The ‘Strategy as Practice’ perspective has recently attracted a substantial following of scholars interested in developing a better understanding of strategy as ‘something people do’ rather than something that ‘organizations have’ (Johnson et al. 2003; Jarzabkowski et al. 2007; Johnson et al. 2007; Whittington 2006). Under this banner, researchers have begun to examine issues like what happens in strategy meetings (Schwartz and Balogun 2007; Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008; Hodgkinson et al. 2006), how various strategic management tools are used (Kaplan and Jarzabkowski 2006; Stenfors et al. 2007) and how middle managers can and do contribute to strategy making (Balogun and Johnson 2004; Rouleau 2005). There is also a more critical stream in Strategy as Practice writing that has focused on the discursive practices of strategists (Laine and Vaara et al. 2007; Ezzamel and Wilmott, 2008) or on the roles of the wider strategy community including academics in the legitimation of potentially doubtful strategy practices (Whittington et al. 2003). Finally, there have been several attempts to position the Strategy as Practice perspective with respect to broader currents in theories of practice (Hendry and Seidl 2003; Chia and MacKay 2007; Johnson et al. 2007; Seidl 2007; Whittington 2006; Jarzabkowski 2004).

This chapter begins to address a set of key but deceptively simple questions about this emerging body of work. Where is it heading?