The performativity of strategy: Taking stock and moving ahead
Section snippets
From strategy practice to the performativity of strategy
Since strategy research undertook something of a practice turn (Whittington, 2006) dominant economics-framings of strategy and strategy work have been complemented, and in certain cases challenged, by ideas and conceptualizations drawn from theorists who see with more of a “sociological eye” (Whittington, 2007). Where these thought-provoking and insightful works have succeeded is in highlighting the importance of understanding how it is that strategy is accomplished (Burgelman et al., 2017;
What next? A research agenda on/for the performativity of strategy
While we believe the adoption of a performative approach in strategy shows considerable promise, as the papers published in this special issue show, such an endeavor is also associated with important challenges. In what follows, we outline some of these and offer three avenues of research, which can help strategy scholars engage in a process of creative reappropriation of the performativity concept and develop a promising performative agenda on strategy.
Conclusion
The prolonged and growing attention on the practice of strategy has led to an increasing interest in how strategy work is accomplished. Performativity enhances our understanding of strategizing through its dual focus on post-structural conceptualizations, and on its rejection of the assumption that strategy discourses, tools, methods and approaches pre-exist their embodiment by strategists. Performativity encourages researchers to focus their inquiries on how strategy work is achieved when
Laure Cabantous is Professor of Strategy and Organization at Cass Business School, City, University of London. She is also Affiliated Professor at HEC Montreal. Her research agenda is organized around two areas: the performative power of management theories and models; and practices of valuation and calculation in organizations (in relation with strategy making). Laure has also an interest in decision-making practices under uncertainty, and distributed cognition in organizations (i.e., how
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Laure Cabantous is Professor of Strategy and Organization at Cass Business School, City, University of London. She is also Affiliated Professor at HEC Montreal. Her research agenda is organized around two areas: the performative power of management theories and models; and practices of valuation and calculation in organizations (in relation with strategy making). Laure has also an interest in decision-making practices under uncertainty, and distributed cognition in organizations (i.e., how organizational actors make use of “things” to think and make decisions). Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Management, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Human Relations, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.
Jean-Pascal Gond is Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Cass Business School, City University London, UK. His research mobilizes organization theory and economic sociology to investigate corporate social responsibility (CSR). Key research programmes currently in progress on CSR include the roles of standards and metrics in the institutionalization of CSR in the financial marketplace and in corporations, the influence of CSR on employees and the variations of CSR across varieties of capitalism. His research in economic sociology is concerned with the influence of theory on managerial practice (performativity) and the governance of self-regulation. He has published in the fields of CSR, perfomativity and organization theory in leading academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Business and Society, Economy and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Organization Studies and French journals such as Finance Contrôle Stratégie and Revue Française de Gestion
Alex Wright is Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Organization at Sheffield University Management School. His research interests center on sociological approaches to the practice and process of strategy, the communicative constitution of organization, organizational routines, performativity, and developing criticality in management learning and education. He has published in journals such as Organization, M@n@gement and Journal of Management Inquiry.