Mona Ericsson, Leif Melin and Andrew Popp discuss the fruitfulness of historical methods for strategy as practice research. The authors start by directing our attention to the limitations of how business historians typically write about strategy, which is inductive and based on corporate archives and thus typically silent about what really goes on inside a firm. Drawing on their own rich and vast background in historical research, the authors then introduce four categories of methods suitable that giving voice to strategy practitioners about their strategy-making over time: (1) written sources and narratives; (2) micro history; (3) ego documents; and (4) lived experience. Using their own research projects as illustrations, Ericsson, Melin and Popp introduce each of these categories of historical methods and provide insightful reflections on their challenges and limits. The authors stress that these historical methods allow open a window for critical reflection on time, providing us with alternatives for evaluating present occurrences and for appreciating the inherently temporal dimension of practice.

Claus Jacobs and Jane Lê discuss the role of play in strategizing. While play and games have been linked with strategy for quite some time, it is only very recently that strategy scholars have focused explicit attention on the role of play. The authors start with a discussion about different approaches to play. This leads them to identify and elaborate on four purposes of using play can be used for in strategizing: achieving novelty, improving understanding of complexity, suspending norms and inviting experimentation, and skill development. They conclude with a discussion about three potential areas for future research on play in strategizing: enriching our conceptual repertoire of play, extending our empirical repertoire of play, and exploring play across all parts of the strategy process.

Ann Langley addresses a central question in strategy as practice research: How can we build a cumulative body of knowledge when strategy as practice interests tend to favour small intensive samples and fine-grained analysis, leading to corresponding limitations in terms of generalizability? Langley addresses this question from three different perspectives on the nature and purpose of science: (1) the ‘normal-science view’ is based on the ongoing search for more accurate, general and useful causal statements about the relationships between important phenomena; (2) rather than striving for a single truth, the ‘practice view’ calls for increasingly more insightful interpretations or representations of the social world; and (3) the ‘pragmatic view’ puts the emphasis on the instrumentality of knowledge. Accordingly, the researcher ought to uncover the knowledge of the practitioners, render it explicit and make it available to others. Langley shows how the different publications in the field of strategy as practice invariably fall into one of the three views of science. She concludes by discussing the advantages and disadvantages were strategy as practice to adhere to any one of these models of science.

Linda Rouleau suggests that biographical research provides a set of narrative methods of inquiry for carrying out in-depth studies of strategizing practices. Amongst the diverse forms that biographical methods can take, she suggests that biographical interviews or narratives of practices, that is, focusing on work experience and professional trajectories, provide privileged access to the subjective accounts of what managers and others ‘do’. Rouleau provides an overview of how biographical methods have been used in strategy as practice research in an attempt at gaining an in-depth look into the world of practitioners who are strategizing. She also puts forth illustrative data extracted from a previous study based on narratives of practices, which examined how middle managers deal with the restructuring of their organization. Finally, she explains how biographical methods, in general, and biographical interviews or narratives of practices, in particular, can be used to gain access to explicit and tacit knowledge, and how the depth of the relationship between narrator and researcher is central to a thorough understanding of strategizing practices.

Robert Chia and Andreas Rasche elaborate on the challenges of capturing the actual doing of strategy, which requires researchers to adopt a new worldview. They argue that the traditional ways of studying strategy work have led to an explanatory rupture between research accounts of strategy practice and the practice itself, which is intimately linked to the adoption of a set of epistemological premises that they term the building worldview. This view is characterized by two basic assumptions: (1) individuals are treated as discretely bounded entities; and (2) there is a clear split between the mental and physical realm; cognition and mental representation of the world necessarily precede any meaningful action. Accordingly, strategic action is explained through recourse to the intention of actors. They contrast this with what they refer to as dwelling world-view, which allows getting close to the actual doing of strategy because it does away with the assumption that identities and personal characteristics pre-exist social practice. Within this view, vocial practices are given primacy over individual agency and intention. Thus, strategic actions are explained not on the basis of individual intentions but as the product of particular, historically situated practices. Chia and Rasche discuss the epistemological consequences of these two worldviews showing how research findings depend on the chosen worldview.

Leonhard Dobusch, Julia Hautz and Thomas Ortner introduce the emerging topic of Open Strategy. As they highlight, we can observe an increasing trend towards more inclusive and transparent strategizing. From a practice perspective, this trend can be described as a shift in the practices of strategy-making. The authors describe the different practices of inclusiveness and transparency and show how they relate to each other. They then identify and review distinctive themes of strategy as practice research on Open Strategy. This includes the role of technologies and materiality in enabling openness, the discursive practices and processes underpinning openness, the temporal dynamics of open processes, the difference between controlled and uncontrolled forms of openness and the dialectic relationship between openness and closure.

Jane Lê and Paul Spee set an agenda for the growing body of research exploring the role of materiality in strategy research. In their overview of existing work, they differentiate four different approaches to materiality: the communication approach; the technology approach; the sensemaking approach; and the positivist approach. They explain the assumptions inherent in each approach and how these assumptions affect the way we understand and study strategizing. They conclude with an outline of different avenues for future research on materiality in strategizing.

Eric Knight and Matthias Wenzel examine the multimodality of strategizing. Drawing parallels to research in other domains of organization studies, they show that the enactment of strategic practices involves, amongst others, discursive modes (i.e., written or oral texts such as speech acts, emails, documents or newspaper articles), bodily modes (i.e., bodily movements such as gestures, gazes, nodding or pointing) and material modes (i.e., objects and artefacts such as tables, chairs, rooms or tools). As the concept of multimodality signals, these different modes are typically interrelated. That is, one typically finds a constellation of different modes involved in strategy work. The authors review existing strategy as practice research in terms of how they have conceptualized and captured the multimodality of strategy work. They distinguish three different conceptualizations, which they label ‘multimodality as representation’ (treating different modes as reflected in each other), ‘multimodality as co-creation’ (treating different modes as recursively shaping each other) and ‘multimodality as intertwinement’ (treating different modes as amalgamated). They discuss how each view of multimodality allows for different types of insights to be gained on the doing of strategy.

Danielle Zandee explores everything SAP researchers always wanted to know about action-research methods but were afraid to consider in their own work. The author argues and demonstrates how action research by joining practitioners in their real-time strategic efforts can be fruitful for developing innovative insights and impactful research. In turbulent times and unsettling settings, action research appears to be a risky but highly promising road for advancing strategy as practice. The author describes the main characteristics and modalities of action research and summarizes how action research has been discussed and applied in strategy as practice. To help strategy as practice researchers to engage with practitioners in their research, this contribution puts forth a framework providing a set of core questions for developing relevant and rigorous research designs and conducting issue-driven inquiry whilst staying connected with SAP research interests and requirements. Overall, the proposed action research framework provides SAP researchers with an ambitious agenda to study and impact strategic practice close to where it happens in the daily work of strategists. Yet, Danielle Zandee also recognizes that while action research can be extremely rewarding in terms of the subjective and reflexive research experience, it is typically very time-consuming and complex. Finally, some guidance on how to gradually adopt action research as methodology within the SAP domain, is provided.

Carola Wolf and Paula Jarzabkowski focus on activity theory as an approach for studying strategy as practice. The origins of activity theory can be found in Lev Vygotsky’s seminal work, but it has been developed and used in a variety of ways, including foundational work in strategy as practice. Wolf and Jarzabkowski offer an overview of activity theory and propose an organizing framework for understanding how activity theory has been used in strategy as practice research: activity-in-practice, activity as part of practice, or activity-as-practice. They next explain the key theoretical elements of activity theory, which leads them to focus on how activity can be conceptualized as a product of activity systems, including the actors, the community that the actors interact with and the symbolic and material tools that mediate between actors, their community and their pursuit of activity. In this discussion, they not only highlight existing contributions but explain how future research could go much further using an activity theory approach.

Stewart Clegg and Martin Kornberger focus on one of the most important but still understudied dimension in strategy as practice: power. They investigate how power theories can inform the study of strategy as practice, and vice versa. Understanding strategy as the ‘art of creating power’, the study of the ways in which power and strategy interact and how one leads to the other should be a central concern for scholars of strategy. Whilst providing an overview of the key writings that have emerged at the interface between power and strategy, the authors also attempt to point towards several possible future lines of inquiry. Their contribution is structured following a rather simple heuristic device (strategy as noun, strategizing as verb, strategic as adjective) which emphasizes the different agents, mechanisms and effects that can guide the analysis of power and strategy.

Valérie-Inès de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud outline a narrative approach to strategy as practice. They draw on the work of Paul Riceour and Michel de Certeau to elucidate the various narrative practices that constitute an inherent part of strategy and strategizing. This involves the production of texts in strategy formulation, but also the consumption of texts in the ‘implementation’ of strategies. They offer a model that focuses on the writing and reading of texts and narratives as ongoing activities in organizations. This view allows one to understand the crucial role of strategy texts and ongoing interpretations in strategizing – and thus challenges the conventional view that focuses on formal strategies without considering the ways in which they are ‘talked into being’.

Whittle and Mueller offer a dramaturgical perspective on strategy as practice. This approach has its roots in Erving Goffman’s seminal work, and this contribution provides a sorely needed reflection of how the key ideas and concepts of this theoretical perspective can be used to advance our understand of important issues and questions in strategy as practice research. They include disruptive events, front region, dramatic realization, idealization, audience segregation, misrepresentation, back region, teams, team secrets, discrepant roles and defensive practices. However, Whittle and Mueller also encourage scholars to not only use specific ideas or concepts in Goffman’s work but to engage in more comprehensive analyses applying this approach to develop a fuller understanding of strategizing processes. They conclude by identifying avenues for future studies going beyond previous work using dramaturgical lenses in strategy as practice research.

Ann Cunliffe proposes some key considerations and a stimulating reflection on the connection between ethnography and the study of practice. She argues that ethnography is particularly suited forstrategy as practice research because of its focus on the rich description of the micro-practices of organizational life. Based on relevant ethnographic studies that are illustrative and may be of interest for strategy as practice researchers, she explains how it is possible to better understand new or unanticipated processes and practices that are at the core of strategy-making. Nevertheless, she urges strategy as practice researchers to embrace more deeply a subjectivist or intersubjective view when adopting an ethnographic methodology in order to offer new insights into the relational and reflexive nature of strategizing as an emergent and lived experience. Yet, doing so raises a number of important questions: What philosophical assumptions underpin the ethnographer’s work? How do these influence the methods used, the form of analysis and the theorizing? How does the researcher position her/himself in the research? How does an ethnographer write a convincing research account?

Simon Grand, Widar von Arx and Johannes Rüegg-Stürm argue that real practice research needs to be accompanied by constructivist epistemologies. They show that while there are many variants of constructivism, they all share four central concerns: (1) they question a concept of ‘reality’ as something that is ‘objectively given’; (2) they study the status of knowledge and the processes through which it is constructed; (3) they treat agency in the construction of reality as distributed among heterogeneous actants; and (4) they challenge the predominance of unquestioned dichotomies in the social sciences, like micro vs. macro or situated activities vs. collective practices. After introducing and comparing the three most central constructivist perspectives, Grand and his co-authors discuss the implications of the four central assumptions of strategy as practice research, useful for the study of strategizing practices, the understanding of strategy and the conduct of strategy research. Above all, they emphasize that the very notion of strategy and strategizing practice contains nothing that can be taken as given, but is instead the result of continuous (re)construction by the activities of the practitioners and researchers involved.

Saku Mantere turns his attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein and the potential of the philosopher’s ideas for elucidating our understanding of strategy as practice. This is an important contribution in that, apart from being one of the most influential philosophers, Wittgenstein’s ideas have paved the way for the ‘practice turn’ in social science. Both Giddens and Bourdieu, for example, have been greatly influenced by Wittgenstein. Mantere focuses on the idea of the ‘language game’ as a powerful concept to make sense of SAP. He argues that language games shed more light on the discursive struggles endemic to the practice of strategy. He also maintains that the notion of ‘forms of life’, used to characterize the non-linguistic background of social practice, can direct our attention onto a number of important yet often neglected aspects of strategy. Examples from real-life strategy conversations provide concrete illustrations of these ideas.

Florence Allard-Poesi adopts a Foucauldian view on strategy as practice. This reflection explains the seminal role of Foucault’s work in more critical studies of strategy as practice, as well as pointing to new ways in which we can look at strategy as a body of knowledge. From this perspective, strategic management may be seen as a heterogeneous set of discursive and material practices. These discursive and material practices are governed by specific rules that determine what can be read, said and done in and around strategy. She argues that strategic management is similar to a monitoring technique in which the strategist is led to reveal one’s intentions, say aloud what is hidden and ‘objectify’ one’s subjectivity. This has all kinds of effects on the individuals in question and the way in which people can and will make sense of strategy.

David Seidl, Stéphane Guérard and Tania Räcker review and synthesize the extant literature on the role of meetings in the context of strategy. They show that meetings involve various meeting practices, that they serve many different (manifest and latent) functions, and that their effects on the respective organization depend on the ways in which they are integrated into larger series of meetings. In addition to that they examine the literature on strategy workshops, as particular types of meetings. They explain that workshops allow suspending the existing organizational structures and, in this way, provide a platform for strategic reflection. They also report on various empirical studies that have examined the effectiveness of different workshop designs. Based on the review of the existing literature, the authors outline an agenda for future research on meetings and workshops.

Davide Nicolini, David Seidl and Violetta Splitter provide yet another very useful theoretical perspective. They focus on Theodore Schatzki’s work and explain how it has been employed in strategy as practice research. This approach, rooted in Schatzki’s practice theory, is characterized by ‘flat ontology’, and it has proven to be a very fruitful source of inspiration and a theoretical foundation for strategy as practice scholars. Nicolini, Seidl and Splitter explain that this perspective gives ontological priority to strategy practices rather than practitioners, that it helps us to understand the embeddedness and situatedness of strategy practices in their social, institutional and organizational contexts, and that helps us to better understand linkages between bundles of practices in strategy and strategizing. This leads them to point to specific areas of application and offer implications and guidelines for future research using this approach in strategy as practice research.

Marie-Léandre Gomez provides a Bourdieusian perspective on strategy as practice. This is a contribution that is very much needed, given the impact of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on practice theory in general. Gomez explains how Bourdieu offers a systemic view of practice that highlights the importance of relations between agents and with the field, the capital possessed by these actors and their habitus. She argues that research on strategy can benefit greatly from Bourdieu’s praxeology. In particular, a Bourdieusian perspective allows one to overcome false dichotomies in strategy and strategizing: the micro/macro alternative, the opposition between structure and agency, and the dilemma between rationality and emerging strategy. In addition, the perspective can help us to better understand the various struggles that characterize strategy and the role of academics in these struggles.