Strategy Practice Interest Group

The Strategy Practice Interest Group is an inclusive community that provides a space for engagement and the sharing of ideas among strategy academics as well as professionals and managers that make strategic decisions. Among others, the group is interested in what strategists do, rather than focusing exclusively on what firms have. Thus, we are interested in the myriad of activities, methods, and tools that actors employ in the doing of strategy, and how such “strategy work” contributes to organizational outcomes as well as the broader institutional environment in which it is embedded.

The IG is especially interested in academic work with strong implications for strategy practitioners. It is also interested to identifying contemporary challenges faced by strategy professionals and managers involved in the strategy process.

Topic Areas of Research

We engage in and foster dialogues on the activities through which actors make strategy. In such debates, we embrace and support everyone who likes to discuss and deepen our understanding of issues concerning the practice of strategy-making, such as academics, business people, and consultants at all career stages.

For this, we regularly perform a great variety of formats at the SMS Annual International Conference. Among others, such formats include pre-conference workshops for early-career scholars and practitioners, panel sessions that bring together diverse views, and paper sessions that provide the latest insights into strategy practice.

Some questions that we are interested include:

• What does ‘strategy work’ involve? Who is involved in the doing of strategy?
• What impact do strategizing activities have on firm performance?
• How do individual strategists and their teams shape strategy and firm performance? What is their role in the development and leverage of firm’s resources, capabilities and processes?
• What is the role of discourse, cognition and emotion in the doing of strategy? How do the discursive, cognitive and emotional aspects of strategists’ actions influence firm outcomes?
• What are the skills required to perform strategy work and how are these skills acquired?
• What are the micro foundations of the activities involved in the doing of strategy?
• How are strategic problems identified and conceptualized?
• What tools do strategy practitioners employ and with what effect?
• How is the communication of strategy taking place within and across organizations? How are the outcomes of this communication consumed by strategists and non-strategists?
• How do external strategy stakeholders (such as consultants, government agencies, professional societies) influence strategy practice?
• How does the macro environment impact on the doing of strategy and vice versa?
• What are the implications of conceptualizing strategy as a situated social activity?
• How can theorizing inform managerial practice? How can insights from practitioners help scholars develop more relevant theories?
• How can engaged scholarship help extend strategy theory?
• How can we better leverage on a multi-disciplinary approach to inform and advance the strategy practice agenda?
• How can we conceptualize and study strategy as a profession? What is the contribution of strategy as a profession to society and how can this contribution be improved?