Taking Historical Embeddedness Seriously: Three Historical Approaches to Advance Strategy Process and Practice Research

Abstract

Despite the proliferation of strategy process and practice research, we lack understanding of the historical embeddedness of strategic processes and practices. In this article we present three historical approaches with the potential to remedy this deficiency. First, realist history can contribute to a better understanding of the historical embeddedness of strategic processes, and comparative historical analysis in particular can explicate the historical conditions, mechanisms, and causality in strategic processes. Second, interpretive history can add to our knowledge of the historical embeddedness of strategic practices, and microhistory can specifically help us understand the construction and enactment of these practices in historical contexts. Third, poststructuralist history can elucidate the historical embeddedness of strategic discourses, and genealogy in particular can increase our understanding of the evolution and transformation of strategic discourses and their power effects. Thus, this article demonstrates how, in their specific ways, historical approaches and methods can add to our understanding of different forms and variations of strategic processes and practices, the historical construction of organizational strategies, and historically constituted strategic agency. We are very grateful to special issue editor John Hassard and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and guidance throughout this process. We want to thank Martin Friesl, Kalle Pajunen, Anniina Rantakari, Heli Valtonen, and Kustaa H. J. Vilkuna for their help when working on the manuscript and David Miller for language revision. We also wish to express our gratitude to colleagues at Aalto University, HEC Paris, and the University of Jyväskylä for comments on our earlier versions in research seminars and other occasions. We acknowledge the financial support of the Academy of Finland as part of the "Discourse in Strategic Management" and "Reverse Path Dependence" projects and the Foundation for Economic Education.

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