Despite the attention that strategic change as a topic of research has received, there remain considerable difficulties in conceptualizing the actual sources of strategic change. Strategy workshops represent one obvious and explicit research site since organizations often use such events as a...

In this paper we draw on Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory, and in particular his concept of an 'episode', to guide research into strategic practice and its relationship to the operating routines of an organization. Episodes, in Luhmann's theory, provide a mechanism by which a system can...