This year, the Academy of Management Meeting will be held from August 6-10 in Montréal, a city that is also home to the first research group on strategy as practice to be established in North America. The AOM meeting thus provides a perfect occasion for the GéPS (Groupe d´études sur la pratique de la stratégie/ Strategy as Practice Study Group) to invite you to a special event held at HEC Montréal on August 5. This workshop is intended as an opportunity to take stock of recent SAP research and consider new directions.
So far, SAP scholars have explored the question of what strategists “do”, providing at least three different types of answers to this question: strategists talk, they write texts and they use various kinds of tools, models, methodologies, etc. The pervasiveness of ethnographic research in the area has led to a predominance of studies dealing with strategic talk and agency. However, there is still relatively little research on the production and use of texts and tools. We believe that the SAP field would benefit from further examination of textual, intertextual and material aspects of strategy as practice. In particular, research on the connections between talk, texts and tools is most welcomed: how do managers talk about texts and tools? How are texts and material objects mobilized during the flow of conversations? How do strategists “textualize” their conversations and their use of tools? How are the choice and usage of tools related to other aspects of the practice of strategy? And finally, what are the most promising methodologies for answering these questions? Thus, this workshop will be organized around the sub-themes of “talk,” “text” and “tools” both as distinct research objects but also as how they relate to each other. Three guest speakers, one for each sub-theme, will be invited to start the discussion in the morning and to wrap it up at the end of the day.