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For higher Ed market: The basis of this book is an in-depth empirical study of strategy and strategizing in universities. It provides insights into how strategies of research, teaching and commercial income are shaped over time, as well as considering the problems of size and scope faced by modern universities. Theoretically, the study is robustly framed within the strategy literature, while the detailed empirical analysis makes a clear contribution to our understanding of putting strategy into practice in both the university and wider contexts. Many practical stories and exhibits about doing strategy in universities are included that will be evocative and thought-provoking for those researching, studying or managing higher education institutions. With its unusual combination of a strong strategy framework and rich empirical insights into strategizing in universities, this book is of interest to students of higher education management, as well as to practising managers in higher education. ′This volume will appeal to researchers, students and those engaged in strategic management in higher education. The case study material provides a detailed portrait of the ways in which senior managers engage in strategic development. Overall, the volume provides rich insights on strategic management in higher education′ -Professor Bob Burgess, Vice-Chancellor, University of Leicester ′This is a completely original account of three contrasting universities′ approach to creating and managing strategy in modern conditions. The problem of multiple strategies which interact with one another will be recognised by every practitioner but have not been described in this way before.\" Strategy as Practice\" represents an important contribution to higher education literature because it theorises decisions and strategies which are for the most part instinctive responses to external realities′ - Professor Michael Shattock was Registrar of the University of Warwick before taking up his Visiting Professorship at the Institute of Education, University of London, where he is Director of the MBA in Higher Education Management. ′Strategy is something all organizations are encouraged to have. Many that do get it wrong. Their strategies are empty black box ′diamonds′ or other modish schemes. In this book Jarzabkowski argues, cogently, that strategy should be seen in terms of practice - in terms of what it is that organizations and strategic actors do when they do strategy. The book signals a major re-orientation and intellectual maturation of a field that is too important for organizations to leave to the odd blend of occasional scholarship, analysis based on aggregate data, and inspired prescription that has characterized much of strategy to present. In addition, it charts how organizations in one of the most important institutional areas of contemporary societies, the universities, actually do strategy′ Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

This paper advances understanding of the coordination of interdependence between multiple intersecting routines and its influence on the balancing of coexisting ostensive patterns. Building on a professional service routine—the deal appraisal routine—and its intersections with four related routines, we develop a dynamic framework that explains the coordination of standardization and flexibility in four ways. First, intersecting routines have shifting salience in the performance of a focal routine, and this shifting salience is enacted through professional skill and judgment. Second, each intersection amplifies pressure toward one or the other ostensive pattern thus introducing dynamism into the balancing of competing ostensive patterns. Third, professionals skillfully acknowledge these pressures from intersecting routines to orient toward one ostensive pattern and then reorient the performance of the routine toward the opposite ostensive pattern. Fourth, this balancing act, which we theorize as reciprocal task interdependence, occurs within the moment of performing each task, so providing a highly dynamic understanding of the association between routine interdependence and the coordination of coexisting ostensive patterns.

This paper extends existing understandings of how actors' constructions of ambiguity shape the emergent process of strategic action. We theoretically elaborate the role of rhetoric in exploiting strategic ambiguity, based on analysis of a longitudinal case study of an internationalization strategy within a business school. Our data show that actors use rhetoric to construct three types of strategic ambiguity: protective ambiguity that appeals to common values in order to protect particular interests, invitational ambiguity that appeals to common values in order to invite participation in particular actions, and adaptive ambiguity that enables the temporary adoption of specific values in order to appeal to a particular audience at one point in time. These rhetorical constructions of ambiguity follow a processual pattern that shapes the emergent process of strategic action. Our findings show that (1) the strategic actions that emerge are shaped by the way actors construct and exploit ambiguity, (2) the ambiguity intrinsic to the action is analytically distinct from ambiguity that is constructed and exploited by actors, and (3) ambiguity construction shifts over time to accommodate the emerging pattern of actions.

This paper uses a practice perspective to study coordinating as dynamic activities that are continuously created and modified in order to enact organizational relationships and activities. It is based on the case of Servico, an organization undergoing a major restructuring of its value chain in response to a change in government regulation. In our case, the actors iterate between the abstract concept of a coordinating mechanism referred to as end-to-end management and its performance in practice. They do this via five performative–ostensive cycles: (1) enacting disruption, (2) orienting to absence, (3) creating elements, (4) forming new patterns, and (5) stabilizing new patterns. These cycles and the relationships between them constitute a process model of coordinating. This model highlights the importance of absence in the coordinating process and demonstrates how experiencing absence shapes subsequent coordinating activity.

This article develops an empirically grounded process model of how managers in organizations respond to coexisting paradoxical tensions. With a longitudinal real-time study, we examine how a telecommunications firm copes with an organizing paradox between market and regulatory demands and how this paradox influences belonging and performing paradoxes for managers. These paradoxes coevolve over time as managers shift from defensive responses that attempt to circumvent paradox to active responses that accept and work within paradox. Our process model clarifies the recursive relationship between different kinds of paradox, the cumulative impact of responses to paradox over time, and the way that responses to paradox become embedded in organizational structures.

In response to critiques of strategy tools as unhelpful or potentially dangerous for organizations , we suggest casting a sociological eye on how tools are actually mobilized by strategy makers. In conceptualizing strategy tools as tools-in-use, we offer a framework for examining the ways that the affordances of strategy tools and the agency of strategy makers interact to shape how and when tools are selected and applied. Further, rather than evaluating the correct or incorrect use of tools, we highlight the variety of outcomes that result, not just for organizations but also for the tools and the individuals who use them. We illustrate this framework with a vignette and propose an agenda and methodological approaches for further scholarship on the use of strategy tools.

While the strategy-as-practice research agenda has gained considerable momentum over the past five years, many challenges still remain in developing it into a robust field of research. In this editorial, we define the study of strategy from a practice perspective and propose five main questions that the strategy-as-practice agenda seeks to address. We argue that a coherent approach to answering these questions may be facilitated using an overarching conceptual framework of praxis, practices and practitioners. This framework is used to explain the key challenges underlying the strategy-as-practice agenda and how they may be examined empirically. In discussing these challenges, we refer to the contributions made by existing empirical research and highlight under-explored areas that will provide fruitful avenues for future research. The editorial concludes by introducing the articles in the special issue.

Research summary: This article brings together the competitive dynamics and strategy-as-practice literatures to investigate relational competition. Drawing on a global ethnography of the reinsurance market, we develop the concept of micro-competitions, which are the focus of competitors' everyday competitive practices. We find variation in relational or rivalrous competition by individual competitors across the phases of a micro-competition, between competitors within a micro-competition, and across multiple micro-competitions. These variations arise from the interplay between the unfolding competitive arena and the implementation of each firm's strategic portfolio. We develop a conceptual framework that makes four contributions to: relational competition; reconceptualizing action and response; elaborating on the awarenessmotivation-capability framework within competitive dynamics; and the recursive dynamic by which implementing strategy inside firms shapes, and is shaped by, the competitive arena. Managerial summary: Competition is often seen as war: \"attack,\" \"retaliation,\" and \"dethronement.\" Yet competition can also be relational, incorporating collaboration and reciprocity. We show these dynamics in a syndicated financial market, reinsurance, where multiple competitors get the same price for a share of the same deal. Our competitors have rivalrous motivations to win business and relational motivations to ensure buoyant pricing, maintain market health, and enable long-standing client relationships to persist. These motivations are grounded in the strategizing practices with which firms implement their strategic portfolios and compete on deals. Competitors' rivalrous or relational motivations are highly dynamic, shifting throughout the competition on any deal and across the multiple deals on which they compete. Cumulatively these practices shape the entire market for these volatile, uncertain financial products.

This paper addresses a fundamental conundrum at the heart of meaning making: How is agreement to change achieved amid multiple, coexisting meanings? This challenge is particularly salient when proposing a new strategic initiative as it introduces new meanings that must coexist with multiple prevailing meanings. Yet, prior literature on meaning-making processes places different emphases on the extent to which agreement to a new initiative requires shared meaning across diverse organizational members. We propose the concept of a joint account as the means through which an agreement to change may be achieved that accommodates multiple, coexisting meanings that satisfy diverse constituents’ vested interests. Based on the findings from an ethnographic study of a university’s strategic planning process, we develop a framework that demonstrates two different patterns in the microprocesses of meaning making. These patterns extend our understanding about the way vested interests enable or constrain the construction of a joint account. In doing so, we contribute to knowledge about resistance, ambiguity, and lack of agreement to a proposed change.

Religion has significantly influenced societies throughout history and across the globe. Family firms—particularly those operating in strongly religious regions—are more likely to be subject to the influence of religion. However, little is known about the mechanisms by which religion affects business activities in family firms. We study how religion impacts business activities through a qualitative study of two Anatolian-based family firms in Turkey. We find that religion provides a dominant meaning system that plays a key role in constituting business activities through three mechanisms: (1) family imports religious practices as business practices; (2) family adheres to religious values as a rationale for business actions; and (3) family religious values define business taboos by avoiding the evil eye. These mechanisms highlight how religion becomes a source of well-understood business practices, how religion defines the nature of rationality that guides business activities, and how religious taboos can delimit the range of potential business activities, respectively.