Using Strategy Tools in Practice - How Tools Mediate Strategizing and Organizing

Advanced Institute of Management Research Paper No. 047

57 Pages Posted: 1 Dec 2008

See all articles by Sarah Kaplan

Sarah Kaplan

University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management

Paula Jarzabkowski

Aston University - Aston Business School

Date Written: August 1, 2006

Abstract

Recently there has been much debate about the usefulness of strategic management education and implicitly about strategy tools and frameworks. Yet, this debate is taking place in the absence of detailed knowledge about how, or indeed, whether, managers use the theoretical tools that they learn. This paper addresses this gap by taking a practice perspective to look at how strategy tools are engaged by different actors in mediating strategizing and organizing processes. Based on an ethnography of strategy making inside one firm, we explore how an actor's search for rationality and objectivity through the use of tools is actually a political, symbolic and socially interactive process. Drawing on the boundary object literature, we provide a conceptual framework for analyzing strategy tools as key mediators of these contextual and political interests.

Suggested Citation

Kaplan, Sarah and Jarzabkowski, Paula, Using Strategy Tools in Practice - How Tools Mediate Strategizing and Organizing (August 1, 2006). Advanced Institute of Management Research Paper No. 047 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1309556 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1309556

Sarah Kaplan (Contact Author)

University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management ( email )

105 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6 M5S1S4
Canada

Paula Jarzabkowski

Aston University - Aston Business School ( email )

Aston Triangle
Birmingham, B47ET
United Kingdom

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