The structuring of strategy as an organizational practice: Analytical possibilities based on organizational institutionalism

Abstract

This paper seeks to present a set of theoretical and methodological recommendations in order to guide the research on strategy. It starts from a discussion of the evolution of studies in organizational strategy, emphasizing its main assumptions as well as its common and differentiating features. It also presents the perspective of strategic-as-practice. Although the contributions of the strategic-as-practice approach, it has dismissed the organizational dimension, which should be at the center of the strategy concept. Because of this, we think it is necessary to revisit the relationship between organizing and strategizing. We follow the literature in suggesting a closer link between the studies of strategy and the theories of organization. We suggest that the approach of organizational institutionalism can contribute to expand the perspective of the strategy-as-practice and mediate its relationship with the structurationist approach, considering its applicability to the understanding of strategy as an organizational practice. However, we consider that institutional studies on strategy tended to keep the traditional dualistic views of the traditional approaches, requiring a reorientation based on the assumptions of the theory of structuration. Considering this initial discussion, the paper states the need to understand strategy a fortiori, what means to accept its constitution as a space and time limited set of practices that is configured and presented to researchers and practitioners in different ways as it unfolds and develop over time as a flow of actions discontinuously and discontinuously re-(produced) from, and based on, certain social and organizational structures. From this reformulation, we indicate that it is not productive to disconnect the concepts of strategy and organization and that researchers should understand the practice of organizational strategy as existing both as a routine flow of individual actions, included in the durée of daily practices, social and systemically integrated, and as rules and resources mnemonically preserved that promotes the generation of effects that distance itself in space and time and that can be observed by an analyst by means of its preceding factors, its current dynamic development and its consequences and future implications once he establishes an empirically analytical point of departure to the analysis.