Towards a View of Organizational Attention as Practice

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how a practice-theoretical perspective can complement, integrate, and expand work conducted with the tradition of the Attention-Based View of the firm (ABV), the idea that organizations should be understood as collective mechanisms for directing, regulating, and distributing attention. We argue that a practice-theoretical approach can expand the ABV in at least three ways. First, it allows theorizing the situated nature of attention, showing that a pragmatic field of attention is inherent in all practices and their nexuses. Therefore, the scholarly inquiry should focus on the practices for paying and attracting attention and the attentional effects of practices. Second, it enriches the idea of distributed attention, suggesting that many more -- and more heterogeneous entities are involved in attentional processes than previously thought. Third, it provides a conceptual apparatus to shed new light on the competitive processes that preside on strategy makers’ situational attention, recovering the phenomenon’s integral political nature