’ (Hilgers & Mangez, 2015, p. 11). This results in a dissociation wherein they construct a strategist identity while not being allowed to participate significantly in strategy-making; this can result in ‘disappointed expectations and potential allegations of “cheap talk” or “open washing”’ (Hautz et al., 2017, p. 303).

On the other hand, opening participation may be hazardous for strategy specialists: Rather than submitting to the normative understandings of strategy practices, non-specialists may engage in strategies aimed at subverting the field’s values, meanings and interests and at contesting the boundaries of the strategy field – i.e. who is a strategist and what strategy is or should be. Indeed, the definition of fields’ boundaries and the control of who can enter the field are one of the most important stakes of the political struggles around the organizational hierarchy of power (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Townley, 2014). If strategy specialists fail to protect the canonical uses of strategy tools and language, they risk lessening the perceived value of their expertise and their cultural capital (Armstrong, 1985). This may result in the appropriation of strategy practices by other fields and their infusion with other teleoaffective structures and general understandings (Hui, 2017), such that more fields can claim their legitimacy when dealing with strategy (Knights & Morgan, 1991) and take precedence over the strategy field in the organizational hierarchy of power.

It is difficult to predict whether cumulated enactments of opening participation lead to the decline or reinforcement of the strategy field in the organizational hierarchy of power. In all cases, open participation can be seen as a weapon in the struggle for organizational power between practitioners. Consciously or not, strategy non-specialists – particularly top and senior managers – may use open participation practices to subvert the rules and promote the visibility of their own cultural capital; meanwhile, strategists may use open participation to conserve and extend the visibility of their cultural capital. Thus, enactments of open participation practices participate in the struggle for power among organizational elites.

Conclusion

Political aspects of open participation in strategy

Our work aims to advance the theoretical understanding of political confrontations at the intersection of fields of practices when opening participation in deliberate strategy-making. By doing this, we respond to the repeated calls of strategy-as-practice scholars to study the politics of participation (Burgelman et al., 2018; Vaara et al., 2019). Our article proposes four ideal-types of enactments of open participation, and it provides a theoretical apparatus for analysing political dynamics by discussing how actual enactments navigate within these four ideal-typical zones and can be provisionally and marginally relieved from the normativity of organizational practice-arrangement bundles by manoeuvring around materiality and the entry or exit of participants.

Our article also contributes to deepening our understanding of Hautz et al.’s (2017) dilemma of empowerment: non-specialists fear identity threats while simultaneously being lured by the prestige of the strategy field. Management practices are then required to decide on an ‘ideal’ degree of empowerment and, more importantly, to provide breaches for reflexivity, some ‘ontological security’ (Mantere & Whittington, 2020) and a safeness climate. Together, manipulating material arrangements and providing a safe learning climate and breaches for reflexivity contribute to extending or restricting the range of possible enactments. Future research could examine more systematically what specific forms of material arrangements orientate towards different zones of opening participation.

Eventually, a more critical view of opening participation to non-specialists suggests that it may be a way for strategists to reinforce the domination of their field in their organization and their own status within it as experienced practitioners, thereby explaining the desires behind ‘open-washing’ (Vaara et al., 2019). Training non-specialists in strategy – as Hautz and colleagues (2017) suggest – merely makes them low-status newcomers to the strategy field, and practices of open participation in strategy could be seen as investments in symbolic and cultural capital rather than pursuits of organizational effectiveness. From a practical viewpoint, this means that managers should pay attention to non-specialists’ silence or peaceful conversations with strategists when opening participation. The participation of non-specialists must be supported by mobilizing material arrangements and specific management practices if open participation is to unfold in zones of controversy or domination and lead to bright new insights or stronger commitment.

Power at the intersection of fields of practices

Our conceptualization of organizations as sets of nested sub-fields with varying autonomy and positions in the organizational hierarchy of power allows us to discuss the theoretical consequences of uneven legitimacy and identity strength on the political struggles that occur during enactments of participation practices. We argue that opening participation leads to the confrontation of different fields with uneven power and that other organizational fields may intervene to pattern these confrontations. We highlight the various manoeuvres that increase or decrease the position of fields in the organizational hierarchy of power. Enactment after enactment, repeated manoeuvres around provisional material arrangements together with reflexive learning can lead to the decline or reinforcement of the strategy field in an organization.

By highlighting the importance of legitimacy in strategy-making processes, we develop a practice-based understanding of the organizational distribution of power not in relation to organizational charts but instead connected to the varying hierarchy of fields in the organization (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008). Our research deepens our understanding of how people are both submitted to and enact systemic power structures through participation practices, thus contributing to a post-processual understanding of strategy (Chia & MacKay, 2007). This advances our knowledge of how power practices are enacted in the nexus of overlapping occupational, management, strategy and open-participation practices, and it responds to the call of practice theory scholars to explore power at the intersection of fields of practices (Hui, 2017; Watson, 2017).

Our research does not address individual differences within a given field. Yet, like any other social field, strategy fields in organizations comprise people with differentiated positions and different interests, and they are likely to exhibit contentious claims between strategy specialists with competing versions and statuses related to strategy, such as between upholders of traditional strategy and upholders of open strategy. Schmitz and colleagues (2017) suggest that practitioners with low status in their field may want to position themselves in other fields with the symbolic and cultural capital associated with their original field. How does this translate to strategy-making? Do junior strategists exhibit more openness towards variations in strategy practices because of an agenda of entering other fields with higher positions? Future research is needed to understand the consequences of intra-field struggles for the enactment of power at the intersection of fields. Specifically, how practitioners from other fields, such as CFOs or COOs, leverage these struggles to enact their own legitimacy is consequential to how organizations think about their future.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Senior Editor Paul Spee and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. Scientific research is an open participation practice; our conversations and controversies throughout the review cycles were very helpful in improving earlier drafts of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Cécile Belmondo is Full Professor at IAE de Lille – University of Lille. Her research focuses on the practice and processes of routine emergence and strategy formation, with an interest in materiality.

Caroline Sargis-Roussel is Professor in Management and Vice Dean at IESEG School of Management, University of Lille. Her research interests are knowledge management, implementation of strategy tools, power dynamics and social capital in cross-functional teams.

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