Social Media and the Emergence of Reflexiveness as a New Capability for Open Strategy

Abstract

2016) Social media and the emergence of reflexiveness as a new capability for open strategy. Long Range Planning. Permanent WRAP URL:1 Social media and the emergence of reflexiveness as a new capability for open strategy Abstract Social media increases transparency and inclusiveness in organizational strategizing by widening engagement with strategy content and participants. However, our study shows that just relying on the feedback features of social media is not sufficient for an open strategy approach. Instead, emergent feedback from social media use leads to tensions initially between the participatory nature of the technology and extant management practices. Ultimately, these tensions encourage the development of new internal capabilities to appropriate feedback structurally into the organization. We conceptualize the emergence of this new organizational capability as reflexiveness. Further, we suggest that it is the development of this capability that, along with transparency and inclusiveness, explain the shift towards more open forms of strategizing and the potential to move organizations towards stewardship, as a governance model more consistent with open strategizing practices in organizations.

Strategy processes and practices: Dialogues and intersections

“…From the strategy practice perspective, the article by Neeley and Leonardi in this issue shows well how the practices related to information systems can lead to intended and unintended consequences in strategy making. Overall, the use of social media and other information technology tools in strategy processes represents an important, largely untapped topic area for future research (Baptista, Wilson, Galliers, & Bynghall, ).…”

Zones of participation (and non-participation) in open strategy: Desirable, actual and undesirable

“…Although existing literature infers that the opening up of strategy might lead to increased tensions around both the strategy process (e.g. inclusion in formulation and implementation) and strategy content (e.g., sharing details of the new strategy), questions of how these influence each other remain largely neglected (Baptista, Wilson, Galliers, & Bynghall, 2017). Research has also focused largely on open strategy in the contexts of either relatively new organizations (e.g.…”

New Media and Strategy Research: Towards a Relational Agency Approach

“…The leading organizations in this area have been new media companies, like Wikipedia and Creative Commons, which have engaged crowds and communities to handle strategic tasks -not only digital innovation but also strategy making itself (Dobusch and Kapeller 2017). Baptista et al (2017) note that open strategy making requires new organizational capabilities. When strategies become more transparent and inclusive, managers need to develop reflexive skills as a new basis for making and communicating strategy to their stakeholders and strategy-making participants.…”

“…This echoes the concerns about trust discussed previously. However, in this case, the discussion is primarily focused on the risk that companies might succumb to external legitimacy crises (Baptista et al 2017;Castelló et al 2016;Veil et al 2012).…”