Strategic factor markets: expectations, luck, and business strategy
Management Science
Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication
Asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage
Management Science
Mastering the dynamics of innovation: how companies can seize opportunities in the face of technological change
Adaptation on rugged landscapes
Management Science
Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design
Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design
It's About Time: Temporal Structuring in Organizations
Organization Science
Constructing the Olympic Dream: A Future Perfect Strategy of Project Management
Organization Science
Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking
Organization Science
Change in the Presence of Residual Fit: Can Competing Frames Coexist?
Organization Science
Making Organizational Theory Work: Institutions, Occupations, and Negotiated Orders
Organization Science
Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory
Organization Science
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This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible, and acceptable; otherwise, breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but they could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change.