Markus Hällgren, Oscar Rantatalo and Ola Lindberg examine the interface between research on extreme contexts and strategy as practice research. The authors argue that combining these two bodies of literature can help management and organization researchers to develop more impactful research. They start by discussing what an extreme context is, followed by an overview of how strategizing plays out in risky, emergency, disruptive and surprising contexts. Then, the authors provide an empirical vignette from their own research as an example of strategy work in a risky setting. This example uses incident command organizing to perform strategic work during extreme situations. The case study illustrates how strategic change entails a dynamic and political process during which actors within the same practice may act with different objectives. While the authors show that excellent work has already been done at the interface of extreme contexts and strategy as practice research, they suggest future research avenues that would allow reinforcing the bridges between these two areas of research.

Chapter Five investigates the core-semiperiphery-periphery structure of the European automotive industry between 2003 and 2017 by drawing on the global value chains and global production networks perspectives and on the conceptual explanation of the spatial division of labor in transnational production networks in the automotive industry. It develops a methodology to empirically determine the relative position of countries in the core, semiperiphery or periphery and changes in their position over time. The methodology is based on calculating the automotive industry power of individual countries, which is the combination of trade-based positional power, ownership and control power, and innovation power in the automotive industry. On the one hand, the empirical analysis revealed a dominant position of Germany as a higher-order core, which is joined only by France and Italy in the stable core of the European automotive industry. On the other hand, the periphery is mostly located in eastern Europe despite the rapid growth of the automotive industry since the 1990s. The majority of countries kept a stable relative position in the core-semiperiphery-periphery structure of the European automotive industry transnational production system during the 2003-2017 period.

Tyson Rallens, Tom Lawrence and Nelson Phillips adopt a social-symbolic perspective on strategy work. Thereby, they offer a sorely needed analysis of what strategy work consists of. More specifically, the authors use the social-symbolic approach to illuminate the ‘objects’ that strategy practitioners work on. They identify three types of objects: strategy objects, strategic objects and strategists (as objects). They also explain how this work amounts to programmes of action and how objects of strategy work are embedded in ecologies of social-symbolic objects. They conclude by discussing how this approach can benefit future strategy as practice research and how such work can add to research on social-symbolic work more generally.

Ethel Brundin and Feng Liu examine the role of emotions in strategizing. They suggest that studying emotions has enriched our understanding of the dynamics of strategizing practice. They explain how emotions are used as a means to realize intended ends and also how emotions may yield unintended effects. The authors highlight that the topic of emotion offers a set of promising opportunities for future research. In particular, they point to some missing themes and theories, highlight that strategy as practice research on emotions has tended to neglect strategists beyond the senior management, criticize the focus on larger organizations only, propagate research exploring the linkages between micro and macro levels of analysis and call for more methodological diversity. The authors also observe that current research is limited in that it borrows concepts from existing emotion theories rather than aiming to contribute to those theories as well.

François Cooren, Nicolas Bencherki, Mathieu Chaput and Consuelo Vásquez develop a communicational approach to strategy and strategy-making in an attempt to foster a dialogue with the strategy as practice literature and its latest explorations around talk and text. Based on a ‘communicative constitution of organization’ approach, they provide a conceptual framework to define strategy-making as a series of communication episodes where specific matters of concerns are invoked, evoked and negotiated, defining and appropriating value to the organization. More specifically, they propose that strategy as practice researchers focus on fleeting moments of strategy to highlight how collective endeavours are progressively born as effects, and therefore do not exist prior to the practices that generate them. Applying this framework to the analysis of a board meeting in a community organization, the authors show that favouring a constitutive view of communication allows the researcher to de-center his/her analysis from human practices, broadening it to a ‘web of practices’ (Vaara and Whittington 2012: 310) that is created through talk and text.

Eero Vaara looks at the discursive aspects of strategy and strategizing from a critical angle. He emphasizes that critical discourse studies (CDS) differ from that of relativist forms of discourse analysis, which reduce everything to discourse. After an overview of the characteristic features of CDS, he presents various ways in which this methodology can be applied to advance our understanding of different forms of strategic discourse: (1) the central role of formal strategy texts; (2) the use of discursive practices in strategy conversations, (3) the construction of strategy and subjectivity in organizational discourse; (4) the discursive legitimation of strategies; and (5) the ideological underpinnings of strategy discourse. He also illustrates how strategy as practice researchers can conduct a critical discursive analysis by providing an example of a media text. Overall, he addresses the fundamental questions of how texts are selected and analyzed from a critical standpoint and emphasizes key issues in the application of CDS in strategy as practice.

David Oliver advances the perspective of ‘identity work’ as a form of strategic practice. The author begins by reviewing the literature on identity and identification at the individual, collective and organizational levels in the organization studies literature. He then examines existing research linking identity with strategy, organizing the respective work into three broad perspectives: identity as resource, identity as lens and identity as work. Each of the three perspectives is linked to one of the three focuses of strategy research, that is, strategy content, strategy process and strategy as practice. He finally draws on the growing number of processual studies of identity to elaborate the notion of identity work as a strategic practice, one which operates across different levels of analysis, and integrates past, present and future temporal orientations. A concluding discussion proposes five avenues of future research for strategy as practice scholars, namely identity emergence, identity across levels of analysis, identity and time, identity talk and identity and materiality.

Martin Blom and Mats Alvesson highlight the value of strategy as practice scholars adopting a ‘critical eye’ on their research. The authors review and comment on strategy as practice from a critical perspective and suggest how a critical perspective can be leveraged in a future research agenda. For this purpose, they outline five critical management studies oriented themes for future strategy as practice research, partly based on previous studies with a ‘critical touch’, but also adding some new, and perhaps more radical questions and contributions in relation to previous strategy as practice literature.

Pikka-Maaria Laine, Susan Meriläinen, Johanna Moisander and Janne Tienari focus on a very important but largely neglected topic in strategy as practice research. They argue that strategy as practice research would benefit from a theoretically advanced feminist understanding of what gender is and how it plays into strategy work. They offer an overview of different feminist approaches for developing strategy as practice scholarship. They then concentrate on feminist phenomenology and feminist new materialisms and offer an empirical illustration of what it means to draw from these approaches in strategy as practice research. They conclude with a discussion of future research that could tap into these insights or follow also some of the other feminist perspectives.

Joep Cornelissen and Henri Schildt discuss the sensemaking perspective and its potential for strategy as practice. Their review of past strategy as practice research suggests that sensemaking is largely used in a perfunctory manner in strategy as practice research. They argue that sensemaking provides a rich smorgasbord of theoretical constructs and models that is useful for strategy as practice research. However, they also maintain that moving beyond the application of sensemaking as an umbrella construct would provide important opportunities for more specific contributions. They discuss specific opportunities related to temporality, materiality and sensegiving in strategy as practice research and the role that the sensemaking lens might play in exploring these topics.

Ann Langley and Maria Lusiani focus on the practice of strategic planning. After a review of prior research, they elaborate on what it means to view strategic planning as a social practice. They argue that ‘strategic planning’ is essentially a label that is applied to a shifting set of practices that relate to the articulation of organizational strategic intent in the form of strategic plans. In their analysis, they focus on the textual practices that can be seen as the core in the production and consumption of strategic plans. They discuss the different shapes, content and dynamics of strategic planning practices and suggest avenues for future research on this important social practice.

Richard Whittington explains how Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory can be applied to strategy as practice research. Giddens has been a key source of inspiration in seminal pieces of strategy as practice, especially in Whittington’s own influential work (Whittington 1992; 2006). Whittington explains that structuration theory offers a way to understand microlevel phenomena while placing them into a wider macro context, which makes it a particularly fruitful approach for strategy as practice. He offers on overview of how management researchers have already applied structuration theory but does not stop there. Instead, he explains that there is more to structuration theory than has been realized in previous research. In particular, he argues that structuration theory can help to better understand the role and agency of different types of strategic actors (employees, middle managers, consultants and planners) and advance systematic comparative analysis.

Haridimos Tsoukas develops the argument of Chia and Rasche further. In line with earlier works by Chia (Chia and Holt 2006; Chia and MacKay 2007; MacKay, Chia and Nair 2021), he argues that strategy as practice researchers need to adopt a real practice ontology if they wanted to go beyond the process approach in strategy. He supports the call for a clear break with methodological individualism in favour of a view that gives primacy to practice. Yet he warns about pushing research too much in the opposite direction, where strategy is treated as emergent by definition. Instead, we need to reconcile – from a practice-based approach – the possibility of both non-deliberate and deliberate types of action in strategy. Drawing on Heidegger’s philosophy, he develops a framework that distinguishes between four different types of actions according to the involved form and degree of intentionality: (1) ‘practical coping’ (based on tacit understandings); (2) ‘deliberate coping’ (based on explicit awareness); (3) ‘detached coping’ (based on thematic awareness); and (4) ‘theoretical coping’ (based on theoretical understanding). These four forms of action are then linked to four forms of strategy making.

Jean-Pascal Gond, Bernard Leca, Charlotte Cloutier and Alfredo Grattarola in turn introduce the ‘Economies of Worth’ (EW) perspective to strategy as practice scholars, emphasizing its critical distance from earlier forms of critical sociology and its distinctiveness from the concept of institutional logic. They clarify the EW assumptions, introduce its key concepts, and explain its usefulness for understanding the formation of social agreement in the context of disputes. Based on a review of existing EW studies, they discuss how the framework has thus far been used to analyze how actors deal with strategic pluralism and, more specifically, to investigate the social dynamics underlying strategic legitimation, strategic localization and strategic materialization. They conclude by explaining how certain key insights from economies of worth can be further leveraged to continue to advance strategy as practice research at the phenomenological, conceptual and methodological levels.