Introduction

The living role of history has so far been missing in the Strategy as Practice literature. This chapter emphasizes strategizing in the context of time and suggests a dialogical openness to the past. The literature on Strategy as Practice predominantly sees practice ‘as something that firstly can be chosen and aligned through some form of deliberative weighting on the part of a strategist (albeit on a micro-social scale), and secondly, can be observed and classified by a researcher in terms of its outputs, or effects’ (Chia and Holt 2006, p. 637). Here, a challenge is to interlink close observations of the micro-level activities of people ‘with a continuous regard for the wider institutional context that informs and empowers such activities’ (Johnson et al. 2007, p. 22). Even if scholars taking up this challenge put individuals' activities in context, the contextual dimension of time is still seldom included, eschewing historical frameworks.

The aim of this chapter is to take the Strategy as Practice perspective a step further by elevating the historical dimension as a living tradition that shapes present future-oriented activities performed by practitioners in their representation and reconstruction of the past. Our focus centres on strategizing in relation to hermeneutical situatedness, prompting a dialogical openness to the past. Hermeneutical situatedness allows the practitioner to take on the appearance of a social historical being always affected by the testimony of history and under its influence (Gadamer 1989).