Abstract: This paper discusses the way by which strategic management speech acts construct conceptual space for implementing a strategic agenda. The study was conducted in two internationally operating manufacturing companies based in Europe both of which had set a strategic agenda of increased customer orientation. Ethnomethodological analysis was conducted on interview data collected from managers. Four framings, naïve criticism, emphatic, analytical, and commercial repertoire, were identified in the managers’ talk about the employees working the customer interface. Each repertoire opens varying ways to view
the work of sales and maintenance personnel and managers and each repertoire translates into a different conceptualization of how to increase customer orientation and customer interaction.

Abstract: We adopt a practice lens on the way that strategizing and structuring are entwined within and shape the implementation of a strategic change. We examine the association between strategizing and structuring at Telco, a large company undergoing a radical strategic change. Our longitudinal observational study examined how managers make sense of the new strategy and the new structure through the practices that they developed to implement each. Often the two seemed to involve quite separate practices, aimed primarily at either structural change, or at implementing the new strategy. Yet we also noticed that a repertoire of intermediary practices that formed a type of temporary structuring of the organization that enabled it to both hold together the existing business, even as it enacted the new one.

Abstract: This study develops and tests a set of hypotheses on how to manage investors’ evaluative uncertainty during M&A through a specific form of impression management, namely, interim news events. We suggest that voluntary disclosures are key in influencing investors’ reactions during M&A. Empirical support for our theoretical arguments is shown in a sample of 36,376 deals and 163,023 associated interim news events carried out by NYSE and NSDQ listed organizations over 10 years. Our research contributes to literature on voluntary disclosures, impression management and managing M&A.

Abstract: Linear strategic planning practices offer little help in dealing with messy strategic issues that strategists face in high-velocity environments. Opening strategizing processes gives an opportunity to benefit from brainpower of unexploited intellectual resources. Inclusion of external and internal network resources is expected to lead to greater innovation impact and execution power. The objective of this study is to test concepts and tools of open strategizing that enhance inclusion of internal and external stakeholders. Tentative results based on piloting open strategizing in two expert organizations show that external strategizing ecosystems produce huge amount of innovative ideas. Internal inclusion by developing silo solvents demonstrates increased horizontal collaboration. The study raises also serious considerations for further development of open strategizing concepts and practices. These will be discussed in greater detail in the final presentation.