Toward a Mid-Range Theory of Strategy Workshops

Abstract

Strategy workshops - typically 2-3 day events involving senior managers - represent a common and frequent, yet under-researched, organisational practice relating to strategy development and therefore provide a natural extension of mainstream strategy process research. In this paper we seek to build upon the recent call for a more micro, activity-based approach to strategic management by identifying a theoretically informed empirical agenda for research into strategy workshops. We argue here that theoretical perspectives on ritual - specifically on transition ritual (i.e., rites of passage) - and ritualisation from social anthropology and microsociology are very relevant to our agenda. In particular, insights from this literature suggest that the nature of such ritualised events may help explain the problem of transferring plans and ideas from such workshops to the everyday of management practice.