Abstract
In Practicing Strategy, Paroutis et al. (2013) set out to provide a text that puts to use some of the tenets and core concepts of the ‘strategy-as-practice’ (SAP) approach, to which they show a strong allegiance. The book seeks to be simultaneously research-led and practice-driven, and features up-to-date discussions of theory and case study examples of its application throughout the book. A strong focus on strategic practices, strategy practitioners and strategic tools or artefacts (this includes discourse) both supplements and complements existing SAP texts, such as Johnson et al. (2007) and Golsorkhi et al. (2010). The book provides a synthetic and sympathetic review of key SAP contributions before pursuing the micro-level of analysis of a selective set of topics that the authors consider to be central to SAP academic debates. In particular, they strongly build upon the SAP tradition by deploying some of its frameworks and principles, which they extend in drawing on their own original research to focus on three distinct areas: the work of strategic teams, mergers and acquisitions and strategic discourse.
The book is structured into five parts: the first four including an introduction and 7 theoretical chapters, while the last one, which accounts for half of the book, consists of five case studies. The introduction to this last part sheds some light on the book’s choice of structure. It emphasizes the multi-layered quality of practice-led and research-led teaching, and draws on Jarzabkowski and Whittington (2008) and Holbrook and Devonshire (2005) to sketch ways to materialize a practice-led approach to learning and teaching strategy that would be informed by current research on practice with a tripartite framework that combines three forms of teaching: practice-informed, practice-skills and practice-inquiry teaching. Drawing on first-hand practice-based research conducted by the authors, practice-informed teaching is provided throughout the book with the introduction of practice-oriented concepts and frameworks that are aimed to stimulate students’ thinking, and vignettes helping them to develop a feel for the daily practice of strategy-making, interpret strategists’ actions and interactions and promote critical reflection. The book’s format (which includes an abundance of mini-cases in addition to more extensive ones) also aims to facilitate the development of critical forms of inquiry and students’ practical skills by encouraging the examination of ongoing, ‘hands-on’ strategic practice.
The first part and chapter of the book (Part I; ‘Practicing Strategy – Foundations and Importance’) provides a panorama of existing schools of strategic thought to delineate a shift in the focus of attention from strategy to strategizing, positioning and providing a justification for the SAP perspective relative to mainstream approaches. In a scholarly but accessible overview, it usefully outlines essential contributions to the SAP approach, and introduces two frameworks: the ESCO framework, developed by one of the authors, which enables the examination of the linkages between micro- and macro-levels of strategy-making, with a view to facilitating their alignment, and the important tripartite (3P) framework, an adaptation from Whittington (2006) that distinguishes between practitioners, practices and praxis, the actual activity and context of strategizing (see Figure 1.4, on p. 11). Sometimes, supplemented with additional frameworks, and used in a way that is reminiscent of Vaara and Whittington (2012), the 3P framework structures the theoretical elements of the book and is being repeatedly mobilized in the different chapters of the book as a matrix for interpreting strategic action throughout the chapters and in the case studies.
Devoted to the first ‘P’ of the 3P framework: strategy practitioners, Part II of the book (‘Strategy Practitioners’; Chapters 2–4) includes three very welcome chapters on Chief Strategy Officers (CSOs), Strategy Teams and Strategy Consultants that contribute to the distinctiveness of the book. Starting with a section that extends from upper echelons to a wider set of actors, the initial overview is quickly followed by Chapter 2, which presents up-to-date research on the changes in organizational structures leading to the emergence of strategy directors (also called CSOs). The chapter provides an overview of the sparse literature characterizing the distinctiveness of this role and the contours of their activity, supported by original empirical data. It achieves a hands-on focus on real-world practice along with a balance between North American and European research, effectively highlighting the relational, transversal and fluid nature of the role, its relative disconnection or abstraction from formal organizational structure and hierarchy, but its simultaneous embeddedness in a broad set of relationships with multiple actors, and the complex density of the micro-level of daily practices that it involves. Although the perspective conveyed heavily resonates with Mintzberg’s early work on managers, it is not directly or explicitly positioned relatively to it, and one can regret the way that the role of CSOs is mostly formulated in terms of being ‘polycephalous’, a quality that is presented as being specific to that role, which neglects the fact that authors such as Gosling and Mintzberg (2003) have identified this as being the case for many 21st-century managers and/or leaders.
Chapter 3 insightfully extends this focus on strategy practitioners to the functioning of strategy teams, harmoniously complementing the perspective developed in Chapter 2 but further highlighting the relational and collective nature of strategy development practices, as well as their often distributed character. The position/perspective advocated is a clear departure from most formulations of strategy development in strategy texts, which most often lack any detailed account of the complexity of actual practices (here praxis). Basing themselves on Paroutis and Pettigrew (2007), the authors discuss a typology of seven core activities (relational, leadership, analytical or reflective) employed by strategy teams in the context of daily strategy-making, at different levels and as part of different modes of strategizing (see matrix, p. 42). The 3P framework is mobilized to conclude the chapter and integrate the discussion from the preceding chapters.
Chapter 4 focuses on strategy consultants and their perceived role as both external actors and stakeholders in practising strategy. It both provides a short overview outlining the contrasting theoretical perspectives on the subject as well as an insight into the actual practices of consulting, offering examples from several different firms looking at their management of consulting interventions or the structure of their activity, including career progression or roles. Again, the 3P framework is applied to categorize elements of the consulting activity using the lens of practitioners, practices (including outputs and tools) and praxis, but only in conclusion. Had this framework been used from the very start to analyse these elements, it might have produced a more penetrating and original account. As it is, it tends to rearrange already familiar accents rather than to take the opportunity to go beyond them.
Part III (‘Influencing Strategy Practice’; Chapters 5–6) is devoted to the second ‘P’ of the 3P framework: practices (including tools) and includes three chapters whose coherence is still to fully establish. The introductory overview on how practitioners can influence strategy praxis and practices identifies two main pathways: one that is ‘artifact-oriented’ and involves the use of management tools and techniques, and another one that is more ‘action-oriented’. The introduction almost exclusively engages with the ‘artifact-oriented’ pathway, offering a useful but rather short and selective review that takes as its premises academic neglect of how ‘these tools are actually used … in managers’ day-to-day work of strategizing’ (p. 58; citing Kaplan and Jarzabkowski (2006). Starting with Rigby and Biloteau’s (2011) categorization of strategy tools, where classical ones such as benchmarking, strategic planning or the PESTLE and the SWOT frameworks are highlighted, the overview quickly moves to their context of use. Although this well-balanced chapter includes a good set of references, the decision to focus on the way tools are used rather than the character of the tools themselves seems to offer little more than a pretext for the neglect of widely used approaches such as cognitive mapping (Ackerman and Eden, 2005) or activity theory, which are represented in copious coverage, not to mention boundary objects (Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2009). In this, it is guilty of a tendency that is not uncommon within the SAP perspective to overstate differences by failing to refer to traditional contributions and striving artificially to differentiate itself as a new perspective (see Carter et al., 2008: 85). The somewhat gratuitous citation of De Certeau’s use of Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage in expanding the focus on practice is also unfortunate in the conclusion.
Chapter 5 (strategy through discourse) offers a perspicacious introduction to existing research on language and discourse as a social practice, giving particular attention to the way recurrent rationalizations, patterns of arguments, vocabularies and metaphorical framing participate in strategizing. It includes a neat typology outlining four different approaches to discourse in strategy, functional, interpretive, structural and critical perspectives, where differences between them, as well as the approaches that fall in-between (such as the ones traversing the functional and interpretative, which mark the boundaries of American mainstream thought) are insightfully discussed, each being illustrated by well-chosen contemporary research examples. This provides a very good overview of significant positions and possibilities, including the way metaphors have implications in terms of how agents of change view their role. The two mini-cases in this section offer distinctive analyses of the operation of ‘layers of meaning’ and ‘technologies of power’ unpacking step-by-step the analytic approaches of ‘situated symbolic action’ and ‘structuration’. Despite its quality, this chapter differs from the section introduction, and indeed, the rest of the book, by being written more as an academically dense journal article. Nevertheless, the treatment of critical approaches is at best an afterthought. It mentions Foucault but excludes Fairclough’s significant contribution to discourse analysis, as well as any reference to the wider field of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and specific work on the discourse of strategy by Hardy (see Hardy et al., 2006; Maguire and Hardy, 2005) or Vaara (see Mantere and Vaara, 2008; Vaara et al., 2010; Vaara and Tienari, 2008), for instance. It does, however, include mini-cases, which could easily be used in tutorials, as well as a good set of questions at the end.
Chapter 6 (strategy meaning in action) explores the meaning of the concept of strategy to practitioners, and what strategy actually means in practice, a subject considered by the authors to be an unexplored issue – a claim that is at times overstated. The chapter is meant to extend the discursive approach outlined in the previous chapter by considering first-order (individual), group, and institutional discourses through the use of data and some results from Paroutis and Heracleous (2013), whose content has been adapted to fit the needs of a textbook chapter. Abundant quotes are used to explore the functional (what strategy is expected to achieve as a means to an end), contextual, identity and metaphorical dimensions of strategy for strategy directors, the first three dimensions resonating with one specific P of the 3P framework, and the last one combining the three Ps. It is unfortunate that the discussion of identity aspects ignores the plentiful critical academic literature on identity, and the last section merely covers functionalist and mechanistic views of strategy by directors without critically investigating the possible influence of dominant discourses, and how they might contribute to these results. This is a disappointing replication of the limitations of the section devoted to critical views of strategy discourse in the previous chapter. Although critical literature is neglected, this chapter provides a useful initial short review of contributions on strategizing discursive practices, similar to previous chapters. The Nokia mini-case that it includes is, however, excellent. Indeed, these mini-cases are definitely a strength of the book.
Section IV (‘Practicing Strategy in Context’; Chapters 7–8) is meant to be devoted to the third P of the 3P framework (‘Praxis’) and begins by briefly delineating a contextualist view of strategy. In a way that is reminiscent of Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 7, which outlines an SAP approach focusing on strategic practices in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), is very much experience-led. The chapter, however, begins confusingly by reviewing the 3P framework, highlighting its shortcomings and supplementing it with another framework: text, tools and talk (which is adapted from De La Ville and Mounoud (2003), although the reference is incorrectly given in the text). The use of a supplementary framework is argued to be necessary to better account for the significant role of institutional forces in M&A, an element that is downplayed in the 3P framework. Unfortunately, the integration of the two frameworks and the potential overlaps are not appropriately developed. The relations and discrepancies between practices and praxis, and text, talk and tools would benefit from greater clarity of exposition. That said, the rest of the chapter is robustly developed with the help of an excellent mini-case, but conceptual issues remain.
Chapter 8 (‘Practicing Strategy in Complex Firms’) engages with the issue of distributed strategic activity across a community of practitioners in complex organizations. It offers a lively section on ‘engaged strategy participation’, with the help of an excellent case study (Beiersdorf UK), which clearly links with Chapters 2 and 4.
Overall, this section (Section IV) is strong on practical analysis and is set up well to support postgraduate (PG) teaching. Questions remain, however, on the choice of mergers and acquisitions and complexity only to illustrate the ideas, and the conceptual frameworks used are not always fully convincing in theory or practical application.
Section V (‘Case Studies’) carefully delineates the research- and practice-led approach to teaching that is developed by the proponents of the book. This is an important section for management learning about how to teach in a practice-based way. With the exception of the Apple case study (whose first half offers a synthesis of existing materials), the cases included are original, well-prepared and particularly suitable for MBAs. Centrica, the second case, could perhaps have been updated (it dates back to 2005, which is rather old). The third case, Marconi, starts with restructuring challenges that are extremely well stated, and both the Lafarge versus Blue Circle and Wikimedia cases are fascinating.
Practicing strategy is an interesting textbook whose focus offers a significant departure from existing strategy texts. It has the strength of having been seriously researched to provide an original combination of sources seen through a distinctive perspective. Accessible and well-written, it includes good questions and revisions activities to provide practical and useful support for both pedagogy and student learning. It is lively and strives to be up to date, although this at times leads to the inclusion of references to too many conference papers that students in particular might find difficult to access.
The real contribution of the book, and its distinctiveness, stems from the intimacy of the relationship between the text and the experience of the authors as researchers in the strategy field. This acts as a lens that delivers a genuinely different perspective on several of the themes that are unpacked by the SAP perspective. It holds a distinctive voice compared to more mainstream strategy texts, still mostly dominated by Porter’s thinking, even those displaying greater inclination towards practice and process (such as Johnson, Scholes and Whittington). The phenomenological richness of the book, where the experience of the authors is palpable, gives it more personality and immediacy than its prosaic competitors. In each chapter, the book also includes a distinctive and very insightful review of a selection of excellent published academic contributions that will be appreciated by strategy researchers and PhD students alike.
One less successful aspect of the book, which might be a downside of its selectivity, is its degree of theoretical integration. While being research-led, it is not systematic regarding the issues or concepts reviewed, being focused on articulating a particular point of view. Half of the book consists of case studies. As a result, it is not quite a text and not quite a research monograph, and its ideal audience is therefore not quite clear. Its structure in five parts is also surprising in that it doesn’t clearly match the tripartite framework that is meant to structure its development. An introduction, followed by three sections then a case study section would have brought less confusion and would have centred the 3P framework more clearly. That said, several parts of the book should be useful to MBA students.