Greatness Takes Practice: On Practice Theory’s Relevance to “Great Strategy”

Abstract

Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit Abstract. This paper draws on the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Alasdair MacIntyre to explore the origins of great strategies. Despite its naturally rather modest approach to social life, practice theory does speak to the question of greatness. In particular, I shall derive five principles capable of building great strategies: value the ordinary, see past markets, embrace diversity, allow for the bottom up, and accept different forms of greatness. The paper proposes ways in which strategy as practice researchers can be more ambitious with regard to issues of performance, particularly through ethnographic case studies of "great" companies and of companies with different criteria of performance. The paper also identifies parallel research traditions with which strategy as practice researchers might work more closelyfor instance, those associated with design thinking, nonmarket strategy, and institutional entrepreneurship and innovation. It also identifies opportunities and risks in working with the psychological traditions of microfoundational and behavioral strategy.

On the Origin of Great Strategies

“…What is the popcorn episode if not an experiment? Examples like these are clearly what Whittington (2018) and Ocasio and Joseph (2018) have in mind when suggesting that greatness comes from appreciating and attending to the mundane details of strategy practice.…”

“…Strategic greatness thus does not come from "heroic individuals, grand visions, and imaginative leaps" (Whittington 2018, p. 343), but, rather, from the strategist's attention to the mundane, the trivial. According to Whittington (2018), it is the microcomplexity of the mundane that, if properly understood and unpacked, offers opportunities for favorable asymmetries in the prevailing order.…”

A (Re)view of the Philosophical Foundations of Strategic Management

“…The Giddesian ST is particularly present in the ‘conventional distinction between praxis and practice’ (Whittington, 2010, p. 119) and constitutes, with the Bordieusian praxeology (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990) and de Certeau's theory on practice (de Certeau, 1984), a central component of the conceptual scaffolding of the first generation of s‐as‐p studies that focus on social practices and on how managers actually implement strategy, or the ‘doings’ in strategy (Whittington, 1996, 2003, 2018). Indeed, ST became a key approach to study the interplay between micro‐activities and macro‐outcomes and abandon the dichotomist view on the structure–action debate (Seidl and Whittington, 2014).…”

Towards a general framework for innovation shaped with AI to create and transform market offerings

“…The origin of great strategies is known to be fundamental to the study of decision‐making and organizational behavior (Argote & Greve, 2007; Calabretta et al, 2017; Whittington, 2018). Everyone agrees that great strategies emerge from the status quo that can be technological (materialization), cognitive (representations) or economic (value systems), which stabilize a market or a competitive order of human activities.…”