Presenting at EGOS 2008.
Between 10 and 12 July 2008 I attended the 24th EGOS Colloquium in Amsterdam. I presented a paper (co-authored by my PhD supervisor, Edgar Whitley) in the “Strategy as Practice – Stability and Change in Strategizing Routines” track, convened by David Seidl, Martha Feldman, Ann Langley, and Saku Mantere. Our paper was entitled “A Break from the Routine: Studying Strategising Practices at a Small E-Commerce Retailer with Actor-Network Theory” [PDF slides here]. As this paper was directly influenced by the engagement between the strategy-as-practice field and actor-network theory at a Lancaster University symposium in February 2008, I will take the opportunity here to reflect on that event as well.
The EGOS conference track brought together two, increasingly converging lines of inquiry: on the one hand, the literature of the Strategy as Practice (S-as-P) community, and on the other hand the efforts to develop a theory of organisational routines, led most prominently by Martha Feldman and Brian Pentland. In recent years both strands of research have engaged with actor-network theory (ANT) to varying degrees. Denis, Langley and Rouleau (2007) outlined the relevance of ANT-based approaches to the strategy-as-practice agenda, while Johnson, Langley, Melin and Whittington (2007) included ANT among the theoretical resources of the strategy-as-practice perspective. Similarly, Feldman and Pentland (2005; 2007) have drawn on ANT repeatedly for their conceptualisation of organisational routines.
As I am interested in the nature of organising competence as well as the role of technological artefacts (specifically e-commerce technologies) in the performance of such competence, I am drawn to this debate that concerns the relationship between organising and strategising practices, routines, and artefacts. Besides this year’s EGOS track I have also attended the “Engaging with practice: Doing strategy as practice research” workshop at Aston Business School in March 2007 and the Strategy as Practice Symposium at Lancaster University in February 2008.
The latter had a particularly fascinating premise and format. As the Strategy as Practice movement is marked by its preference for sociological methods, as opposed to economics-based approaches to the study of strategic management, the Lancaster event brought together the usually Business School-based S-as-P scholars with prominent sociologists and linguists from Lancaster University, to encourage further cross-pollination between these disciplines. Given my interest in actor-network theory, I was allocated to the sessions with John Law, the British founder of ANT. Having had the opportunity to meet his French counterparts, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, just a few weeks earlier, I was very much looking forward to this event.
Altogether I took part in three round-table discussions at Lancaster concerning actor-network theory, and they were all very engaging and helpful. On the morning of 21st February I attended the “Ontological Reflections” session with Bob Jessop and John Law. The discussion focused on the agency-structure problem in social theory, and it gradually transformed into a clarification of the critical realist vs. actor-network theory assumptions about the nature of reality. In the afternoon I went to the “Actors in Networks, Networks as Actors” session [audio] held by John Law, where he very kindly addressed whatever questions were put to him regarding ANT.
Finally on the morning of 22nd February I participated in “The Micro-Macro Problem in Organizational Research” session [audio] led by Paul Chilton and John Law, which was also attended by a number of distinguished professors in organisation studies and strategic management. I was very fortunate to be able to offer my ongoing empirical research as the case study example for this discussion. Indeed, the micro-macro question of social theory has been repeatedly put to me, whenever I have had to present my PhD research at the LSE, so I was happy to make some progress with this issue in such a (socially) constructive manner. All in all, the Lancaster event worked fantastically well as an experiment, as it produced some very specific answers to the questions that I brought along and put forward.
Relaxing at EGOS 2008.
The same could also be said about the EGOS Colloquium, which also felt as a grand laboratory for the testing of propositions, as people and ideas circulated in the formal sessions – and especially in the coffee breaks. Our paper was part of the round table session entitled “Breaking the routine,” chaired by Haridimos Tsoukas. The session was aptly named, as all the papers within it were dealing with the issue of disruption, focusing on events that break established organisational or strategising routines. The papers and the presentations highlighted the apparent paradox between the need to innovate and the need to routinise in both strategising and organising activities. The paper by Johannes Rüegg-Stürm and Silke Bucher also took up the task of outlining the difference between strategising and organising.
In our paper we also focused on the distinction between innovation and routinisation, by way of tracing the changes in the socio-technical arrangements of our case study company. Our aim was to articulate the nature of organising competence through a description of the ways the flows and relationships that constitute the firm are co-ordinated. This description then led to some propositions regarding the nature and role of technological artefacts and the mechanisms of worth creation within the larger complex “quasi-objects” that emerged into view as a result of our analysis. Our paper eventually raised the issue of the relationship between the organising and strategising practices of firms and the nature of the mode of production, highlighting the need to consider the nature of organising competence alongside the nature of the ‘knowledge-based economy.’
While our paper was an explicit attempt to deploy actor-network theory for the study of organising and strategising, ANT still appeared to be something of a minority interest within this year’s Strategy as Practice track at EGOS. Nevertheless, there were at least two other interesting engagements with actor-network theory that I’ve come across during the main presentation sessions. Luciana D’Adderio (see also her 2008 paper) drew directly on the ANT-inspired branch of economic sociology and social studies of finance literature (performativity theory) in her attempt to bring artefacts to the heart of the debate concerning organisational routines. Simon Grand also included actor-network theory in his analytical arsenal when studying the routinisation of strategising practices in entrepreneurial ventures. Given that the role of artefacts in organising and strategising as well as the agency-structure and micro-macro problems were so central to the discussions both at Lancaster and in Amsterdam, I expect that actor-network theory and the associated literatures will continue to be a source of inspiration for the study of strategy as practice.
References
D’Adderio, L. (2008). “The Performativity of Routines: Theorising the Influence of Artefacts and Distributed Agencies on Routines Dynamics.” Research Policy 37(5): 769-89.
Denis, J.-L., A. Langley, et al. (2007). “Strategizing in Pluralistic Contexts: Rethinking Theoretical Frames.” Human Relations 60(1): 179-215.
Feldman, M. and B. Pentland (2005). “Organizational Routines and the Macro-Actor.” Actor-Network Theory and Organizing. B. Czarniawska and T. Hernes. Malmö, Liber; Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press: 91-111.
Johnson, G., A. Langley, et al. (2007). Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources. Cambridge University Press.
Pentland, B. T. and M. S. Feldman (2007). “Narrative Networks: Patterns of Technology and Organization.” Organization Science 18(5): 781-95.
Tags: Amsterdam, EGOS, John Law, Lancaster University, practice theory, strategizing
