Participation in strategy work

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Garlick, Ashley ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2287-4521 (2019) Participation in strategy work. In: UWL Doctoral Conference 2019, 29 March 2019, London, UK. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

No single CEO or strategy team can know it all. Organizations are beginning to understand the value in involving others in the creation of strategy. There is mounting evidence that opening the strategy processes to a wider audience through greater inclusion and transparency can have significant positive benefits for firms (Mack and Szulanski, 2017). Sitting alongside emergent strategies and autonomous strategy work, participation is used to increase commitment to strategies (Laine and Vaara, 2015: 616), while an absence of participation has a negative impact on the quality of the resulting strategy (Floyd and Wooldridge, 2000). Despite this, within the academic literature there is currently a very limited understanding of how participation informs and shapes strategy work in organizations (Hutter, Nketia, and Füller, 2017). This is in part because the concept is inconsistently used by scholars and lacks clear definition.

This study aims to produce a framework of participation strategy making that explains how practices, objects and episodes are used as part of a strategizing process. It identifies practices that are employed during strategizing and asks how participation in strategy making can influence a strategizing process. Exploring the early findings of a case study, eight semi-structured, in-depth interviews with senior and middle-managers in a large, third-sector organization are analysed together with document analysis and participant observation of strategizing episodes. It finds that triggers for adopting participation practices are influenced by changes to senior management personnel, who then deliberately embark on listening exercises. It puts forward a three-stage framework for understanding strategic formulation, informed by a sensemaking perspective: formulation, exploration and confirmation. The study generates important insights into how participation can best be used as part of a wider strategizing process.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Other)
Keywords:	participation, strategy as practice
Subjects:	Business and finance > Business and management > Strategy
Depositing User:	Ashley Garlick
Date Deposited:	16 Jun 2019 12:10
Last Modified:	01 Sep 2021 02:45
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/6151

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References

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Participation in strategy work

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