Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Spontaneous order: the roots of strategy emergence
- 2 Economic agency and steps to ecological awareness
- 3 Reconceptualizing agency, self-interest and purposive action
- 4 The ‘practice turn’ in strategy research
- 5 Building and dwelling: two ways of understanding strategy
- 6 Strategy as ‘wayfinding’
- 7 The silent efficacy of indirect action
- Epilogue: Negative capability
- Notes
- Index
4 - The ‘practice turn’ in strategy research
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Spontaneous order: the roots of strategy emergence
- 2 Economic agency and steps to ecological awareness
- 3 Reconceptualizing agency, self-interest and purposive action
- 4 The ‘practice turn’ in strategy research
- 5 Building and dwelling: two ways of understanding strategy
- 6 Strategy as ‘wayfinding’
- 7 The silent efficacy of indirect action
- Epilogue: Negative capability
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices… It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism…, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p.54We argued in the last chapter that the uncertainties and complexities of life as are experienced by strategic actors are not containable in the way that economic theory and strategy design theory suppose. Even with ceteris paribus conditions in place, the choice sets, judgements and outcomes presented as being logical for the individual rational human agent or collective are riven with empirical exceptions, unseen ecological influences and communally felt limitations. Any theoretical understanding entails recognition of how we repress, discount or ignore elements of experience in order to attain, sustain or restore a sense of coherence. The distinctions we made between strong and weak individualism, between technē and phronesis, and between purposeful and purposive action push us towards recognizing that acting strategically is as much an instinctual, habitual and unthought response to experience as it is a deliberate, planned effort. In understanding economic activities such as trade and entities such as markets and prices, therefore, we ought to recognize them as socially organized, complex and open-ended institutional facts. Within such an environment, strategic action is not about an observer gathering information concerning an external environment in order to manage resources so as to occupy an advantageous position (a niche market, a rare capability, a competitive opportunity) but about attaining and sustaining a set of organized relationships nested within wider systems in order to experience the possibility of doing things differently and, potentially, better.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Strategy without DesignThe Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action, pp. 112 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009