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How do managers visually interact with strategy tools during workshops to produce knowledge about strategic issues? Building on the strategy-as-practice perspective and visual organization studies, we conceptualize workshops as arenas where visual interaction with strategy tools takes place. Following this approach, we examine how a top management team creates a strategy tool during a workshop (using primarily video data). Our findings reveal three distinctive patterns of visual interactions: shift, inertia, and assembly. We also show how each of these patterns is enabled by the affordances of the tool used. Our study contributes to theoretical elaborations of how actors visually interact with strategy tools, which offers extensions to the strategy-as-practice and visual organization literatures.We would like to thank the special issue guest editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments and guidance.

Additional Information:• This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Preventive Vet- Del Rio, V., Voller, F., Montibeller, G., Franco, L. A., Sribhashyam, S., Watson, E., Hartley, M., & Gibbens, J.2013. An integrated process and management tools for ranking multiple emerging threats to animal health. Abstract: The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs supports the use of systematic tools for the prioritisation of known and well defined animal diseases to facilitate long and medium term planning of surveillance and disease control activities. The recognition that emerging events were not covered by the existing disease-specific approaches led to the establishment of the Veterinary Risk Group (VRG), constituted of government officials and supporting structures, the risk management cycle and the emerging threat highlight report (ETHiR), to facilitate the identification, reporting and assessment of emerging threats to UK's animal health. Since its inception in November 2009 to the end of February 2011, the VRG reviewed 111 threats and vulnerabilities (T&V) reported through ETHiR. In July 2010 a decision support system based on multi-criteria-decision-analysis (MCDA) improved ETHiR to allow the systematic prioritisation of emerging T&V. The DSS, known as e-THiR, allows the regular ranking of emerging T&V by calculating a set of measurement indices related to the actual impact, possible impact on public perception, and level of available capabilities associated with every T&V. The systematic characterisation of the processes leading to the assessment of T&V by the VRG has led to a consistent, auditable and transparent approach to the identification and assessment of emerging risks. The use of MCDA to manage a portfolio of emerging risks represents a different and novel application of MCDA in a health related context. This paper describes and discusses the characterisation and management of emerging risks by the VRG since its inception, and results from a pilot application of the e-THiR system to a reduced set of emerging threats.

Citation: FRANCO, L.A. and LORD, E., 2011. Understanding multi-methodology: evaluating the perceived impact of mixing methods for group budgetary decisions. Omega-The International Journal of Management Science, 39 (3), pp. -372.Additional Information:• AbstractThis paper reports on the design and implementation of a multi-methodology intervention intended to support a budget prioritisation decision by a multi-organizational group tasked with tackling the problem of teenage pregnancy in an English borough. The intervention approach involved the combined use of cognitive/causal mapping and a multi-criteria decision analysis method to develop and prioritise a number of projects aimed at alleviating issues associated with teenage pregnancy. The paper describes and discusses the process of developing and applying the intervention approach, and provides an evaluation of its perceived impact by the client group. Drawing on the rich seam of data gathered over the course of our work with the multi-organisational group, we explore the varying degrees of impact that the mapping and multi-criteria evaluation methods achieved during and after the intervention. Analysis of the intervention data suggests that both methods were perceived to facilitate a different way of thinking and learning. In addition, we find that the mapping and multi-criteria evaluation methods successfully addressed participants' democratic and rational concerns. However, despite these reported positive effects, the full recommendations of the intervention were not implemented. An attempt is made to explain this outcome in terms of both, the multi-organisational context within which the intervention took place, and the nature of the group task. Directions for further research are then proposed.

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