Bridging practice and process research to study transient manifestations of strategy

• Date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Laurent Mirabeau,Cynthia Hardy,Steve Maguire
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2732
• Published date: 01 March 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Bridging practice and process research to study

transient manifestations of strategy

Laurent Mirabeau

1

| Steve Maguire

2

| Cynthia Hardy

3,4

1

Telfer School of Management, University of

Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

2

Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill

University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

3

Department of Management & Marketing,

University of Melbourne, Carlton, Victoria,

Australia

4

Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University,

Cardiff, U.K.

Correspondence

Steve Maguire, Desautels Faculty of Management,

McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West,

Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1G5, Canada.

Email: steve.maguire@mcgill.ca

Funding information

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

of Canada, Grant/Award number: 435-2014-0256;

Australian Research Council, Grant/Award

number: DP110101764

Research Summary: At the intersection of Strategy Process

(SP) and Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) research lies the focal

phenomenon they share—strategy, which manifests itself in

a variety of ways: intended, realized, deliberate, emergent,

unrealized, and ephemeral strategy. We present a methodol-

ogy comprised of three stages that, when integrated in the

manner we suggest, permit a rich operationalization and

tracking of strategy content for all manifestations. We illus-

trate the utility of our methodology for bridging SP and

SAP research by theorizing practices that are more likely to

give rise to unrealized and ephemeral strategy, identifying

their likely consequences, and presenting a research agenda

for studying these transient manifestations.

Managerial Summary: Managers know well that, some-

times for good reasons and other times with negative conse-

quences for organizations, not all aspects of strategic plans

are implemented with fidelity, resulting in unrealized strat-

egy; and not all bottom-up projects receive the middle-

management support they need to become realized, resulting

in ephemeral strategy making. Surprisingly, however, these

transient manifestations of strategy receive little attention in

the scholarly literature. Our paper addresses this gap by pre-

senting a methodology for tracking all six manifestations of

strategy (intended, realized, deliberate, emergent, unrealized,

and ephemeral strategy), highlighting the interdependent

relations among them. It also describes strategy making

practices that are likely to give rise to the two transient man-

ifestations, i.e., unrealized and ephemeral strategy, as well

as their consequences for subsequent strategy making.

KEYWORDS

ephemeral strategy, research methods, strategy as

practice, strategy process, unrealized strategy

Received: 30 August 2015 Revised: 11 April 2017 Accepted: 8 June 2017 Published on: 21 December 2017

DOI: 10.1002/smj.2732

582 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/smj Strat Mgmt J. 2018;39:582–605.

1|INTRODUCTION

The relationship between Strategy Process (SP) and Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) research has been

vigorously debated (see Hutzschenreuter & Kleindienst, 2006; Jarzabkowski & Wilson, 2002; Whit-

tington, 2007), even though these two vibrant research traditions share a focal phenomenon—strat-

egy. SP research “is essentially concerned with choice processes (strategic decision-making) and

implementation processes (strategic change)”and the critical role played by time and history therein,

with a special focus on “action and context”(Pettigrew, 1992, p. 6 & 11). It emphasizes “three main

elements: the strategists, the issue, and the sequence of actions”(Hutzschenreuter & Kleindienst,

2006, p. 676). SAP research represents “the study of strategy under the sociological eye”

(Whittington, 2007, p. 1577) as an institutionalized social practice such that “the organization is de-

centred, and people, practices and societies enter equally onto the stage”(Whittington, 2007,

p. 1577 & 1578). It concerns itself with how things are done and by whom, emphasizing the people

doing strategy work (practitioners) in their day-to-day activities (praxis), as well as the tools and

methods (practices) they use i.e., “accepted ways of doing things, embodied and materially medi-

ated, that are shared between actors and routinized over time”(Vaara & Whittington, 2012, p. 287).

We explore the intersection between the two approaches and develop a robust, systematic and

integrated methodology for tracking strategy content that can be used in empirical settings by

researchers from both traditions for mutual benefit and cumulative advancement. This novel method-

ology consists of three stages. The first operationalizes Burgelman’s (1983) concept of strategy to

capture strategy as discourse. The second stage captures strategy as action by finding common

ground between Porter (1996) and Mintzberg (1978) to identify patterns over time. The third stage

involves an analysis of strategic consonance and dissonance (Burgelman & Grove, 1996), allowing

researchers to distinguish induced from autonomous activity (Burgelman, 1983; Floyd & Lane,

2000; Floyd & Wooldridge, 2000). In respecting the nuanced, complex, and multifaceted nature of

strategy, acknowledging that the concept carries multiple meanings (Ronda-Pupo & Guerras-Martin,

2012), and recognizing that strategy content manifests itself in multiple ways (Mintzberg & Waters,

1985), this methodology makes important contributions.

First, our methodology allows researchers to track intended, deliberate, realized, unrealized,

emergent (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985), and ephemeral (Mirabeau & Maguire, 2014) manifestations

of strategy in a single study. This is critical because SP and SAP researchers are interested in the

complexity and richness of strategy, and even researchers whose main interest is in a single manifes-

tation can enrich their understanding by engaging with other manifestations because of the temporal

and conceptual relationships among them. Second, our methodology is particularly useful for

researchers to document and study unrealized and ephemeral strategy, which present significant

methodological challenges because they unfold over just a short period of time and leave few traces.

In providing a systematic and comprehensive way to track these transient manifestations, which

have been largely ignored in the literature, our methodology overcomes the limitations of existing

methods. In so doing, it lays the groundwork for SP and SAP researchers to develop a better under-

standing of transience in strategy content, which is also important for practitioners to learn how and

why their strategic activity may fail to endure. Third, we make a conceptual contribution by illustrat-

ing how our methodology can be applied to study the transient manifestations of strategy. We do so

by combining it with the variation-selection-retention (V-S-R) framework that is well established in

the SP literature (Barnett & Burgelman, 1996; Burgelman, 1996), and with insights about practices

from SAP researchers. In this way, we are able to theorize practices that are more likely to give rise

to the two transient manifestations of strategy, as well as identify their likely consequences for orga-

nizations. Our final contribution is to highlight the potential for bridging SP and SAP perspectives

MIRABEAU ET AL.583