The first books on organization theory I read were Burrell and Morgan's (1979) Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, and Morgan's (1986) Images of Organization. These works explored the conceptual and methodological pluralism of the social sciences and in particular organization theory, and made clear that the dominant positivist mode of inquiry was just that: a mode of inquiry, that taken to extremes, could hinder the knowledge-generation process. Pettigrew's (1985) and Johnson's (1987) in-depth studies of the strategy process, in addition, shaped my early understanding of strategy. They emphasized that we cannot hope to understand sufficiently the complex processes related to strategic management unless we take a good look at the internal functioning of organizations. This entails getting one's hands dirty in the field, gathering nuanced data on actors' first-order perceptions through hermeneutically oriented methodologies.

These initial orientations enabled me to view strategy as inextricably linked to organization, and as such processual rather than static, messy and ambiguous rather than clear-cut, socio-political rather than simply “technological” or sanitized, and located within local conditioned rationalities rather than universal rationalities. I became convinced that carrying out my doctoral research on the topic of how organizational discourse and culture influence strategic change processes Heracleous (1997) using ethnographic methodologies would be useful in terms of contribution to knowledge (even though it would also be pretty hard work).