Strategy as Practice (SAP) research focuses on three main areas: practitioners, practices, and praxis. [1] It views strategy as something constructed through the actions and interactions of practitioners as they draw on practices. [2] A key concern is explaining who strategists are, what they do, and how that influences strategy. [3] SAP draws on various social and organizational theories and can provide new insights into long-studied problems like dynamic capabilities.

1. Strategy as Practice
Brief overview
Mário Porfírio

2. Working Papers
Paula Jarzabkowski (2003)
RELEVANCE IN THEORY & RELEVANCE IN PRACTICE: STRATEGY THEORY IN
PRACTICE,
presented at the 19th EGOS Colloquium, 3-5 July 2003 (work in Progress)
Chris Fenton and Ann Langley (2008)
STRATEGY AS PRACTICE THE NARRATIVE TURN
HEC Montreal (Canadá)
Paula Jarzabkowski, Julia Balogun and David Seidl (2005)
FIVE KEY QUESTIONS AND A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR STRATEGY-
AS-PRACTICE RESEARCH (work in Progress)

3. Professor Paula Jarzabkowski
Professor of Strategic Management at Aston Business School and at
Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) Ghoshal Fellow
Director of the Aston Centre for Critical Infrastructure and Services (ACCIS).
Research focuses: social practices of strategy-making, particularly in regulated,
professional service and public sector organizations.
She publishes in leading journals, such as Academy of Management Journal,
Journal of Management Studies and Organization Studies.
Published the first book on strategy-as-practice, 'Strategy as Practice: An Activity-
Based Approach' with Sage in 2005.
Other research interest: relevance debate and the application of management
theory to practice.

4. Relevance in theory
• Existing theory is irrelevant in increasingly high
velocity business environments
» D’Aveni, 1994; Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001; Hamel and
Prahalad, 1994
• Since strategic management is an applied
discipline this is a serious criticism
» Jarzabkowski, 2005
• knowledge has become the key source of
competitive advantage
» Courtnay et al, 1997; Grant, 1996; Nahapiet and Ghoshal,
1998

5. Boundary conditions for four streams of strategy
theory
»Jarzabkowski, 2003

6. Boundary conditions, strategy tools
techniques and frameworks
»Jarzabkowski, 2003

7. Dissociation of strategy
theory in practice
»Jarzabkowski, 2003

8. strategizing
‘doing of strategy’
the construction of this flow of activity in ways
that are consequential for the firm through
the actions and interactions of multiple actors
and the practices that they draw upon.
(Jarzabkowski, 2005)

9. Strategic Activities
Not all activities
• Activities that draw on strategic practices.
Strategy is a particular type of activity that is connected with particular practices, such as
strategic planning, annual reviews, strategy workshops and their associated discourses.
(Barry and Elmes, 1997; Knights and Morgan 1991; Hendry 2000)
In the same way that science may be defined as those activities that draw on scientific
practices (e.g. methods, tools, scientific language) (Latour and Woolgar), strategy might be
defined as those activities that draw on particular strategic practices.
• Activity might be considered strategic to the extent that it is consequential for the strategic
outcomes, directions, survival and competitive advantage of the firm (Johnson et al, 2003),
even where these consequences are not part of an intended and formally articulated
strategy.

10. SAP framework
“practitioners” (senior managers, board members, consultants
and others) draw on more or less institutionalized strategic
“practices” (routines, tools or discourses at organizational and
extra-organizational levels) in idiosyncratic and creative ways
in their strategy
“praxis or practice” (specific activities such as meetings,
retreats, conversations, talk, interactions, behaviours) to
generate what is then conceived of as strategy
constituting in the process both themselves as strategy practitioners, and
potentially their own activities as the seeds for new strategy practices.
Whittington,2006

11. SAP framework
Practitioners shape strategic activity through
who they are, how they act and what resources they
draw upon in that action.
• Who they are
– As individuals and how they relate with others
– Experience of being a strategist
– In the organization (top level, mid/low level)
– Outside organization (Non Executive directors, Consultants,
Gurus, clients)

12. Practitioners
• What they do?
– ”making telephone calls and having meetings”
Mintzberg, 1973
– “what strategists do is connected to who
strategists are and the situations in which they
act.”
Jarzabkowski, 2005

13. Theoretical basis of SAP
What is the theoretical basis of strategy as practice research ?
How this aligns with existing organization and social theory
approaches?
Strategy as practice as a field is characterized less by what theory is
adopted than by what problem is explained.
The central research interest focuses on explaining
who strategists are, what they do and why and
how that is influential for the practice of strategy.
Jarzabkowski, 2005

14. Theoretical basis of SAP
… many problems posed in existing strategy research, such as
dynamic capabilities, resource-based view, knowledge-based view and strategy process
might be illuminated by a practice based approach to
theory,
their study.
Antonacopoulou, 2005; Jarzabkowski, 2005; Johnson et al, 2003.
… the field does not require ‘new’ theories per se, but to draw
upon a range of existing theories to explore strategy
problems defined within our conceptual framework, to
develop novel methods and research designs for their study
(Balogun et al, 2003), and to advance explanations of how strategy
is constructed using these different levels and units of
analysis.
Jarzabkowski, 2005

15. Practitioners
Literature dominated by concepts of strategy as a top-down process of
formulation separated from implementation,
focus upon top managers, their demographics and their decision-
making processes (e.g. Hambrick and Mason, 1984; Papadakis et al, 1998;
Wiersema and Bantel, 1992).
this dominant definition of strategists and their impact upon strategy is
inadequate to fulfil our theoretical framing of a practitioner
from two perspectives.
– fails to deal with individual experiences of agency, in which who a person is, is
innately connected to how that person acts and the consequences of that
action for the construction of activity.
– increasingly strategy as practice studies indicate that middle managers and
lower level employees are also important strategic actors . (e.g. Balogun,
2003; Balogun and Johnson, 2004; 2005; Regner, 2003).

16. Ongoing challenges for strategy as practice research:
Practitioners
increasing number of studies that take a multi-level approach to studying
strategists, these studies are still constrained to examination of
internal employees, primarily at the managerial levels.
There is still little work examining how those outside the
firm, such as consultants, regulators, shareholders, and consumers,
shape strategy, which provides a clear avenue for research.
Jarzabkowski, 2005

17. Ongoing challenges for strategy as practice research:
Practitioners
We need not only
wider definitions of who is a strategist…
but also more fine-grained analyses of
how strategists personal identities and
experiences
contribute to the way that they shape
strategy.
Jarzabkowski, 2005

18. Srategizing Research
Jarzabkowski, 2005

19. Research in SAP
• Studies focused in practitioner and practices through which that
practitioner derives in the doing of strategy. (section A)
– micro-level explanations and outcomes that have more macro
consequences primarily as components of a larger picture of
practice.
• Studies focused in sections B or C, have greater proximity to
strategy as a wider activity,
– explanations of how and why certain types of activity
are consequential for the firm and to explain more macro
consequences.
Jarzabkowski, 2005

20. http://www.s-as-p.org/

21. Obrigado