Strategy after modernism: recovering practice

Abstract

Abstract 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 of sociology to engage more directly with strategy as a social practice. This article outlines elements of a double agenda for strategy research after modernism: first, a sociological agenda concerned with understanding strategy's elites, its skills and its technologies, and their implications for society as a whole; second, a managerial agenda, turning this sociological understanding to practical advantage in terms of how managers become strategists, how strategy skills are acquired and how strategy technologies can be better designed and used. The article considers implications for research methods and the Mintzbergian tradition in strategy.