Boards in action: processes and practices of ‘strategising’ in the Boardroom

Abstract

Normative expectations are that Governing Boards will be involved in setting the strategic direction of the organisation. However, knowledge of the processes and practices by which Boards engage in strategy is limited. In particular, very few empirical studies have penetrated the ‘black box’ of the Boardroom and examined the complex Board/Management interactions that amount to Boards ‘doing’ strategy. Here we address this gap, presenting an in-depth analysis of an unfolding process in which the Board and Management of a single organisation engaged in setting strategic direction over an 18-month period. We observed planning events, video-recorded Board meetings, analysed texts pertaining to the initiative, and spoke to key personnel. We adopt a ‘strong’ process approach which brings together strategy as process and as practice (SAPP). Our analysis is multi-modal: we track the iterative development of the strategy through documents/texts produced for Board meetings; and we adopt a sociomaterial approach in illuminating the entanglements of the human and nonhuman which constitute strategising. By considering events over a series of episodes, we have built a picture showing how micro-level practices in the Boardroom are layered incrementally in the emergence of strategy at organisational level. Relatedly, we show how these practices enable the Board to negotiate the tensions between control and service/collaboration. Hence the paper contributes to theory and knowledge around Board engagement in strategic activities.

Reviewing the strategic influence of governance professionals in UK colleges: Acting as the translator of the conduct of conduct

“…The authors subjected the interview data on themes raised by or in relation to governance professionals to thematic analysis, passing through a number of iterations and re-categorisations before we ended up with the eight observation themes analysed below. For a more detailed description, see the article from Watson and Ireland, 2020. One practicality that must be considered is that the GP appears to take a minimally interactive role in board meetings, creating a paradox of an article developed from observations of a role for which the practices mostly occur outwith the meetings themselves. However, our analysis of video recordings, focusing on the minutiae of non-verbal communication (such as body language, glances and gesture), provided us with evidence of the mutually constitutive (Cooren et al, 2011) collective social practices with which we could compare our analysis of interviews and other documents.…”

“…The authors subjected the interview data on themes raised by or in relation to governance professionals to thematic analysis, passing through a number of iterations and re-categorisations before we ended up with the eight observation themes analysed below. For a more detailed description, see the article from Watson and Ireland, 2020.…”

Investigating the association between universities' corporate governance structure and the knowledge transfer performance outcomes

“…The study is not without limitation, as we proxy universities' governance structure with the board of directors and the KT performance outcome with the USOs establishment. Future research may broaden the spectrum of analysis to embrace other structures or measures of governance, or different aspects of technology transfer (such as patents and licenses) and of regional context, may analyze with a more fine-grained USOs, distinguishing between technological and service ones (Meoli et al, 2019), may focus on the USOs' growth and Universities' CG structure and KT outcomes development (Iazzolino et al, 2019;Fini et al, 2017), may analyze the impact of USOs on regional development (Agasisti et al, 2019), may focus on the university-level and regional level supporting systems effective for the USOs creation (Fini et al, 2011), may focus on the process and practices of strategizing in the board (Watson and Ireland, 2021), may focus on a lower university-level of analysis, that is, the university department or even the research group (Riviezzo et al, 2019), may focus on a second level of analysis, i.e. at USO level, to analyze whether the board composition of USOs affect their knowledge performance.…”

“…, 2019), may focus on the university-level and regional level supporting systems effective for the USOs creation (Fini et al. , 2011), may focus on the process and practices of strategizing in the board (Watson and Ireland, 2021), may focus on a lower university-level of analysis, that is, the university department or even the research group (Riviezzo et al. , 2019), may focus on a second level of analysis, i.e.…”

How is the role of student governor understood in further education colleges in the UK?

“…We performed this by engaging in repeated viewing/listening and transcription of board and committee meetings and interviews, drawing on documented artefacts (such as board papers and strategy development documents), and observations of planning events excerpts, to become attuned to how the interrelations of the social and the material coalesce to produce the processes and practices of governance (Fenwick 2012). Thus we have drawn on vignettes which preserve the narrative context of data, and in the mini case study we have sought to show how analysis of interaction in boardrooms reveals the ways in which this builds incrementally in the construction of strategy (Watson and Ireland 2020). We were concerned with juxtaposing what participants told us about the role and what we observed in practice, which enabled us to draw out disjuncts and tensions which we here present as a means to support development of the role of the student governor rather than to develop theory around governance.…”