"Strategizing, organizing and emerging strategy"

Abstract

Process- and practice-oriented research has explored strategy making as a social accomplishment embedded in the organizational context. We present a structuration theory framework of strategy making that conceptualizes strategic agency as constrained and enabled by the wider organizational praxis. We suggest that strategy emerges in an ongoing dialectical process between strategizing, practices of strategy formulation and implementation, and organizing, practices actually coordinating the daily organizational praxis. Drawing on the framework in a qualitative case study, we elucidate the interplay between strategizing, organizing and emerging strategy in a corporate research organization. Further, we show how contingent organizing practices gain influence and become reproduced in the organizational praxis. Thereby, we identify scaling mechanisms through which strategizing can affect organizing and interaction patterns in organizing between organizational contexts.