International audienceThis paper takes the long view on the development of strategy as a profession, from the 1950s to today. We identify strategy as a structurally precarious profession, subject to cyclical demand and shifts in organizational power. This precariousness has increased with the secular shift towards more open forms of strategy-making, with more transparency inside and outside organizations and more inclusion of different actors internally and externally. We analyse four forces - organizational, societal, cultural and technological - driving the evolution of strategy as a profession and discuss implications for the future of strategy work, for effective strategies, for strategy's professional bodies and for strategy researc

This paper investigates the changing job characteristics of strategic planners in the face of long-run increases in environmental turbulence since the 1960s. We build on contingency theory to examine how growing turbulence may have impacted three aspects of strategic planner jobs: temporal range, processes and organizational location. Drawing on job advertisement data between 1960 and 2003, we compare strategic planner jobs over time and relative to a similar managerial function, marketing. We find that the secular increase in environmental turbulence is negatively associated with forecasting (temporal range), economics and analysis (processes) and centralization (organizational location), especially *Manuscript-MUST NOT CONTAIN AUTHOR IDENTIFIERS Click here to view linked References

Research summary:We develop and test a set of hypotheses on investors' reactions to a specific form of impression management, public presentations of overall strategy by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). Contrary to expectations from a "cheap talk" perspective, we suggest that such strategy presentations convey valuable information to investors, especially in conditions of heightened information asymmetry associated with varying types of new CEOs. Broad empirical support for our theoretical arguments is shown in a sample of strategy presentations carried out by NYSE and NASDAQ listed organizations over 10 years. Our research contributes to literature on new CEOs and impression management. We draw out implications both for management and for further research. Managerial summary:We examine the impact of public presentations on company strategy by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) on company stock prices. Adjusting for market movements in general, on average stock prices rose by 1.6 percent following these strategy presentations. Strategy presentations received larger reactions the more the CEO was unfamiliar to investors. Thus, stock price gains for new CEOs in general were 5.3 percent; for external, within-industry new CEOs, they were 9.3 percent; and for external, outside-of-industry new CEOs, they were 12.4 percent. Given that only 40 percent of new CEOs present on strategy in their first 200 days post-appointment, we suggest that new CEOs pay more attention to this potential means of communicating, especially if they are unfamiliar to investors.

We propose that the pre-eminent ‘grand challenge’ for organization theorists today is the societal control of powerful corporations. This grand challenge is the more urgent because of the contemporary inadequacies of markets, hierarchies and regulations as instruments of control. We argue for the potential role of ‘open strategy’ in mobilizing normative controls over big business. We develop a distinction between the managed and unmanaged practices of open strategy. Both can help expose corporations to normative pressures, but we highlight the unmanaged open practices of collective subpolitics and individualist whistleblowing. Especially when mobilized by globally networked professionals, these unmanaged practices can subject corporations to normative pressures where markets, hierarchies and regulations fail. We propose two broad research themes relevant to the effectiveness of managed and unmanaged practices of strategic openness: on the one hand, there are material issues to do with labour markets, organizing and technologies; on the other hand, there are discursive questions of authenticity, capability and identity.