Strategy as Practice (SAP) has emerged as a distinctive approach for studying strategic management, strategic decision-making, strategizing, strategy-making and strategy work (Jarzabkowski, Balogun and Seidl 2007; Johnson, Melin and Whittington 2003; Whittington 1996). In recent years, SAP research has become more popular than ever (Jarzabkowski, Seidl and Balogun 2022; Kohtamäki et al. 2022). SAP provides not only an organizational perspective into strategic decision-making but also a strategic angle for examining the process of organizing, and thereby it serves as a research programme and social movement for connecting contemporary strategic management research with organizational studies. This third edition of the Handbook offers an updated and forward-looking reflection about what we have learned and how to make the most out of this powerful perspective in future research.

David Seidl, Stéphane Guérard and Tania Räcker review and synthesize the extant literature on the role of meetings in the context of strategy. They show that meetings involve various meeting practices, that they serve many different (manifest and latent) functions, and that their effects on the respective organization depend on the ways in which they are integrated into larger series of meetings. In addition to that they examine the literature on strategy workshops, as particular types of meetings. They explain that workshops allow suspending the existing organizational structures and, in this way, provide a platform for strategic reflection. They also report on various empirical studies that have examined the effectiveness of different workshop designs. Based on the review of the existing literature, the authors outline an agenda for future research on meetings and workshops.

Davide Nicolini, David Seidl and Violetta Splitter provide yet another very useful theoretical perspective. They focus on Theodore Schatzki’s work and explain how it has been employed in strategy as practice research. This approach, rooted in Schatzki’s practice theory, is characterized by ‘flat ontology’, and it has proven to be a very fruitful source of inspiration and a theoretical foundation for strategy as practice scholars. Nicolini, Seidl and Splitter explain that this perspective gives ontological priority to strategy practices rather than practitioners, that it helps us to understand the embeddedness and situatedness of strategy practices in their social, institutional and organizational contexts, and that helps us to better understand linkages between bundles of practices in strategy and strategizing. This leads them to point to specific areas of application and offer implications and guidelines for future research using this approach in strategy as practice research.

Violetta Splitter and David Seidl address the practical relevance of practice-based research on strategy. They review practice-based studies that have examined the ontological and epistemological conditions for producing strategy research that proves relevant to management practice. Drawing on these works, they argue that researchers inevitably adopt a scholastic point of view, which makes it impossible to directly capture the logic of strategy practice. However, strategy as practice scholars can increase the practical relevance of their research by developing theories based on practical logic. They have outlined three approaches to capture the logic of management practice: (1) theorizing through practical rationality; (2) the application of ‘participant objectivation’; and (3) the consideration of the dissociation process. They argue that if strategy as practice research builds on these insights, it can prove a particularly fruitful approach for generating knowledge that is of conceptual relevance to strategy practice.