This article examines three practices of strategising/organising – strategy workshops, the project management of strategic and organisational initiatives, and the creation of symbolic artefacts to communicate strategic change. These are seen through a practice theory lens that emphasises...

Strategy workshops, the practice of taking time out from day-to-day routines to deliberate on the longer-term direction of the organisation, are a common practice, yet surprisingly little is known about them. This article presents the first substantial exploration of the role of workshops in...

This paper identifies a practice turn in current strategy research, treating strategy as something people do. However, it argues that this turn is incomplete in that researchers currently concentrate either on strategy activity at the intra-organizational level or on the aggregate effects of...

This paper distinguishes between `tight' and `loose' perspectives on national business systems. These two systems perspectives are compared in the light of new and existing European data on corporate strategies and structures, on the one hand, and national institutions of business finance,...

The 'new institutionalism' had led to increasing emphasis on the 'embed dedness' of organizations in local social systems. In this journal, Sorge (1991) and Whitley (1994) have shown, in particular, how the dominant forms of organization within countries or sectors are shaped by distinct...

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...