Robert Chia

• PhD Organisation Studies
• Professor at University of Glasgow

Now in its third edition, this Handbook is essential for students and researchers in Strategic Management and Organizational Theory and Behaviour. The Strategy as Practice approach moves away from the disembodied and asocial study of firm assets, technologies and practices, towards the study of strategizing as an activity. Strategy is understood as...

The adoption of a stakeholder approach to public engagement within the public sector has been extensive. However, there remain critical gaps in the understanding of stakeholder participation arising from hidden disparities that contribute to unequal access to communication channels, information, and hence ultimately knowledge and decision making. T...

Strategic success is usually associated with having deliberate intentions, prior stated goals and a comprehensively formulated plan for effective execution. This way of thinking is driven by a means-ends logic and underpinned by the cognitivist assumption that conscious thought and consequential reasoning drive effective action: such privileging of...

The conceptual dichotomy between exploration and exploitation has gained much academic attention in innovation management studies ever since March (1991) identified and examined the importance of this distinction and its consequences for organisations. A systematic literature review surrounding this dichotomy, perusing its postulations, was conduct...

This Element maintains that increasing strategic effectiveness involves paying greater attention to the idiosyncratic capabilities and know-how already accumulated in an organization's shared practices and the modus operandi contained therein. An organization's modus operandi describes the practiced patterned regularities that enables it to achieve...

Advocates of stakeholder theory have long known that grasping its key insights requires a specific worldview that is, unfortunately, still not prevalent within the community of strategic management scholars. We argue that this worldview encompasses a process ontology that is radically different from the substance-ontological outlook typical of the...

Research on ethical leadership in organizations has been largely based on Western philosophical traditions and has tended to focus on Western corporate experiences. Insights gained from such studies may however not be universally applicable in other cultural contexts. This paper examines the normative grounds for an alternative Confucian virtue-bas...

This symposium will seek to explicate how Chinese thought differs from the western mode of thinking and the implications for managers and management. The discussion will focus on connecting specific Chinese constructs to topics of organization research, for example, building a Chinese indigenous model of organizational momentum for change, providin...

Emergence of a firm’s strategy is of central concern to both Strategy Process (SP) and Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) scholars. While SP scholars view strategy emergence as a long-term macro conditioning process, SAP advocates concentrate on the episodic micro ‘doing’ of strategy actors in formal strategy planning settings. Neither perspective explains...

Emergence of a firm’s strategy is of central concern to both Strategy Process (SP) and Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) scholars. While SP scholars view strategy emergence as a long-term macro conditioning process, SAP advocates concentrate on the episodic micro “doing” of strategy actors in formal strategy planning settings. Neither perspective explains...

The term 'Grand Challenges' has been used to refer to wide-ranging global concerns such as climate change, poverty eradication and sustainable development. They are urgent, intractable, large-scale and long-term strategic challenges that affect current and future generations. The complexity of these grand challenges mean that diagnosis and prescrip...

Strategy researchers increasingly recognize that in many organizations, strategic coherence can emerge inadvertently from local coping actions and decisions taken 'on the hoof'. However, how this actually happens in practice has not been sufficiently examined and explained. We draw from the "practice turn" in social theory to show how strategy can...

Non-Cognitive Micro-foundational Framework for Dynamic Capabilities

The dynamic capabilities framework has been used to explain how firms successfully adapt to changing environments. However, tensions exist in the literature surrounding the idiosyncratic, tacit and hence inimitable nature of dynamic capabilities. The literature struggles to explain in cognitivist terms how such firm capabilities are acquired in the...

Learning is usually assumed to be an essentially cognitive activity. Consequently, the learning organization literature takes the process of learning to be essentially about acquiring facts, processing information, formulating knowledge configurations, and internalizing rules, routines and procedures, etc. This way of understanding learning assumes...

Decisions as insensible insertions

“Though the river’s current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing.” Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1200): Hōjōki

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn introduced the notion of 'paradigms' to explain how science actually progresses by replacing one paradigm of comprehension with another. Kuhn's notion of paradigms and the related issues of incommensurability were taken up by organization theorists Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan and used to...

Purpose This paper aims to articulate a practice-based, non-cognitivist approach to organizational learning. Design/methodology/approach This paper explores the potential contribution of a process-based “practice turn” in social theory for understanding organizational learning. Findings In complex, turbulent environments, robust organizations rec...

Paradox has become a popular theme in management and organization studies. In this chapter contribution, we argue that paradox arises, not from our phenomenal experience, but from our efforts at conceptualizing it through the logic of comprehension dominating Western thought. We identify an Aristotelian-inspired 'Being' ontology and a corresponding...

That organizations exist in a fluid environment of unprecedented and discontinuous change seems beyond debate. We seem to find ourselves immersed in a world in which events have a tendency to unfold and overtake us in unforeseeable and novel ways that defy comprehension; a crisis of meaning takes place and conventional sensemaking is disrupted. Our...

Now in its second edition, this extended and thoroughly updated handbook introduces researchers and students to the growing range of theoretical and methodological perspectives being developed in the vibrant field of strategy as practice. With new authors and additional chapters, it shows how the strategy-as-practice approach in strategic managemen...

Business schools have come under a great deal of criticism for being disengaged and irrelevant to managerial realities. A major reason for this apparent lack of relevance is that management is still considered more a science than an art; more about facts and universal principles than about sensitivity and imagination in dealing with the particulari...

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. De Certeau (1984: 93) Introduction Most traditional approaches to strategy research have tended to consist of a compl...

Management scholarship and the journal publication process has been increasingly criticised for being overly elitist and largely irrelevant to the needs of business. There is some justification for such criticisms. Yet, paradoxically, university business schools must resist the urge to be superficially relevant in order to be genuinely useful. I ar...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to tease out the real value-adding contributions university-based business schools can make to the business community and to society at large without compromising in any way its own ethos of academic rigour and scholarship in seeking knowledge and understanding for its own sake. Design/methodology/approach –...

Change is a ubiquitous notion that fascinates and frustrates. The starting point for most attempts at theorizing change begins with the philosophical assumption that stability and equilibrium are fundamental features of reality. Organizational change, therefore, is construed as something exceptional requiring active intervention on the part of acto...

Greetings, and thank you for publishing with SAGE. Your article has been copyedited, and we have a few queries for you. Please respond to these queries when you submit your changes to the Production Editor. Thank you for your time and effort. Please assist us by clarifying the following queries: No Query 1 Please check whether the corresponding aut...

Much has been debated about the perceived relevance/irrelevance of business schools in addressing business needs with some suggesting that academic research is not applicable to practice. We contribute by claiming the debate is itself somewhat misplaced and the real task of business schools is to instil the art of ‘relevating’ the seemingly irrelev...

Strategic change is frequently viewed as emanating from the purposeful choices of organizational actors intent on achieving a prespecified goal against a backdrop of existing environmental forces. Conversely, population ecology advocates maintain that change is a consequence of species populations being subjected to environmental selection. Either...

Project Management Research is primarily concerned with the selection, formulation and production of knowledge associated with the material practices of managing and organizing within pre-defined temporal and spatial contexts. All such forms of knowledge-creation begin from the experiences and raw observations of everyday practices in organizationa...

Copies of this article can be made free of charge and without securing permission, for purposes of teaching, research, or library reserve. Consent to other kinds of copying, such as that for creating new works, or for resale, must be obtained from both the journal editor(s) and the author(s). M@n@gement is a double-blind refereed journal where arti...

A penchant for the direct, the dramatic and the spectacular remains an overwhelming feature of the West in its dealings in the world of practical affairs. In business, corporate success is frequently credited to the highly visible contributions of heroic individuals ostensibly possessing almost superhuman qualities, including the vision and acumen...

Practical wisdom (phronèsis) is an ancient, enigmatic and intractable notion that fascinates, yet the manner of its workings and its influence on public life, professional practice and civil society remains ever elusive. At times it is reminiscent of that proverbial enigmatic, shadowy and elusive nocturnal creature that appears only fleetingly for...

This article develops a new perspective on reflexive practice in the making of elite business careers. It builds upon Bourdieu’s practice framework to examine how business leaders from elite and non-elite backgrounds develop and practice reflexivity in their everyday lives. The article draws upon in-depth life-history interviews with members of the...

This article examines elite business careers through the dual lens of sensemaking and storytelling as recounted in life-history interviews with business leaders. It explores how they make sense of, narrativize and legitimate their experiences of building their careers within and beyond large organizations. The research contribution is twofold. Firs...

et à une intervention délibérée. Les résultats favorables sont imputés aux actions spectaculaires d'agents individuels significatifs. Un tel regard est fondé sur une ontologie de l'être qui hisse des entités discrètes de processus complexes « sans propriété » et de transformations silencieuses. Du point de vue d'une ontologie en devenir cependant,...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of traditional Chinese fuzzy thinking and its particular effects on human resource management (HRM) practices in mainland China. Design/methodology/approach Semi‐structured interviews with practising managers and directors of Chinese companies were used to access the tacit message in HR pr...

Please do not quote without author's permission Interest in so-called Asian-styled Management and Japanese Management techniques and practices, so much written and talked about in the eighties and early nineties, has somewhat abated. Western management thought appears to have moved on to other preoccupations. What remains relatively unacknowle...

Process is an ambivalent term. Its use in organizational research and theorizing is widespread. Yet, there are important subtle differences in how the term is understood and employed in the study of organizing/organization. In this chapter, we show that thinking in terms of ceaseless change, emergence and the immanent becoming of things, entities a...

R o b e r t C h i a Complexity fascinates and confounds. At times it is reminiscent of that proverbial enigmatic, shadowy and elusive nocturnal creature that appears only fleetingly for us to catch a glimpse of before it disappears mys-teriously back into the darkness and beyond. Despite its profound effect on virtually every aspect of modern life,...

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity y The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection. (Whitehead, 1929, p. 20) The relentless demand for a better understanding of the world around us and the justification of appropriate human action has been a major motivational i...

Process is an ambivalent term. Its use in organizational research and theorizing is widespread. Yet, there are important subtle differences in how the term is understood and employed in the study of organizing/organization. In this chapter, we show that thinking in terms of ceaseless change, emergence and the immanent becoming of things, entities a...

Process is an ambivalent term. Its use in organizational research and theorizing is widespread. Yet, there are important subtle differences in how the term is understood. Process may be construed either as an epiphenomenon of substantial organizational entities or as a primary condition of reality from which the phenomenon of organization spontaneo...

Corporate elites are not a new phenomenon. However, the ways in which significant agents gain ascendancy to positions of power vary across nations and cultures. This paper analyses the ascension of a small minority of corporate agents to positions of dominance and the subsequent accession of a select few to the power elite. Our theoretical position...

This chapter contrasts two major epistemological alternatives for Strategy as Practice (SAP) research. On the one hand, the building worldview leads to a detached, spectator’s apprehension of social situations which privileges a ‘knowledge about’ typically characterized by episteme (abstract, universal generalizations using propositional forms) and...

This paper explores the meaning and significance of the term `social practice' and its relation to strategy-as-practice research from the perspective of social theory. Although our remarks are also applicable to other practice-based discussions in management, we discuss strategy practices as a case in point and thus contribute to the strategy-as-pr...

Despite the rhetoric of borderless transnational corporations driven by the homogenising trends in globalisation, nation states and national identities continue to play an important role in structuring national managerial mentalities and dispositions. In this paper, we examine the entrepreneurial spirit of Indian industrialists and the emerging imp...

aBStraCt This chapter explores an oblique, circuitous, and non-linear approach to at-taining wisdom and scholarship in management education. I maintain that becoming an accomplished management education scholar involves a much more colourful, rich, and digressive intellectual journey than is generally ac-knowledged: Detours, dead-ends, fortuitous e...

Strategy exhibits a pervasive commitment to the belief that the best approach to adopt in dealing with affairs of the world is to confront, overcome and subjugate things to conform to our will, control and eventual mastery. Performance is about sustaining distinctiveness. This direct and deliberate approach draws inspiration from ancient Greek root...

We contribute to the debate on the future of business schools by investigating the nature of knowledge being produced and taught within them. We identify how a preference for abstract causal explanation over practical knowledge, and for reason and truth over what works, has led to a privileging of detached contemplation over involved action. Despit...

This article investigates what it means for a manager to be knowledgeable. It identifies, on the one hand, a rational tendency to sublimate knowledge as something more exact, definitive and logical than mere learning, and, on the other hand, a practical tendency to subjugate knowledge to social conventions. Articulating a third way between these vi...

We contribute to the debate on the future of business schools by investigating the nature of knowledge being produced and taught within them. We identify how a preference for abstract causal explanation over practical knowledge, and for reason and truth over what works, has led to a privileging of detached contemplation over involved action. Despit...

Managers and organisations often aim to stay focused and have clarity of purpose in dealing with key business issues, challenges and targets. Yet, this narrow concentration of focus risks overlooking issues, events and transformations occurring at the periphery of corporate awareness that may threaten the survival of the organisation or provide opp...

Author's draft published as working paper The issue of organizational sense-making has been much researched and written about in recent years. Yet, how structurally such sense-making attempts are facilitated remains relatively unexamined. In this article, the authors explore the underlying processes to be accomplished, sustained, and extended. `Epi...

Entrepreneurship and corporate governance are key issues in the debate surrounding competitiveness, sustainability and accountability. Despite the rhetoric of borderless transnational corporations driven by homogenizing trends in globalization, nation states and national identities continue to play an important role in structuring national manageri...

The question of how university-based forms of executive education can effectively contribute to the enhancement of practitioner capabilities using the insights of the humanities remains underexplored. The sustained pressure in business schools to adopt a teaching curriculum and pedagogical approach that appears immediately relevant to the perceived...

We draw on evidence scattered across thick descriptions of organizations to outline an alternative model of routine. Instead of defining routine as a process of compliance with prescribed rules and procedures we define it as a process of deviation from the prescribed elements of organizations, resulting from the mutual constitution of repetitive wo...

The recent turn to ‘strategy practice’ offers a genuine opportunity for establishing an alternative perspective that is clearly distinct from the traditional strategy process view. The challenge is to clarify and articulate an alternative set of ontological and epistemological premises for founding this new approach to theorizing strategy.What has...

This file contains the following: -a reprint order form -a copy of your page proofs Please give the proofs a final, careful reading. At this point in the process we are not introducing new changes, so please mark only typographical corrections. Indicate these in the margins in ink. I will be proofing your article as well and will contact you via e-...

Wisdom (which all men seek with such great mental longing) is . . . higher than all knowledge and is unknowable and inex-pressible by any speech, incomprehensible by any intellect, unmeasurable by any measure . . . A wise man has no extensive knowledge. He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man. —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching W isdom is an ancient,...

The question of how university-based forms of executive education can effectively contribute to the enhancement of practitioner capabilities using the insights of the humanities remains underexplored. The sustained pressure in business schools to adopt a teaching curriculum and pedagogical approach that appears immediately relevant to the perceived...

new regime of thinking wherein hybridity, fluidity and movement are the norm rather than the exception. Alexander Styhre POSTMODERNISM Definition The term 'postmodernism' made its first appearance in the title of a book, Post-modernism and other essays, written by Bernard Iddings Bell as early as 1926. In the latter half of the 1960s a number of so...

What strategic actors actually do in practice has become increasingly the focus of strategy research in recent years. This paper argues that, in furthering such practice-based views of strategy, we need a more adequate re-conceptualization of agency, action and practice and how they interrelate. We draw from the work of the continental philosopher...

According to the advocates of a "Generalized Darwinism" (GD), the three core Darwinian principles of variation, selection and retention (or inheritance) can be used as a general framework for the development of theories explaining evolutionary processes in the socio­economic domain. Even though these are originally biological terms, GD argues that...

education should be idealistic. Robin Wensley proceeds by commenting that Mintzberg has little more to say in this book compared to previous offerings, yet recognizes that Mintzberg does credit the innovation apparent in European institutions. He, too, puts the MBA within a broader context, one of a research establishment subject to institutional p...

In this book, Haridimos Tsoukas, one of the most imaginative organization theorists of our time, examines the nature of knowledge in organizations, and how individuals and scholars approach the concept of knowledge. Tsoukas firstly looks at organizational knowledge and its embessedness in social contexts and forms of life. He shows that knowledge i...

Strategy-as-practice has become an important alternative to the hitherto dominant institutional and resource-based approaches to strategy research. This paper examines some of the underlying conceptions of 'practice' and its implications for researching the micro-practices of strategizing. It concludes with the observation that the notion of habitu...