How do things become strategic? ‘Strategifying’ corporate social responsibility

Abstract

How do things become ‘strategic’? Despite the development of strategy-as-practice studies and the recognized institutional importance of strategy as a social practice, little is known about how strategy boundaries change within organizations. This article focuses on this gap by conceptualizing ‘strategi fying’ – or making something strategic – as a type of institutional work that builds on the institution of strategy to change the boundaries of what is regarded as strategy within organizations. We empirically investigate how corporate social responsibility has been turned into strategy at a UK electricity company, EnergyCorp. Our findings reveal the practices that constitute three types of strategifying work – cognitive coupling, relational coupling and material coupling – and show how, together and over time, these types of work changed the boundaries of strategy so that corporate social responsibility became included in EnergyCorp’s official strategy, became explicitly attended to by strategists and corporate executives and became inscribed within strategy devices. By disambiguating the notions of strategifying and strategizing, our study introduces new perspectives for analysing the institutional implications of the practice of strategy.

Revisiting Politics in Political CSR: How coercive and deliberative dynamics operate through institutional work in a Colombian company

“…These results enrich prior conceptualisations of the political dimension of institutional work by showing how relatively ill-prepared and resource-less actors shaped the changes triggered by the adoption of a global CSR programme. Our results confirm that institutional work can be channelled through coercive political dynamics (Perkmann & Spicer, 2008), leading sometimes to irreconcilable politics, as well as less obtrusive forms of power within organisations (Acquier et al, 2018;Daudigeos, 2013;Gond et al, 2018). These findings also enrich the existing repertoire of unobtrusive tactics by showing how deliberative politics can be used as a strategy to compensate for their lack of power.…”

Performative Work: Bridging Performativity and Institutional Theory in the Responsible Investment Field

“…We hope that this contribution will also advance the performativity debate past its framing as one of constructionists vs. realists (Felin & Foss, 2009;Zuckerman, 2012), and further instead the engagement between performativity and institutional theory (Fourcade, 2007;Gond & Nyberg, 2016;Gond, Cabantous & Krikorian, 2016;Michael Lounsbury, 2007;Powell & Colyvas, 2008;Slager et al, 2012) Source: Independent Research in Responsible Investment Survey, 2012-2014. Note: We only reported the ranking of the top 10 ranked providers in 2014.…”

Non‐market Social and Political Strategies – New Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Borrowings

“…Ortenblad, 2016) of non-market strategies. Other recent studies have explored inter alia investor reactions to non-market strategies (Arya and Zhang, 2009;Werner, 2017) and the socially constructed nature of non-market strategies (Gond, Cabantous and Krikorian, 2017;Orlitzky, 2011) and have wondered to what extent collective political actions and private political actions are substitutes or complements (Jia, 2014).…”

“…But sociology still has much to offer to the study of non‐market strategies, and sociological contributions on non‐market strategies have started to appear in leading sociology journals (Bartley, ; Lim and Tsutsui, ; Walker and Rea, ). Novel applications of sociological lenses − such as the institutional work lens within institutional theory (Gond, Cabantous and Krikorian, ) or systems theory from the sociology of law (Sheehy, ) − illustrate the potential sociological contributions to non‐market research yet to come. Curiously, we did not receive any submissions to this special issue specifically from a novel sociological perspective, if we exclude the more traditional institutional theory applications.…”