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
1 - Spontaneous order: the roots of strategy emergence
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
Every step and every movement of the multitudes…are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p.122Fools only strive
To make a great and honest hive.
Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive, pp.409–410In the introduction we entered a world of counter-intuitive, paradoxical and even ironic experiences in which human assumptions regarding the orderliness of the world, and their control over that world, have both been shown to be wanting. Of course, there are many instances when what was designed and intended have predictably come to pass. Individuals have found status, battles have been won, firms have earned profits and even souls have been saved. It is also clear, however, that there are numerous instances when very productive orders, patterns of regularities, and consistencies in behaviour have emerged quite non-deliberately. What we investigate in this chapter is just how such strategic ordering may arise spontaneously through social interactions without any singular agency intending for it to be so. What we call ‘strategy’ is so intimately linked to intentionality, purposefulness and goal orientation that assumptions we make about the world around us remain essentially unquestioned; assumptions regarding regularity, separability and malleability, in which a mute and mutable world is slowly harnessed and transformed through human endeavour into a vast and silent warehouse of well-ordered productive resources and outcomes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Strategy without DesignThe Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action, pp. 25 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009