Elsevier

Long Range Planning

Volume 51, Issue 3, June 2018, Pages 407-416
Long Range Planning

The performativity of strategy: Taking stock and moving ahead

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2018.03.002Get rights and content

Abstract

This special issue groups a set of contributions that together question and extend the boundaries of strategy research by examining strategy work as a performative pursuit. In this introduction, we position the special issue papers within the broader context of performativity studies in organization and management theory. To do so, we ground the analysis of the performativity of strategy in the recent developments of strategy-as-practice research, clarify the ambitions of a performative turn in the study of strategy, introduce the plurality of performativity meanings and uses in prior research and specify the conceptualizations of performativity mobilized in the seven contributions that form this special issue. Taking stock of their rich insights, and reflecting on our editing of this special issue, we then identify key challenges underlying the constitution of the body of studies on the performativity of strategy, and propose three avenues of research that together sketch a research agenda for advancing the study of strategy as a performative endeavour.

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

References (75)

  • L. D'Adderio

    The performativity of routines: theorising the influence of artefacts and distributed agencies on routines dynamics

    Res. Pol.

    (2008)
  • K. Kautz et al.

    Sociomateriality at the royal court of IS: a jester's monologue

    Inf. Organ.

    (2013)
  • M. Alvesson et al.

    Critical leadership studies: the case for critical performativity

    Hum. Relat.

    (2012)
  • J.L. Austin

    How to Do Things with Words

    (1962)
  • K. Barad

    Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter

    Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

    (2003)
  • K. Barad

    Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

    (2007)
  • P. Bourdieu

    Language and Symbolic Power

    (1991)
  • R. Burgelman et al.

    Strategy processes and practices: dialogues and intersections

    Strat. Manag. J.

    (2017)
  • J. Butler

    Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative

    (1997)
  • J. Butler

    Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

    (1999)
  • L. Cabantous et al.

    Critical essay: reconsidering critical performativity

    Hum. Relat.

    (2016)
  • L. Cabantous et al.

    Rational decision-making as ‘performative praxis’: explaining rationality's éternel retour

    Organ. Sci.

    (2011)
  • L. Cabantous et al.

    Decision theory as practice: crafting rationality in organization

    Organ. Stud.

    (2010)
  • M. Callon

    The Laws of the Markets

    (1998)
  • M. Callon

    What does it mean to say that economics is performative?

  • C. Carter et al.

    Re-framing strategy: power, politics and accounting

    Account Audit. Account. J.

    (2010)
  • F. Cochoy

    Myriam's ‘adverteasing’: on the performative power of marketing promises

    J. Market. Manag.

    (2015)
  • F. Cooren et al.

    Communication, organizing and organization: an overview and introduction to the special issue

    Organ. Stud.

    (2011)
  • L. D'Adderio et al.

    Performing modularity: competing rules, performative struggles and the effect of organizational theories on the organization

    Organ. Stud.

    (2014)
  • J. Derrida

    Signature event context

    Glyph

    (1979)
  • S. Esper et al.

    Supporting alternative organizations? Exploring scholars' involvement in the performativity of worker-recovered companies

    Organization

    (2017)
  • M.S. Feldman

    Organizational routines as a source of continuous change

    Organ. Sci.

    (2000)
  • M.S. Feldman et al.

    Beyond routines as things: introduction to the special issue on routine dynamics

    Organ. Sci.

    (2016)
  • P. Fleming et al.

    When performativity fails: implications for critical management studies

    Hum. Relat.

    (2016)
  • J. Ford et al.

    Becoming the leader: leadership as material presence

    Organ. Stud.

    (2017)
  • V. Fournier et al.

    At the critical moment": conditions and prospects for critical management studies

    Hum. Relat.

    (2000)
  • R. Garud et al.

    Performativity as ongoing journeys: implications for strategy, entrepreneurship, and innnovation

    Long. Range Plan.

    (2018)
  • S. Ghoshal

    Bad management theories are destroying good management practices

    Acad. Manag. Learn. Educ.

    (2005)
  • J.-P. Gond et al.

    How do things become strategic? ‘Strategifying’ corporate social responsibility

    Strat. Organ.

    (2017)
  • J.-P. Gond et al.

    Performativity

  • J.-P. Gond et al.

    What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity

    Int. J. Manag. Rev.

    (2016)
  • S. Guérard et al.

    From performance to performativity in strategy research

    Management

    (2013)
  • I. Hacking

    Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science

    (1983)
  • N. Harding et al.

    Towards a performative theory of resistance: senior managers and revolting subject(ivitie)s

    Organ. Stud.

    (2017)
  • J. Hassard et al.

    Can sociological paradigms still inform organizational analysis? A paradigm model for post-paradigm times

    Organ. Stud.

    (2013)
  • P. Jarzabkowski et al.

    Constructing spaces for strategic work: a multimodal perspective

    Br. J. Manag.

    (2015)
  • P. Jarzabkowski et al.

    Strategy tools in use: a framework for understanding “technologies of rationality” in practice

    Strat. Manag. J.

    (2015)
  • Cited by (0)

    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.

    View full text