The ordinary practitioners … live ‘down below’, below the threshold at which visibility begins … [T]heir knowledge … is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms … It is as though the practices were characterized by their blindness (Reference de Certeaude Certeau 1984: 93).
Introduction
Most traditional approaches to strategy research can be described as comprising a complex amalgam of activities involving the analyses of dependent and independent variables, theoretical conjecturing and the testing of theories and models developed to capture the essence of strategic realities (Reference RascheRasche 2008). In this regard, the strategy-as-practice (SAP) approach to research is a welcome departure in its single-minded insistence on focusing attention primarily on what strategy practitioners actually do. Although the SAP field has attracted a mass of empirical work (Reference Balogun and JohnsonBalogun and Johnson 2005; Reference Bencherki, Sergi, Cooren and VásquezBencherki et al. 2019; Reference JarzabkowskiJarzabkowski 2005; Reference Paroutis and HeracleousParoutis and Heracleous 2013; Reference RegnérRegnér 2003; Reference Whittle, Gilchrist, Mueller and LenneyWhittle et al. 2021) and theoretical clarification (Reference Denis, Langley and RouleauDenis, Langley and Rouleau 2007; Reference Jarzabkowski, Balogun and SeidlJarzabkowski, Balogun and Seidl 2007; Reference WhittingtonJohnson, Melin and Whittington 2003; Reference WhittingtonWhittington 1996; Reference Whittington2003; Reference Whittington2006; for a recent review, see Reference Kohtamäki, Whittington, Vaara and RabetinoKohtamäki et al. 2022), the alternative epistemological groundings theoretically possible and how that can affect further efforts at conceptualizing SAP often remain relatively unarticulated. This, despite the fact there have been some notable attempts to clarify research and methodological priorities for the SAP movement (see e.g., Reference Balogun, Huff and JohnsonBalogun, Huff and Johnson 2003; Reference Ezzamel, Willmott, Baum and LampelEzzamel and Willmott 2010; Reference JarzabkowskiJarzabkowski 2003; Reference Jarzabkowski2004; Reference Jarzabkowski2005; Reference WhittingtonJohnson, Melin and Whittington 2003; Reference McCabeMcCabe 2010; Reference Tsoukas, Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl and VaaraTsoukas 2010; Reference WhittingtonWhittington 2006).
For strategy researchers it is vital to seriously consider how accounts and explanations proffered on strategy practice reflect an acute awareness of the ‘situatedness’ of strategic action, and hence the inevitable epistemological problems associated with any attempt at representing such strategic realities. The manner in which academic accounts of strategy practice tend to create a schism between those accounts and the nature of the very practices they purport to explain is one of the most intractable problems of the research process (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1977: 19; Reference ChiaChia 2004). Reference BourdieuBourdieu (1990: 29) calls this tendency to academize the observed social art of practice such that it actually obscures the true logic of practice, ‘intellectualocentrism’. As a result, researchers unaware of this inherent tendency are more likely to naïvely accept practitioners’ oftentimes overly rationalized quasi-theoretical accounts of their own practices. By so doing, researchers unwittingly collude with practitioners themselves in concealing ‘the true nature … of their practical mastery’ (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1977: 19). The result is a truncated and sanitized research account that bears little resemblance to the actual messier goings-on in organizational life; a schism emerges between what is practised/experienced prospectively in arriving at appropriate strategic actions and that which is subsequently represented retrospectively in scholarly research accounts. This is the true reason for the much lamented and perennial ‘theory/practice’ gap often identified as a legitimate criticism of what is taught in business schools (Reference Bennis and O’TooleBennis and O’Toole 2005; Reference Pfeffer and FongPfeffer and Fong 2002; Reference MintzbergMintzberg 2004; Reference Starkey and TempestStarkey and Tempest 2009). This widespread tendency to misrepresent what is actually going on in the practitioner world can be addressed and minimized only through a careful examination of the dominant research assumptions, dispositions and practices involved and the nature and limitations of the resultant explanatory outcomes proffered.
In this chapter, we explore how this explanatory rupture between research accounts of strategy practice and the practice itself is intimately linked to the adoption of a widely held set of epistemological premises that we term here the building worldview. This dominant view relies on two core assumptions. The first assumes that every individual is a pre-existing, discrete and bounded entity relating externally to its social environment and to other individuals in such a way as to leave its basic internally specified identity and agentic qualities relatively unchanged. A ‘social atomism’ (Reference de Certeaude Certeau 1984: xi) or ‘methodological individualism’ (Reference WeberWeber 1968 [1922]: 15; Reference von Misesvon Mises 1998 [1949]: 42) is presupposed. Individuals are conceived of as autonomous agents separated by a structure of invisible ‘walls’ and endowed with the inalienable capacity to make choices of their own volition independent of their social circumstances. This widespread assumption among social theorists tends to ‘obscure and distort our understanding of our own life in society’ (Reference EliasElias 1978: 15). It underestimates how inherited socio-cultural outlooks affect perceptions, predispositions and practices and hence ultimately shape the strategic choices made.
Second, the building worldview presupposes a Cartesian split between the mental and the physical realms, so that proper knowledge is defined as the cognitive ability to represent the world around us in the form of processed mental images. The assumption is that cognition and mental representation necessarily precede any form of effective action. This cognitivist legacy goes far back to the influences of Socrates and Plato (Reference DreyfusDreyfus 1988) and remains dominant in much of academic thought in social theory (Reference MarchMarch 1972). What distinguishes ‘action’ as opposed to ‘mere’ behaviour, therefore, is that actors are deemed to be motivated by deliberate intentions and to act purposefully when seeking to attain pre-specified goals (Reference DreyfusDreyfus 1991: 93). By ‘purposeful’, we mean a deliberately designed and planned form of intervention into the flow of reality. Strategic action is thus explained through recourse to the meaning and intention of actors, and a means–ends logic of action is presumed. Reference MarchMarch (1972: 419) summarizes this model of human action succinctly. According to this worldview, it is fundamental that ‘thinking should precede action; that action should serve a purpose; that purpose should be defined in terms of a consistent set of pre-existent goals; and that choice should be based on a consistent theory of the relation between action and its consequences’. Both methodological individualism and the privileging of thinking over action serve as the foundational cornerstones of this building worldview; the intellect is privileged over the senses.
We contrast this building worldview with a dwelling one, in which the identities and characteristics of persons are not deemed to pre-exist social interactions and social practices. Rather, the individual person is considered a social product of the ‘condensations of histories of growth and maturation within fields of social relations … [E]very person emerges as a locus of development within such a field’ (Reference IngoldIngold 2000: 3). The individual is ineluctably a social being produced and sustained by social relations. Hence, neither the individual nor society is to be construed as pre-existing, self-contained entities interacting externally with each other (Reference EliasElias 1991: 456). Instead, both the individual and society are viewed as mutually constitutive and co-defining relational impulses relying on ‘complex responsive processes’ (Reference StaceyStacey 2007: 247); they become who or what they are through relational practices. Social entities as such, including individuals and organizations themselves, are stabilized relational effects of social practices. As such, social practices themselves necessarily form and shape individual agency, intentions and predispositions (Reference Chia and HoltChia and Holt 2006; Reference Ezzamel and WillmottEzzamel and Willmott 2008; Reference MacKay, Chia and NairMacKay, Chia and Nair 2020). The individual is understood, not as an autonomous entity, but rather as a node in a network of practice relations ‘in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations interact’ (Reference de Certeaude Certeau 1984: xi). Neither individuals nor some overarching deterministic super-structure of thought are the real ‘co-authors’ of action. Instead, spontaneous action attuned to the immediacy of circumstances and guided by habituated practices is unthinkingly initiated as a response to social and environmental solicitations and demands. In this regard, a relational ontology of individuation is alternatively proposed in the form of the ongoing ‘bundling’ of social practices (Reference Chia and HoltChia and Holt 2006: 635; Reference Chia and MacKayChia and MacKay 2007; Reference Ezzamel and WillmottEzzamel and Willmott 2008: 197; Reference MacKay, Chia and NairMacKay, Chia and Nair 2020; Reference SchatzkiSchatzki 2005: 466).
What this dwelling worldview implies is that individual agents are so constituted by everyday social practices that they act and interact, for the most part, spontaneously and purposively (in contrast to purposefully) in a self-referential manner. This happens in the everyday successful overcoming of immediate problems and obstacles encountered without any presumption of the need for theoretical distancing, conscious deliberation or reliance on an overall pre-designed plan of action (Reference Chia and HoltChia and Holt 2009; Reference DreyfusDreyfus 1991). There is, on this view, no presupposed prior distinction between individual and society, no initial dualism between mind and matter and no prior distance between thought and action. These distinctions are secondarily generated through social conventions and habituated practices to create and sustain a sense of social order and coherence. From this worldview, it is everyday unmediated coping actions ‘uncontaminated by a directing image’ (Reference CooperCooper 1976: 1001) that breaks new ground and advances our understanding; it is action that precedes cognitive representation and manipulation. Oftentimes, in the uncertainty of the cut and thrust of real-world engagements, as Reference MarchMarch (1972: 423) notes, people ‘act before they think’.
The delineation of a dwelling worldview enables us to establish an alternative set of epistemological premises whereby knowledge is not understood as some abstract representational commodity that is digested, processed and then acted upon. Rather it is ‘grown’, regrown and silently transmitted through embedded social practice within specific socio-cultural and historical contexts. On this account, practical knowledge is unconsciously internalized and incorporated into the modus operandi of an individual in the form of acquired skills, sensitivities and overriding predispositions (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1990). Both the building and the dwelling modes of explanation may be employed to explain the actual practice of strategizing. Each produces significantly different explanatory outcomes, however. Thus, while it is possible to straightforwardly identify and catalogue the explicit and purposeful ‘doings’ of assigned strategists – the tools, artefacts, talk, awayday meetings and strategy presentations, etc. – it is also true to say that much of what goes on in the actual process of evolving a coherent strategy consists of small, unspectacular everyday coping actions taken throughout an organization that are oftentimes surreptitiously overlooked by strategy researchers. This is because of a widespread penchant, on the part of researchers, for focusing attention on the dramatic and the spectacular in human affairs (Reference JullienJullien 2000). Such overlooked seemingly innocuous coping responses are carried out in a self-absorbed manner by individuals with no presumption of deliberate forethought or conscious planning on their part. Actions can be ‘purposive without the actor having in mind a purpose’ (Reference DreyfusDreyfus 1991: 93, emphasis in original). We believe that SAP scholars have not given adequate attention to this latter aspect of strategy-making and the tacit form of practical knowledge associated with it, even though there are now signs that some strategy researchers are beginning to address these issues (Reference BaumardBaumard 1999; Reference Ezzamel, Willmott, Baum and LampelEzzamel and Willmott 2010; Reference McCabeMcCabe 2010; Reference Nonaka and ToyamaNonaka and Toyama 2007; Reference RegnérRegnér 2003). Hence, our aim here is to draw on these insights to enrich accounts of strategy practice by expanding the epistemological possibilities available to the SAP research movement.
Our analysis proceeds as follows. In the next section, we lay the ground for our argumentation by discussing (1) how epistemological considerations interact with the strategy research process, and (2) how traditional epistemological assumptions have informed strategy scholars’ thinking. In the third section, we draw on these insights to distinguish between a building and a dwelling worldview and the specific epistemologies associated with each of these. We show that two types of knowledge, episteme and techné, are intimately linked to the dominant building worldview while another two, phronesis and mētis, constitute the form of practical knowing characterized by a dwelling worldview. In the final section, we first argue that a lot of SAP research remains rooted in the building epistemology. We then explore the implications of adopting a dwelling worldview for the future direction of the SAP research movement. We show that adopting a dwelling worldview with its own set of epistemological premises opens up new avenues for explaining strategy practice as aggregating from mundane or opportunistic everyday coping acts that are inherently unspectacular but that often prove unquestionably efficacious and silently transformational in terms of their overall effect over time.
Epistemology and the Research Process: Problems and Tensions of Researching Strategy Practice
The term ‘epistemology’ is based on the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (account/explanation) and is often perceived to be solely about propositional forms of knowledge claims underpinned by a rationally inspired mode of thought. In ‘proper’ epistemological inquiry, therefore, the facts, the theory, the alternatives and the ideals are brought together and weighed against each other in the creation of knowledge. The prevailing emphasis on this specific form of knowledge has meant that only that which can be subjected to linguistic explication, propositional articulation and universal generalization or precise measurement is deemed to be proper knowledge.
The problem with relying solely on this type of knowledge in academic research is that it misses out on a wealth of tacit, inarticulate and oftentimes inarticulatable understandings that strategy practitioners possess as they go about their practical affairs. Indeed, for most of the time, practitioners themselves may be unaware of this tacit knowledge that they have. This means that, when they are questioned in the research process, respondents may unsuspectingly feel pressurized to justify, account for or clarify their actions in an explicitly logical and coherent manner that is readily understandable to the researcher. They are required to respond to the questions, concerns and preoccupations of researchers in a social context that is distant from the immediate demands of their practical engagements, and to do so using a logic and vocabulary essentially foreign to that of their everyday encounters. The result is that they may unwittingly misrepresent what they actually do know and do thereby obscuring the internal logic of their practice even as they attempt to explain it (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1977: 19). This means that the practice-naïve academic researcher and the research-naïve strategy practitioner may unintentionally collude in producing an overly deliberate and rationalistic account of what has really happened through their retrospective sensemaking efforts (Reference WeickWeick 2001). Interestingly, the situation is far less problematic when successful strategists express their own views in autobiographical accounts, for instance, because there they are less constrained by academic protocols.
In the case of formalized research, however, the conversion from a prospective forward-looking orientation of inventive, opportunistic and timely exploitative action on the part of practitioners to the retrospective theoretical schema of logical explanation connives to transform the reality of practice in process to an efficiency ‘model’ of goal-directed action. This post hoc framing of experience in strictly instrumental causal terms leads to a ‘flattening out’ (to ‘explain’ is to lay out in a flat two-dimensional plane) of the more complex, enfolded and circuitous reality of everyday strategic coping responses. This is partly because, for research to be acceptable and publishable in respected journals, scholars are required to adopt ‘discursive practices’ that conform to the tight demands of an academic community that tend to recognize propositional forms of knowledge and explicit causal explanations as the only legitimate basis of knowledge. Producing knowledge acceptable to the exacting demands of academic scholarship, therefore, risks killing off that very thing that makes research itself a worthwhile activity (Reference MintzbergMintzberg 2004: 399). It tends to leave out the tacit ‘feel’ for a strategy situation that is intuitively understood by the strategy practitioner but that is hardly ever acknowledged in research accounts.
The Epistemological Legacy of Western Thought
To understand the grounds on which the described schism between theory and practice has been generated, we begin by digging deeper into the epistemological legacy of Western thought in this section. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Plato’s successor, Aristotle, distinguished between three types of knowledge, which he called episteme, techné and phronesis. Episteme is universal truth that is context-independent, rationally based and objective. Reference BaumardBaumard (1999: 53) maintains that episteme is propositional knowledge and expertise ‘about’ things. It is abstract, universal and hierarchical knowledge that can be ‘written, recorded, and validated’. Episteme is a product of cognitive representation and symbolic manipulation with language as the primary means employed. It is explicitly articulated in causal terms and can be systematically verified empirically. Similarly, techné is about craftsmanship and involves precise codifiable techniques or practical instructions that are amenable to linguistic explication. Episteme and techné were both often used interchangeably among the ancient Greeks, as Reference NussbaumNussbaum (1986: 94) has noted. Both reflect aspirations towards explicitness, universality, precision, clarity and teachability – all values that were associated with what was deemed desirable in ancient Greece, and that are still held in the highest esteem today, particularly in academic circles (Reference RaphalsRaphals 1992: 227). Knowledge is thus considered such only if it is capable of being expressed linguistically in terms of principles, causes or actor meanings and intentions.
In addition to episteme and techné, however, Aristotle also posited (though less emphatically) the existence of phronesis (practical wisdom) as a less accessible form of personal knowing that differs qualitatively from episteme and techné. Unlike the latter two categories of knowledge which are assumed to be a kind of possession, phronesis rather ‘expresses the kind of person that one is’ (Reference DunneDunne 1993: 244) not what one has. While episteme and techné imply the explicitness and transmissibility of knowledge, phronesis alludes to a form of tacit knowing that emerges through a person’s striving and self-cultivation and hence is inseparable from his/her entire cultural attitude and predisposition. Although both episteme and techné can be consciously learned and hence can be forgotten, ‘phronesis cannot’ (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 6.5.1140b, 28–30, cited by Reference DunneDunne 1993: 265), since it is always already integral to an individual’s make-up. Unlike episteme or techné, in which it is possible to make a distinction between intention and behaviour, and hence between what one is and what one does, in phronesis what one does reflects what one is. Unlike episteme and techné, which produce outcomes that are clearly separable from the producer, phronesis gives rise to praxis. Praxis is non-instrumentalized action. It seeks no outcomes other than its own self-realization (Reference DunneDunne 1993: 262); in effect, praxis is self-perfecting action. In phronetic action (i.e., praxis) therefore:
the agent … is constituted through the actions … [H]e becomes and discovers ‘who’ he is through these actions. And the medium for this becoming through action is not one over which he is ever sovereign master; it is, rather, a network of other people who are also agents and with whom he is bound in relationships of interdependence
This intimate relationship between being and doing, between intention and action and between identity and strategy makes phronesis extremely difficult to comprehend, and hence it remains very much an unexplored feature in strategy research (Reference BaumardBaumard 1999; Reference Nonaka and ToyamaNonaka and Toyama 2007).
Moreover, recent studies of pre-Socratic Greek culture and society, including especially the insights expressed in Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony (Reference Detienne and VernantDetienne and Vernant 1978), suggest the existence of yet another form of practical knowing on which even Plato and Aristotle remained surprisingly silent. Detienne and Vernant call this form of ‘cunning intelligence’ mētis. Mētis is ‘a type of intelligence and of thought, a way of knowing; it … combines flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over years’ (Reference Detienne and VernantDetienne and Vernant 1978: 4). The field of application for mētis is a world that is shifting, multiple, disconcerting and ambivalent. While phronesis was still considered in Aristotelian thought, and is increasingly recognized and acknowledged as a form of ‘tacit knowledge’ or ‘practical wisdom’ (Reference BaumardBaumard 1999; Reference Nonaka and ToyamaNonaka and Toyama 2007), the quality of mētis was largely ignored by the Greek philosophers – and this has also been the case in strategy research. Mētis corresponds to what we mean when we say that someone is ‘street-smart’, ‘canny’ or seem able to ‘get away with things’ or ‘get out of difficult situations’ with cunning and ease. Both phronesis and mētis are qualities integral to a person’s persona and remain relatively unexplored in the SAP research agenda, yet they are vital tacit qualities of an effective strategy practitioner. In what follows, we show that phronesis and mētis are alternative epistemologies intimately linked to a dwelling mode of thinking.
Building and Dwelling: Two Worldviews for SAP Research: Comparing the Building and Dwelling Worldviews
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Reference de Certeaude Certeau (1984: 91–3) finds himself at the top of the ill-fated World Trade Center in New York musing on the difference between the panoramic view looking right down on the city below and the alternative view from down below looking up. In one case, the tourist, enjoying this voyeuristic pleasure, sees from a commanding ‘bird’s eye point of view’ the city neatly laid out below as one would view it on a map. In the other, from down below, a view of the city as most ordinary people would see it: pedestrians hurrying along, engrossed in their everyday activities and unthinkingly finding their way around at the street level. Unlike the detached transcendent observer looking from atop the building, the pedestrians on the streets down below do not have a comprehensive picture of the city. Instead, all they experience is a series of continuously changing migrational views as they actually walk the streets at ‘ground zero’ – unthinkingly but deftly avoiding traffic, sidestepping and negotiating their way around obstacles, ignoring the honking, but noticing the displays on the sidewalk, passing by, reaching towards and generally ‘muddling through’ (Reference LindblomLindblom 1959) on their way to work. This is the creative experience of weaving spaces, events and situations together in a subjective self-referential manner to create sense and meaning for oneself. The richness of experiences involved in such pedestrian journeys cannot be captured by static maps, tracing routes, locating positions or identifying explicitly made decisional moments. Nor can they be even descriptively exhausted through seeking out and clarifying the meanings and intentions of actors, since such everyday activities are often conducted unthinkingly in situ. The pedestrians ‘down below’ have no privileged ‘bird’s-eye’ view and must act by ‘reaching out’ from wherever they find themselves, feeling their way towards a satisfactory resolution of their immediate concerns and circumstances. In this astute observation of these two contrasting viewpoints, Reference de Certeaude Certeau (1984) is making a vital distinction between two different outlooks and their associated modes of engagement and knowing that we label here the ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’ worldviews.
In the building mode, researchers suppose that there is an initial pre-cognitive separation between the actor and the world – so much so that the strategy actor has first to ‘construct mental representations and models of the world prior to any practical engagement with it’ (Reference IngoldIngold 2000: 178; Reference JullienJullien 2004). As such, the strategy actor is assumed to be distinct and detached from the situation he/she finds him/herself in, much like de Certeau’s viewer looking from atop the World Trade Center building. Strategizing is thus construed as the act of top-down detached analysis and planning followed by purposeful ‘interventions’ into the flow of reality to effect a desired outcome. Such action is necessarily comprehensive and ‘heroic’, in that it presupposes the attempt on the part of the actor to impose his/her will and ideal onto an otherwise recalcitrant reality. It directs attention to the meaning, intention and conscious purpose of the individual actor and portrays the latter as a self-contained entity engaging externally the reality it is confronted with.
In the dwelling mode of theorizing, on the other hand, people are assumed to be intimately immersed and inextricably intertwined with their surroundings in all their complex interrelatedness. They have no privileged ‘bird’s-eye’ view of their circumstance and hence have to act from wherever they find themselves in order to achieve a satisfactory resolution of their immediate concerns and predicament. In this immersed situation, people engage in ‘wayfinding’ (Reference HutchinsHutchins 1995), creating action pathways that radiate outwards from their concrete existential circumstances. Like the pedestrians in Reference de Certeaude Certeau’s (1984) observation, people experience the city streets by walking it and feeling ‘their way through a world that is itself … continually coming into being’ (Reference IngoldIngold 2000: 155, emphasis added). Self and world (e)merge in the concrete activities of dwelling, in which skills are acquired and developed ‘without necessarily passing through consciousness’ (Reference DreyfusDreyfus 1991: 27). In such a dwelling mode, decisions and actions are essentially ‘incisions’ made sponte sua in response to the urgencies and demands of a given situation. Here, the efficacy of action does not depend upon some pre-thought plan but result from a combination of honed sensitivity to local goings-on and an internalized mētic predisposition that facilitates continuous timely and ongoing adjustment and adaptation to the circumstances faced.
What is crucial to the dwelling mode of explanation is that it acknowledges the primacy of tacit knowledge over explicit knowledge. It recognizes that such forms of tacit knowing are acquired through living within and becoming intimately acquainted with local conditions ‘on the ground’, and not from some detached observer’s point of view. In other words, the dwelling mode of engagement presupposes the possession of phronesis and/or mētis. Actions are taken contingently in relation to the minutiae of changes detected in a specific local context and not as a universal rule or principle. Moreover, such small local adaptations and the timeliness involved in making them are essentially incremental and ‘unheroic’, so that they often go unnoticed. The practical intelligence involved is subtle, tacit and oblique, unlike the kind of direct means–ends logic of explanation used to account for purposeful human action. Table 1.1 summarizes the relationship between a building and a dwelling worldview.
| Building worldview | Dwelling worldview |
|---|---|
|
|
| Actions and concerted effort are directed towards achieving pre-set goals – conscious thought precedes action. | Actions are directed towards overcoming immediate impediments – in situ practical coping. |
| Consistency of action assumed to be ordered by deliberate goal-directed intent. | Consistency of action assumed to be ordered by a modus operandi – an internalized habitus. |
Towards a Dwelling Worldview: Phronesis and Mētis
To better understand what we mean by a dwelling epistemology and its implications, we now link the concepts of phronesis and mētis to our discussion. As we have maintained, unlike episteme or techné, phronesis and mētis, as tacit forms of knowing, are acquired by being relationally immersed within a social context and by the subsequent internalizing of shared social practices. These are learned unconsciously by way of exemplification, and unthinkingly emulated much in the same way a child imitates the habits, mannerisms and facial expressions of its parents (Reference DreyfusDreyfus 1991: 17). Such practical knowing is generated in the immediate intimacy of lived experience, tacitly acquired through imitation, trial and error and the gradual process of behavioural modification to suit circumstances apprehended. As such, this kind of tacit know-how does not easily lend itself to research scrutiny. Phronesis, in particular, is that tacit form of prudent practical intelligence and wisdom, acquired through experience, that accounts for the ability to perform judiciously and appropriately in defined social circumstances.
Reference Nonaka and ToyamaNonaka and Toyama (2007: 6), in a paper on strategic management, suggest that SAP may be better understood as ‘distributed phronesis’. In largely agreeing with the emphasis on SAP, Nonaka and Toyama make the point that strategy as practical wisdom arises from the desire to pursue a ‘common goodness’ and hence necessarily involves subjective value judgements. This is where phronesis differs qualitatively from episteme and techné. Thus, ‘if techné is the knowledge of how to make the car well, phronesis is the knowledge of what a good car is … and how to endeavour to build such a car’ (Reference Nonaka and ToyamaNonaka and Toyama 2007: 8). Neither episteme nor techné can answer the question of what a ‘good’ car is, since this is a subjective valuation. Only through phronesis can one answer that question.
By couching the problematic in this manner, however, Nonaka and Toyama are in danger of ‘instrumentalizing’ phronetic action (praxis), which, as we have shown, is inseparable from a person’s being and internalized predisposition. Someone with phronesis cannot help acting in the way he/she does. He/she is internally predisposed to building a ‘good’ car in this instance; it is part of being, as we have argued above. Our view is that Nonaka and Toyama overlook the most important aspect of phronesis; that it is a culturally shaped and socially internalized modus operandi or habitus (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1990), integral and inextricable from one’s own sense of self. Phronesis denotes a shared propensity to act in a manner congruent with our own sense of who we are and our collective idea of the good. For this reason, we can agree with Nonaka and Toyama that phronesis may indeed be an immanent and socially distributed, strategic orientation that is deeply resonant with the collective good of society.
Mētis is another kind of practical intelligence, not discussed by Plato or Aristotle, but openly acknowledged by Homer in the Iliad. Mētis is that tacit capability required to escape puzzling, challenging and disadvantageous situations; a kind of ‘cunning intelligence’ (Reference Detienne and VernantDetienne and Vernant 1978). However, in research terms, it does not easily lend itself to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic (Reference BaumardBaumard 1999: 65). Reference RaphalsRaphals (1992: 5) points out that, while phronesis is ‘practical but not inherently oblique, devious or indirect’, mētic intelligence operates with a ‘peculiar twist’; it reflects the internalized ability to attain a surprising reversal of fortunes particularly by those who find themselves in a disadvantaged situation. Mētis is a ‘strategy’ of the weak (Reference de Certeaude Certeau 1984). So, while phronesis is tacit shared practical wisdom associated with goodness and virtue, mētis has no such moral compunctions. It is more associated with clandestine and seemingly ‘unsavoury’ ruses, cunning and opportunism; with the ability to ‘get away’ with things as and when needed. But because of its ‘lowly’ nature, mētis has been mostly ignored or shunned by many researchers of effective action.
Mētis operates through duplicity and disguise, concealing its true lethal nature beneath a reassuring exterior. It is characterized by agility, suppleness, swiftness of action and the art of dissimulation (seeing without being seen or acting without being seen to act). It is a form of primordially acquired ‘strategy’, in which the emphasis is on constantly seeking out practical ways to survive dangerous situations or to ‘outwit’ the competition. The eminent Yale anthropologist James Scott maintains that ‘[k]nowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of mētis’ (Reference ScottScott 1998: 316, emphasis in original). Mētis reflects the ability to reverse apparently unfavourable situations to advantage and hence to achieve more favourable outcomes through diversionary practices such as poachings, surprises, trickery and deceit. Mētis is quintessentially the strategy employed by the disempowered or the disadvantaged (Reference de Certeaude Certeau 1984: 37–40).
Both phronesis and mētis point to the myriad ways by which strategy actors, finding themselves in a given situation, are still nevertheless able to spontaneously and without much forethought transform unfavourable circumstances into favourable outcomes through their practical wisdom, alertness, resourcefulness and guile. When referring to phronesis and mētis, researchers can distinguish the everyday purposiveness of absorbed practical coping action from the purposefulness of planned action (Reference Chia and HoltChia and Holt 2006: 648). Phronetic and mētic intelligence are both internalized predispositions inscribed onto material bodies that generate the propensity to act in a manner congruent with the demands of shifting material situations. They constitute the authentic art of strategizing that is peculiarly sensitive to time – duration as well as simultaneity – and hence they are particularly well suited for dealing with transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous situations. Timeliness of intervention is a crucial feature of phronetic and mētic interventions. It is quintessentially that which continues to lie ‘outside’ the remit of SAP theorizing, yet it is everywhere to be sensed if not seen in actual practice.
Building and Dwelling Worldviews: Consequences for SAP Research
Both the building and the dwelling modes of comprehension may be employed to understand the actual practice of strategizing, each with its own merit. To date, however, it has been the former that has primarily occupied the attention of the SAP research community.
SAP Research and the Building Epistemology
Although SAP scholars have taken much care to conceptualize strategy practices as flexible and being based on practitioners’ improvisations in praxis (Reference WhittingtonWhittington 2006: 620), and although they have encouraged methodological pluralism in research (Reference Balogun, Huff and JohnsonBalogun, Huff and Johnson 2003; Reference WhittingtonWhittington 2003), we contend here that their underlying epistemological assumptions remain largely rooted in episteme and techné. As a result, they are restricted to understanding practitioners’ actions only in terms of these forms of knowledge. Neither phronesis nor mētis, as equally legitimate tacit forms of knowledge possessed by practitioners, feature in their studies. The central assumption of the autonomous strategic actor relying on explicit knowledge to deliberately analyse, plan and then purposefully act to attain predefined ends remains a core feature of the research agenda. To be sure, the focus is directed to more micro-level everyday strategic sensemaking activities, but the focus remains on what formally assigned organizational strategists do, or say they do, and the rational choices they make.
Reference Ezzamel and WillmottEzzamel and Willmott (2008) maintain that SAP advocates such as Reference JarzabkowskiJarzabkowski (2005) and Reference WhittingtonWhittington (2006) continue to rely on an interpretive approach to peer into the black box of everyday strategizing and to examine ‘how, for example, decision-makers’ cognitive frameworks yield their sense of the context; and how these frameworks inform their actions’ (Reference Ezzamel and WillmottEzzamel and Willmott 2008: 196). By so doing, they fail to acknowledge how their research accounts are ‘inescapably constitutive of what [they] claim to capture or reflect’ (p. 196). They go on to insist, rightly, in our view, that, even though SAP theorists continue to employ and emphasize the primacy of practice, citing seminal thinkers such as Reference BourdieuBourdieu (1990) and Reference FoucaultFoucault (1972: Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984) as key advocates, they have not actually embraced the latter’s relational ontology. ‘SAP analysis incorporates little consideration of how, for example, engaging in practices is constitutive of practitioners as subjects’ (Reference Ezzamel and WillmottEzzamel and Willmott 2008: 197). Instead, practices are mainly construed in terms of how assigned strategists ‘think, talk, reflect, act, interact, emote, embellish, politicise’ (Reference JarzabkowskiJarzabkowski 2005: 3) without acknowledging that strategy actors themselves are always already ‘produced’ by these social practices and relationships. Thus, the focus of attention is simply on the explicit doings of strategists that feed into SAP theorizing. Practices themselves are construed as secondary outputs of individuals. In maintaining this epistemological stance, SAP researchers continue to subscribe to what we have called here a building worldview.
Such a research orientation overlooks the formative character of social practices and the modus operandi contained therein on the individual’s or organization’s identity. In other words, it fails to consider the fact that so-called strategic ‘choices’ may be always already shaped by deeply embedded internalized tendencies distributed throughout the organization and acquired through socialization/acculturation. Such internalized tendencies or predisposition that Reference BourdieuBourdieu (1990) also calls habitus constitutes an immanent strategy of sorts tacitly shaping the explicit choices made. As a result of this overlooking, the impression conveyed of organizational strategy-making is one in which important individuals gather themselves in corporate boardrooms, awaydays and summer retreats, enjoying fresh air and/or distance from the cacophony of business operations, to make glitzy presentations and produce glossy reports with a view to charting out the future direction of the organization. This view of strategy-making as a top-down deliberate, intentional and goal-driven activity is itself dispositionally embedded into much of SAP research because of the continuing commitment to proper explicit knowledge (i.e., episteme and techné).
Reference Hendry and SeidlHendry and Seidl (2003: 176), for instance, characterize strategic episodes as ‘a sequence of communications structured in terms of a beginning and ending’. Although we agree that such episodes exist (e.g., meetings and occasions in which senior managers separate themselves deliberately from their day-to-day routines), over-focusing on these formalized aspects of strategizing leads to the overlooking of the less conscious tacit elements involved in the build-up to those episodes in the first place. Similarly, strategy practices are often viewed in a manner that allows a researcher to document and classify precise outcomes and to establish causal relations. Reference MantereMantere (2005), for instance, uses Reference JarzabkowskiJarzabkowski’s (2004) distinction between recursive and adaptive practices to assign clear outcomes (e.g., task definition) to the identified practices (e.g., organizing) and to then characterize key strategy practices in terms of their causes and effects. Similarly, Reference Paroutis and HeracleousParoutis and Heracleous (2013) showed how top management and the central strategy team (i.e., ‘strategists’) of a firm made sense of the concept of strategy. Their analysis neatly packs the strategy discourse of an organization into four distinct dimensions, ranging from an understanding of strategy as being goal-oriented to a perspective highlighting its aspirational character. This kind of explanation rests squarely on the notion of knowledge as episteme and/or techné: both forms of knowledge are characterized by explicitness, classifiability and clarity and are linguistically expressible in propositional terms or in terms of actor meanings and intentions.
We are not arguing that all research into strategy practice must eschew such manifest elements of the strategic activity. Rather, SAP research should not be limited to these visible ‘doings’ of assigned strategists and top management. SAP consists of both visible and manifest purposeful activities and more inconspicuous mundane everyday practical coping actions taken at all levels of an organization. This idea that strategy researchers, like astute business investors, must eschew the visible and manifest and look towards the inarticulate and implicit is well understood by successful strategists themselves. Observing that it is often the hidden practical activities and not the surface glitter that are most important in accessing what is really going on in organizational reality, the chairman of Channel 4 and the private equity firm Risk Capital Partners, Luke Johnson, writes in an article in the Financial Times:
‘Beware form over substance’ … [L]ook at the underlying reality rather than the surface appearance of things … Terry Smith, who runs the UK inter-dealer broker Tullett Prebon, once told me his footwear test of investment analysis: back the captain of industry who wears practical shoes with plastic soles rather than the ones who wear ultra-posh brogues from Church’s. The former visits factories to find out what’s going on, the latter is unlikely to be found outside London’s West End
Johnson is reminding us, whether as investors or researchers, to resist the seductions of the overt and the dramatic and instead to look beneath the surface of things, to the ‘rough ground’ (Reference DunneDunne 1993), to discover the true messy reality of the practitioner world. Similarly, while the SAP movement has rightly directed attention towards the less ‘glittery’ aspects of strategy-making and the more ordinary activities they remain absorbed in what formal strategists do and overlook the goings-on at all levels of the organization that feed up into strategy success. It is now timely to take the next logical step and focus attention on what escapes the building worldview on strategy-making; the tacit dimension (Reference PolanyiPolanyi 2009) of SAP.
SAP Research and the Dwelling Worldview
This turn towards the tacit dimension in SAP reflects a commitment to a dwelling mode of explanation and a focus on the role that phronesis and mētis play in the non-deliberate shaping of strategic outcomes. This is what is required to further expand the field of SAP research; to try to track the spontaneous emergence of strategy by observing how immediate local coping actions taken help shape strategic coherence before deliberate planning and intention kick in. In order to truly appreciate how ‘the myriad, micro activities that make up strategy and strategising in practice’ (Reference WhittingtonJohnson, Melin and Whittington 2003: 3) cumulatively aggregate into the observed strategic consistency of actions, researchers need to attend to the tacit elements of this process that are usually overlooked by their preoccupation with the ‘doings’ of formal strategists. This means a more sympathetic grasping of the largely unplanned logic of practice whereby actions are taken – ‘on the spot … in the twinkling of an eye’ (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1990: 82) – at the operational interfaces of an organization. In other words, because of this immanent logic of practice guiding responses in dealing with the problems, obstacles and impediments confronted at all operational levels, a patterned consistency of action that, through hindsight, we might call ‘strategic’ inadvertently emerges. This attending to the operational emergence of a strategic orientation, bottom-up, is what is missing in Reference Mintzberg and WatersMintzberg and Water’s (1985) otherwise insightful discussion on inadvertent strategy emergence. In a real sense, strategic potential can be said to be latent in everyday mundane coping actions taken at operational levels. It thus renders the hitherto largely unchallenged (academic) distinction between the strategic and the operational redundant. To grasp this immanent aspect of strategy practice we need to embrace the reality of shared tacit forms of local knowing and the dispositional tendencies associated with them existing at all levels of an organization.
The difference between a building and dwelling worldview is well reflected in Reference RegnérRegnér’s (2003) distinction between strategy-making at the centre and at the periphery. According to Regnér, strategy-making at the centre relies mainly on using deductive methods based on well-defined cognitive representations. This, from our perspective, would be much in line with a building worldview. By contrast, at the periphery, decision-makers develop a phronetic and mētic awareness and sensitivity to the local context, and strategy-making is largely improvisational; strategy emerges slowly through intense and immersed close-quarter engagement. A dwelling epistemology, thus, would be a necessary supplement in studying strategy-making at the periphery and as enacted by organizational members not normally considered to be ‘strategists’ by the inner top management circle. This shows that we do not think of building and dwelling epistemologies as mutually exclusive alternatives but, rather, want to encourage scholars to be aware that strategy-making does not simply take place in boardrooms but happens elsewhere in the organization as well, so that attending to both is vital for a comprehensive understanding.
Reference Laine and VaaraLaine and Vaara (2007) go some way towards this revised understanding by shedding light on the phronetic awareness developed by employees who would normally not be described as strategists. Their analysis focuses on the discursive construction of subjectivity within strategy-making. The study shows how project engineers distanced themselves from the strategy discourse, which was initiated by management (mostly questioning the rationality underlying this dominating discourse). Having developed their own (competing) discourse, the engineers protected their own professional identity and autonomy and portrayed themselves as legitimate actors in the overall process of strategy development (e.g., because of their extensive customer contacts and ‘on-the-ground’ knowledge). Reference Laine and VaaraLaine and Vaara (2007) emphasize that strategy-making happens in different parts of the organization, and that struggles over what counts as strategy and strategizing influence the kind of subjectivities that are developed by different organizational actors. Adopting such a view on strategizing plays down the role of pre-thought plans, highlighting how practical coping on the ground can produce alternatives to centrally developed strategic plans (see also Reference McCabeMcCabe 2010 for a perspective on strategizing that reaches beyond that of management).
Another example of how practical coping actions, shaped by an internalized modus operandi (Reference BourdieuBourdieu 1990) and characterized by phronesis and mētis, provide the seeds for the non-deliberate development of a strategy is reflected in the case of Virgin Airways. Sir Richard Branson’s airline was born serendipitously as a consequence of him and his then girlfriend being left stranded on one of the Virgin Islands during a holiday in the Caribbean in the late 1970s. Arriving at the local airport on the island to return home, they found, together with other waiting passengers, that their flight to Puerto Rico had been cancelled.
No one was doing anything. So I did – someone had to. Even though I hadn’t a clue what I was really doing, with a great deal of aplomb I chartered a plane for $2,000 and divided that by the number of passengers. It came to $39 a head. I borrowed a blackboard and wrote on it: VIRGIN AIRWAYS. $39 SINGLE FLIGHT TO PUERTO RICO. All the tickets were snapped up by grateful passengers. I managed to get two free tickets out of it and even made a small profit! The idea for Virgin Airways was born, right there in the middle of a holiday
This spontaneous coping action, borne of necessity given the circumstances he found himself in, provided the embryonic start to the idea of running a trans-Atlantic airline. Today Virgin Airways is a truly global brand. This is the ‘doings’ of phronesis and mētis.
The success of Virgin Airways, among many others, shows that the idea of strategy-making as a formal affair conducted primarily by assigned top managers and highly paid strategists is only partially correct. Often, strategy emerges through coping actions taken in response to the exigencies of a situation faced. It can happen quite serendipitously and relies more on mētis to initiate an opportunistic intervention or on a deeply embedded phronetic sense of ‘rightness’ to respond accordingly. Both reflect internalized dispositional tendencies rather than a reliance on expressed conscious intentions or deliberate choice. To be sure, there may be some vague directional aspirations that may serve as the driving force behind such initially insignificant initiatives. These are not to be discounted. However, to truly understand these latent motives, we need to incorporate the notions of phronesis and mētis as equally fertile forms of explanation in understanding strategic success.
Only through an appreciation of how phronesis and mētis actively shape strategic behaviour can we begin to follow more closely the twists and turns of everyday absorbed practical coping; the opportunism, reversals, ruses, duplicities, disguises and inventiveness that are entailed in strategic doing. This, after all, is really what constitutes strategy-in-practice, as opposed to strategy-in-theory, which we all know and read about in prestigious journals. This ‘underbelly’ of strategy practice has been considered either too obscure or morally repugnant to warrant serious study. Curiously, however, the more popular ‘airport-type’ books on the practice of strategy are far more likely to acknowledge the existence of these elusive and/or ‘unsavoury’ strategic ruses. These books often relate to the thinking of ancient Greeks, von Clausewitz, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, who were more concerned with the tacit, oblique and circuitous elements of strategizing, as described in the dwelling worldview.
The importance of timing and surprise, as well as deception and clever manoeuvres, in gaining strategic advantage is well documented in the classic text of Carl von Clausewitz, which has been taken up by practitioner-friendly books and which is studiously internalized and put into practice by successful strategists. The entrepreneur Reinhold Würth, founder of the German Würth Group, confesses to be an ardent devotee of Carl von Clausewitz. He writes: ‘Von Clausewitz writes that if you have to defend a fortress and you are surrounded by enemies you should send out a minor part of your troops to engage the enemy as far away as possible to enable the rest of your troops time to prepare’ (Financial Times, 5 March 2008: 14). In relating this lesson of strategic ‘ploy’ to his own business, Würth is endorsing the use of deception and dissimulation in business affairs as a legitimate strategy. He is acknowledging the reality of the value of mētis in practically coping with the strategic challenges of a globalized economy. This is something the more ponderous academic literature on business strategy taught in business schools with its economics-based concern seems to leave out.
From a dwelling worldview, practices intimated by phronesis and mētis, as described in the above-mentioned examples, constitute legitimate ‘objects’ of SAP research. Such practices are resistant to traditional conceptual analysis and can only be approached circuitously and obliquely rather than directly. It is suggested or alluded to rather than baldly stated, for were that not the case it would paradoxically lose its power to influence outcomes. Clearly, the shift in focus, initiated by the SAP movement, to micro-strategizing and flexible adaptation is to be complimented. Yet an emphasis on flexibility by itself is not sufficient to move research from a building to a dwelling worldview, with all its attendant consequences. What is needed in SAP research is a redirection of attention from the declared overt activities traditionally associated with strategizing to the subtle manoeuvres adopted by individuals, organizations and businesses over the course of dealing with pressing immediate concerns that threaten their survival, growth and development. This demands a different kind of research capability; one involving the honing of empirical sensitivity to subtle changes going on and the almost unnoticed differences they produce that nevertheless have strategic consequences. Instead of simply relying on the intellect we now need to equally rely on the senses to guide our understanding of how strategy actually develops.
To truly appreciate the hidden workings that make up strategy and strategizing, the importance of phronetic and mētic intelligence and how it is multifariously deployed from moment to moment to gain a temporary strategic advantage in any given situation must be fully recognized. This requires a sympathetic grasping of the internal logic of practice by observing closely the everyday practical coping behaviour, not just of strategists but of operational others within the organization. It is about not simply relying on the retrospective reasons and meanings proffered by assigned strategy actors themselves in restricted academic research contexts. SAP scholars need to get ‘inside’ the experiences of strategy practitioners and organizational members and to learn an alternative vocabulary for describing how practitioners cope on an everyday basis where they find themselves and not where they think they ought to be. Adopting this dwelling research stance will give us a different and more enriched as well authentic account of strategy practice.
A recent review of the SAP literature (Reference Kohtamäki, Whittington, Vaara and RabetinoKohtamäki et al. 2022) revealed that the field remains diverse in terms of its theoretical influences as well as its methodological approaches and epistemological underpinnings. The review identified six main clusters of research (praxis, sensemaking, discursive, socio-material, institutional and process). The dwelling worldview combines a logic of practice with a situational logic, in place of the logic of rationality underpinning much of SAP research. It has some resonances with the sensemaking cluster (where scholars often focus on how action and interpretation relate to each other locally, in situ, and as part of everyday activity) as well as the socio-material cluster (where researchers explore how material arrangements relate to situated human practices; Reference Werle and SeidlWerle and Seidl 2015). These extensions in research perspectives which serve to temper the overemphasis on deliberate agentic intentionality and choice can allow us a better, more nuanced grasp of the pragmatic realism of strategizing in practice.
We realize that future SAP research adopting a dwelling worldview can be challenging from a methodological point of view. Researchers need to ‘get their hands dirty’ and immerse themselves into the everyday realities of actors at different levels of the organization. In particular, we believe that ethnographic accounts can help SAP scholars to better understand the tacit and often unnoticed and seemingly insignificant moves that we emphasize through the dwelling worldview (Reference Rasche and ChiaRasche and Chia 2009). Ethnographies move beyond analysing single organizational episodes (e.g., meetings) and conducting interviews. Ethnographic research usually relies on spending time in an organization to listen, ask questions, and understand the day-to-day interactions of people (Reference Hammersley and AtkinsonHammersley and Atkinson 1983). Naturally, such ethnographies cannot be conducted across all levels and locations of larger organizations. However, this does not imply that such research only leaves us with a snapshot. Ethnographic SAP researchers oscillate between direct immersion into actors’ lifeworld and the theoretical distancing that is needed to see how these ‘native’ accounts fit into the larger organizational context.
Conclusion
This chapter contrasts two major epistemological alternatives for SAP research. On the one hand, the building worldview leads to a detached, spectator’s apprehension of social situations that privileges a ‘knowledge about’ typically characterized by episteme (abstract, universal generalizations using propositional forms) and/or techné (precise, measurable, codifiable instruction) (Reference BaumardBaumard 1999; Reference Nonaka and ToyamaNonaka and Toyama 2007; Reference RaphalsRaphals 1992). Research in line with this building worldview is directed towards the visible, the manifest and often the deliberate ‘spectacular’ interventions carried out by relatively autonomous strategy actors. On the other hand, a dwelling worldview leads to an intimate, engaged and involved comprehension of the local propensities and proficiencies required to skilfully perform the everyday practices of strategizing. It directs attention to the minutiae of tacit and almost imperceptible interventions that, cumulatively, lead to the gradual transformation of strategic situations into favourable outcomes. An ‘unheroic’ stance is adopted so that research attention is redirected to the mundane, everyday practical forms of intelligence and knowledge associated with phronesis and mētis. As we have pointed out, both phronesis and mētis are forms of knowing-in-practice that are recognizable only through their manifest expression: ingrained propensities, dispositions and capabilities associated with a dwelling worldview.
A dwelling epistemology also points to a different understanding of strategy in general. Often, strategy is construed in terms of clarity of vision, of intentionality and transparent purposefulness, of goal-directed thinking and systematic resource mobilization (Reference Chia and HoltChia and Holt 2009). This approach is practically ‘naïve’, however, in that it does not sufficiently take into account the fleeting, transient and shifting nature of competitive realities, whereby competitive advantage may last for only a short while. Oftentimes, it is surprise and the capitalizing on momentary advantage that constitute real strategizing in practice. Researching such ephemeral and immanent strategies involves the adoption of a dwelling epistemology – one that pays attention to the tacit and unconscious parts of strategizing and the internalized and culturally mediated modus operandi underlying strategy practices.
Strategy fundamentally describes the attempt to extract a temporary advantage from within the situatedness of environmental circumstance an organization finds itself in at any moment in time. It does so through both bold spectacular initiatives AND less conspicuous everyday coping adjustments aimed at gaining a temporary leverage from which it can then initiate those more ambitious strategic moves. These seemingly innocuous coping responses unthinkingly taken in the immediacy of practical engagements, oftentimes at lower operational levels, are guided by established organizational practices internalized by its members. Not by design but by habituation, these effective responses contain a modus operandi or patterned consistency that retrospectively can be construed as ‘strategic’. SAP as such is as much about the cumulative effect of patterned responses taken at all points of an organization particularly where the ‘rubber meets the road’, as it is about boardroom strategizing. The multitude of ongoing close-quarter encounters with an extant environment forces an organization to make continuous adjustments to its demands and solicitations to sustain an advantage over its competitors. This practical aspect of organizational strategy-making, of having to continuously extract and sustain advantage from within the circumstances in which it finds itself, has not been sufficiently countenanced by the SAP literature. It is a ‘situated’ view of strategy-making that we call a dwelling perspective and that we particularly want to raise awareness of in strategy researchers.
Although the SAP research movement rightly aspires to document the micro-moments of strategizing, we conclude that it can be much enriched by incorporating the tacit dimension of strategizing to leverage the full potential of an alternative dwelling epistemology. Although the building worldview remains dominant in existing theoretical and empirical studies on the practice of strategy, we see much potential for the dwelling worldview to supplement and extend this more traditional position. It can teach us, above all, that those who are researched do not necessarily have a ‘bird’s-eye’ view of their situation and that, consequently, the resulting knowledge they operate with is of a different genre from that of episteme and techné. To better understand and appreciate the world of practitioners, SAP researchers must attune themselves to the more subtle nuances of strategizing: to the possibility of phronesis as a distributed practical wisdom and tacit understanding underpinning strategic actions; and to the importance of mētis in strategic manoeuvres that appear to be more recognized and accepted by astute business practitioners themselves.
