Epistemological alternatives for researching strategy as practice: building and dwelling worldviews

Abstract

The ordinary practitioners…live ‘down below’, below the threshold at which visibility begins… [T]heir knowledge…is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms… It is as though the practices were characterized by their blindness. De Certeau (1984: 93) Introduction Most traditional approaches to strategy research have tended to consist of a complex amalgam of activities comprising the analyses of dependent and independent variables, theoretical conjecturing and the testing of theories and models developed to capture the essence of strategic realities (Rasche 2008). In this regard, the strategy-as-practice approach to research is a welcome departure in its single-minded insistence on focusing primarily on what strategy practitioners actually do. Although the strategy-as-practice field has attracted a mass of empirical work (Balogun and Johnson 2005; Jarzabkowski 2005; Jarzabkowski and Wilson 2002; Paroutis and Heracleous 2013; Regnér 2003; Samra-Fredericks 2003) and theoretical clarification (Denis, Langley and Rouleau 2007; Jarzabkowski, Balogun and Seidl 2007; Johnson, Melin and Whittington 2003; Whittington 1996; 2003; 2006; for a recent review, see Vaara and Whittington 2012), the alternative epistemological groundings available and how they may affect further efforts at conceptualizing strategy as practice remain relatively unarticulated. This is despite the fact that there have been some notable attempts to clarify research and methodological priorities for the SAP movement (Balogun, Huff and Johnson 2003; Ezzamel and Willmott 2010; Jarzabkowski 2003; 2004; 2005; Johnson, Melin and Whittington 2003; McCabe 2010; Tsoukas 2010; Whittington 2006). For researchers it is vital to give substantial consideration to the manner in which accounts and explanations proffered on strategy practice are reflexively moderated by an acute awareness of the inherent problems relating to the ‘situatedness’ of strategic action, and hence the epistemological issues associated with such attempted representations. The manner in which academically articulated accounts of strategy practice tend to create a schism between such accounts and the very practices they purport to explain is one of the most intractable problems of the research process. Such a schism can be addressed and rectified only through a careful examination of the dominant research dispositions and the nature and limitations of the resultant explanatory outcomes involved.

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