Becoming misrepresentations in strategy and time

Purpose – This paper seeks to review some ontological issues in the creation and representation of strategic management and strategic management processes. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper Whittington's celebrated four school model is taken as a representation of the variety of strategic management theories. First, a philosophy of action perspective is taken to evaluate representations of actions required by a corporate strategy. Second, the decision‐making processes represented by each school are reviewed from the perspective of decision deparadoxification using deconstructions derived from Anderson. Third, the paper looks at the representations of time implied by the four schools by examining the transformation from individual to collective action derived from Heidegger. Findings – The paper finds that what appears to be schools of strategic management thought are no more than the selective attention of scholars upon one contingency reducing approach. Support for any strategic action in each of the four schools will only ever be particle and contingent. None of the four are capable of accommodating Heidegger's authentic relationship of present to future. Originality/value – The paper shows that, taken together, these ontological insights bring into question the general principles of strategy processes. That is to say that they undermine the notion that an organisation can somehow know about its own range of possible futures, and then make decisions and actions in the present to bring about the most desirable state.