The project of this special issue emerged from the following observation. While an increasing number of organization scholars from around the world have been struggling with issues of agency and structure since the 1970s, their works are still hardly perceived as contributions towards a common...

This paper explores the contradictory pressures for standardisation and customisation in reorganisation processes. Taking a ‘practice lens’ (Orlikowski, 2000), it examines eight on-going reorganisations, from both private and non-private sectors, using photography, observation and extensive...

This article identifies an opportunity for European researchers to develop a more practice-sensitive research programme for strategy ‘after modernism’. Strategy's intellectual lock-in on modernist detachment and economic theory can now be relaxed. Strategy can draw also on the rich resources...

This paper assesses economic, political and national institutional explanations for continued resistance to the multidivisional form in France, Germany and the United Kingdom during the 1980s and 1990s. It finds that the economics of different diversification strategies play a significant but...

Strategy is a pervasive and consequential practice in mostWestern societies. We respond to strategy’s importance by drawing an initial map of strategy as an organizational field that embraces not just firms, but consultancies, business schools, the state and financial institutions. Using the...

This research note examines the stability of diversification performance relationships in three countries (France, Germany and the United Kingdom), for two time periods (1982–84 and 1992–94). The aggregate findings, taking the three countries and two time periods together, support a general...

This introductory paper provides a background to the origins, themes and papers of this Special Issue on Micro Strategy and Strategizing. Our overarching argument is that, while the field of strategy has traditionally concentrated on the macro-level of organizations, it needs now to attend to...

The economics of mergers are doubtful — we know that more broadly, and the case indicates the same in the pharmaceutical industry specifically. Yet still big businesses strive to get bigger. We should look more widely than to economics for our explanations.