Recent years have seen increasing initiatives involving more open strategizing. These initiatives, referred to as Open Strategy, imply greater transparency and/or inclusiveness in strategy processes (Hautz et al., 2017; Whittington et al., 2011). As such, Open Strategy forms part of a larger societal trend toward greater degrees of openness in all domains of life – such as Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2003), Open Source Software (von Hippel & von Krogh, 2003), Open Government (Janssen et al., 2012), Open Data (Huijboom & van den Broek, 2011), and Open Science (David, 1998). By comparison with some of these domains, research on Open Strategy is still nascent. While substantial theoretical groundwork has been laid, and both qualitative and quantitative studies are now appearing, there remain significant opportunities for more research on what is a fast-developing and wide-ranging set of initiatives. Given this breadth, we identify the key dimensions, practices, and impacts of Open Strategy, and propose promising theoretical perspectives capable of building cumulative knowledge regarding these. We also guide researchers by offering a practical definition that sets boundaries on the phenomenon.

In responding to changing competitive conditions, organizations are adopting increased levels of openness in the form of greater transparency and the inclusion of a larger number and variety of internal and external actors (Whittington et al., 2011; Hautz et al., 2017). Recent societal changes toward more participation in various domains of society (Dobusch et al., 2015) and technological advances in the form of social technologies (Haefliger et al., 2011), in particular, promote increased inclusiveness in strategizing. In this chapter, we pay specific attention to this dimension of inclusiveness in Open Strategy, which involves external and internal consultation to exchange “information, views and proposals intended to shape the continued evolution of an organization’s strategy” (Whittington et al., 2011: 536; Hautz et al., 2017).

Social network theory has been suggested to offer a particularly suitable perspective for studying both the emergence of increased openness in strategy processes as well as its consequences at multiple levels (Hautz, 2017; Hautz et al., 2017). Social network research and analysis have featured in the social sciences for nearly a century (Borgatti et al., 2009), but their application in an organizational context has increased significantly in recent years, undergoing exponential growth (Borgatti & Foster, 2003; Phelps et al., 2012). This dramatic increase is part of a general shift of research toward more relational, contextual, and systemic understandings (Borgatti & Foster, 2003). In this context, social networks offer a diverse repertoire of theories and frameworks to describe, analyze, and explain the behaviors and consequences that emerge from increased transparency and inclusion in strategy processes. These two dimensions of Open Strategy are based on concepts central to the network perspective, as they refer to increased internal and external transfer of strategic information and to external and internal exchange of information, views, and proposals intended to shape the continued evolution of an organization’s strategy (Whittington et al., 2011; Hautz et al., 2017).

Open Strategy has drawn increasing attention in recent years. A growing number of studies have captured greater transparency and heightened inclusion in the strategic practices of contemporary organizations (e.g., Whittington et al., 2011; Hautz et al., 2017). It is often Information Technology (IT) that can facilitate involvement of a wider range of stakeholders in the generation of strategic content and knowledge (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Wulf & Butel, 2016), and in the practice of strategy (Whittington et al., 2011; Whittington, 2014). However, despite the widely recognized role of such technology as online platforms (Malhotra et al., 2017) and social media (Huang et al., 2013; Baptista et al., 2017) in enabling openness in strategy, literature with an explicit focus on IT has been surprisingly sparse to date (Tavakoli et al., 2015; 2017). Thus far, most papers have been published in Management and Strategic Management outlets (e.g., Whittington et al., 2011; Stieger et al., 2012; Seidl & Werle, 2017), including a special issue on Open Strategy in Long Range Planning (e.g., Hautz et al., 2017).

Examining Open Strategy through the role of visuals holds great promise. Visual artifacts are increasingly central to what organizational actors do inside and outside their firms, for example, with the growing use of visualization tools, big data analytics, presentations (e.g., PowerPoint), user-centered design approaches, visuals in social media, and videoconferencing dominating modern strategy analysis (Berinato, 2016; Boxenbaum et al., 2018; Kim & Mauborgne, 2002). Through the use of these visuals in their strategy process, firms can communicate their strategic direction to internal and external audiences and actively engage these audiences in particular aspects of their decision making, which could in turn, open new, yet unexplored, avenues for their strategy. As such, visuals open up the opportunity to communicate and engage with a much less strategically informed set of actors than is the norm in strategy, for example shop floor workers or stakeholders such as citizens in local communities. This is possible since visuals can reduce cognitive challenges (Täuscher & Abdelkafi, 2017; Hegarty, 2011) and make such challenges more widely accessible compared to more traditional strategy formats (such as memos or reports that often require familiarity with strategy terminology to be understood).

Recently, openness has become a new approach in strategizing as ownership and control of internal assets are no longer vital to achieving competitive advantage (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007). Nowadays, knowledge is widespread and open systems are generally regarded as beneficial in terms of organizational design and work culture. However, openness also comes with politics and it is not a practice that will necessarily be welcomed by all. Openness changes the power dynamics within an organization; there are critics as well as friends, as we shall explore. Openness is a process that can change over time, becoming more or less open as events occur and contingencies or actors change. We are interested in how dominant organizational actors can seemingly manipulate “open systems” strategically. Openness is problematic per se for social systems. Systems endogenously construct their differentiation from other systems through closure achieved through specific cognitive rules. In this chapter, we use Clegg’s (1989) “circuits” approach to a theory of power to grasp the politics of openness in terms of three circuits of power. Some of the recent problems posed in the wider world of social media will be analyzed in terms of the three circuits to illustrate some potential problems.

This chapter is about how the concept of partial organization can contribute to our understanding of the specificity of organizing collective action through social media. Empirically, it is a story about how a small group of activists via Facebook could raise 9 million Swedish crowns (around 900 000 Euros) in just over a week to a private bank account, and also about the ensuing challenges involved in allocating the funds and packing and distributing the tons of clothes and other items they collected. Theoretically, we want to propose that the undecided order of a social media initiative may hold sufficient power to initiate it, but it may become too strenuous to manage in the long run without legitimate authority. In turn, pressures to incorporate standardized practices of membership, leadership, and monitoring may risk the very basis of the large-scale engagement that the partialness of the social media initiative has enabled.

In recent years, researchers have observed the increasing emergence of new forms of organization, in which membership is described as becoming fluid or unclear. Against this backdrop, scholars have proposed to drop membership as a defining criterion for formal organizations and instead to apply the broader concept of ‘contributorship’, which states that there are not only members of an organization, but also contributors who belong partially to the organization, as long as they participate in the organizational processes. I add to this development and combine the concept of contributorship with the decision-based perspective on organizations, which sees decisions as the constitutive elements of organization. Thus, contributorship can be understood as a matter of decision: through their decisions, organizations manage the possibilities for individuals to contribute. I build on two qualitative case studies demonstrating that instead of defining specific members, organizations can decide on spatial, temporal, attributional, resource-related, and/or quantitative-limitational premises for distributing possibilities of contributions.

In responding to changing competitive conditions, organizations are adopting increased levels of openness in the form of greater transparency and the inclusion of a larger number and variety of internal and external actors (Whittington et al., 2011; Hautz et al., 2017). Recent societal changes toward more participation in various domains of society (Dobusch et al., 2015) and technological advances in the form of social technologies (Haefliger et al., 2011), in particular, promote increased inclusiveness in strategizing. In this chapter, we pay specific attention to this dimension of inclusiveness in Open Strategy, which involves external and internal consultation to exchange “information, views and proposals intended to shape the continued evolution of an organization’s strategy” (Whittington et al., 2011: 536; Hautz et al., 2017).

The modern world is highly organized. Much organization occurs within formal organizations, to the extent that the extensive study of formal organizations has overshadowed other forms of organization. But organization happens not only within, but also outside the context of formal organizations. We define ‘organization’ as a decided order, and we see some decisions as more fundamental than others and have dubbed these decisions ‘organizational elements’. We distinguish five such elements: membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions, and hierarchy. Individuals or organizations can use organizational elements to organize other individuals or organizations, even if they do not belong to the same organization. But organizers do not necessarily use all elements, and all settings are not organized by all elements. In fact, many social settings are only partially organized – even formal organizations. We use the concepts of social relationships and formal organization to specify what we mean by organization and organizational elements, and compare organizational elements with other ways in which social relationships develop. We describe the differences between organization and other origins of social order such as institutions and networks. The chapter ends with an overview of the following chapters.

Despite strong emotions and a high density of communication, intimacy does not preclude organization. Intimate relationships can often be recognized as partially organized. In this chapter I examine three intimate relationships – families, kinship, and friendship – in order to investigate how the variation in combinations of organizational elements can be explained by the core component of love in each type of relationship.In examining the appearance of organizational elements in intimate relationships, one can see considerable differences among them, not only in their degree of organization, but also in the elements that are present. There is a connection between the elements that appear in a relationship and the emotional content. But there are also differences within the same type of relationship in how much and in which ways they are organized. An investigation of organizational elements in intimate relationships also provides an awareness of the limits of organization and why intimate relationships remain partially organized.A broadening of the analysis examining connections between states and intimate relationships demonstrates why states can use membership as an organizational element only to a limited extent. States are extremely organized in many respects, yet they are only partially organized.

Openness is in vogue for a small but growing camp of governance reformers (Tihanyi et al., 2014; McGahan, 2015; Almirall et al., 2014; Kube et al., 2015; Mergel, 2015), and innovation scholars (Dahlander & Gann, 2010; Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014; Randhawa et al., 2016). Achieved through transparency and/or inclusion (Whittington et al., 2011), openness has recently become a recognizable theme in strategy literature (Birkinshaw, 2017; Alexy et al., 2018; Matzler et al., 2014a) and is implemented by strategy practitioners in profit-based (i.e., IBM) and nonprofit organizations (i.e., Wikimedia and Creative Commons).

It is, of course, impossible to separate the pressures on staff within business schools from the state of the universities in which they are based. I therefore start this chapter by paying tribute to the memory of an academic colleague in a different discipline, and who I never met. His name was Stefan Grimm and he died in 2014. The story of what happened to him is extreme, though perhaps less so than we would like to imagine. I think it serves as an illustration of university life at its worst and should alert us to the need for a change of direction.

Just by their names, the concepts of Open Strategy (OS) and Strategic Openness (SO) seem to have a lot in common – at the very least, they both constitute equally viable outcomes in a forced relationship technique exercise using the words “open” and “strategy.” Indeed, authors on both topics would arguably agree that both concepts somehow deal with behavior that has to do with strategy and in which certain aspects are open, with “open” implying at least a partial reduction of access restrictions (also see, e.g., OED Online, 2013). More precisely, Open Strategy is defined as an inclusive and transparent way to develop and enact strategy (Tavakoli et al., 2015), and Strategic Openness as how firms voluntarily forfeit control over their resources (Alexy et al., 2018).

Although the question whether organisation obstructs or supports social movement claims and mobilisation has long been debated, it is undeniable that some level of organisation exists in even the most radically horizontal social movements. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to how movements operate in dealing with the tensions associated with the question of organisation, that is, how they seek to be effective in decision-making while maintaining or advancing inclusivity and participation. This chapter presents an analysis of the organising efforts of a timebank. With a particular focus on the production of organisation, we illustrate how a group vested on the idea of horizontal, non-hierarchical collective action is dealing with the coordination and decision-making challenges they meet over time.

Practice theories have an obvious appeal for Open Strategy research. The major trend towards more openness in strategy making gives rise to new strategy practices that afford internal and external actors greater strategic transparency and/or inclusion (Whittington et al., 2011). Committing to the primacy of practice in social life (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki et al., 2001), practice theories offer a particularly suitable perspective for studying both the emergence of these new Open Strategy practices and the complex dynamics of their application in real-life settings. Accordingly, many studies on Open Strategy already refer to practice theories to identify the new practices associated with Open Strategy, such as strategy jamming, strategy blogging, or interorganizational strategy making.