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The purpose of this paper is to study how insights from socio-cognitivism (sensemaking and interaction) in conjunction with institutional theory enhance our knowledge of strategizing in business networks through role and position.

This paper is conceptual and reviews extant literature from the fields under scrutiny, presenting and analyzing new combined approaches.

Current writings concerning strategizing in networks need to be supplemented in the area of strategic business network research. Interaction, sensemaking and institutionalization, as well as the network in which a firm is embedded, are important for strategically developing network positions and the roles of actors.

This conceptual paper suggests mechanisms affecting role and position in networks and calls for empirical research to deepen the understanding of the change forces at play in embedded relational situations for firms.

This study adds to current conceptual knowledge of strategizing in business networks. It presents a comprehensive perspective in viewing how key forces impact on the strategic position and role of corporate actors (both managers and firms) in networks.

By adopting relational practice theory on a case study of a Finnish software company, a solution provider for the public healthcare sector, this study examines how the nexus of practices, and their socio-historical premises, enable and constrain intentional strategizing in an organization about to survive the ten-year Death Valley phase. The strategy literature adopting a practice lens has been focused on the rationality of human actions or implicated that all practices are shaped by the historical socio-cultural background of the organization. As a consequence, the practice-based strategy literature tends to overemphasize the rationality of human action or reduces human agency to an extent where the autonomy of actors becomes problematized. These practice-based strategy views circumscribe relational agency as inherent in practice theory treating human agents as acting within a nexus of practices but also consider them as being free to make choices. Findings suggest that even during intentional strategizing, managers are not fully autonomous in their choices as practices constrain possibilities and set boundaries for strategic activities. Prior commitments determine the possible strategic themes to pursue. Within the boundaries of these strategic themes, strategic activities emerge where the strategic activities are shaped by a nexus of practices within and around the organizational boundaries. Depending on the complexity of mutually dependent entertwined strategic activities, they can be perceived as being beyond management control, or considered strategically irrelevant, which influences the strategic direction in the face of uncertainty.

The study aims to investigate the concept of strategy-as-practice in construction management literature has been investigated. The focus is on the link between strategizing practices and project management.

An exploratory literature review is carried out based on fifteen journal articles on strategizing practices in the construction industry.

The analysis shows how strategy-as-practice questions and contradicts project management practices as depicted in the dominant deterministic perspective. Strategy-as-practice has a focus on reacting and adapting to a chaotic and changing environment, while project management is concerned with creating and maintaining a stable working environment. The findings point to the necessity of considering the organizational and institutional context of project management practices, and hence the values the strategy-as-practice lens, when considering new avenues for improving the industry.

As the study is based on an exploratory literature review of only 15 articles, generalizations should be made with caution. The identified literature is restricted by search words and choice of database.

The differences between strategizing and project management practices are very clear, and a focus on both may offer insights into how the construction industry could improve its productivity by developing more robust management practices.

The paper illustrates the benefit of applying a strategizing perspective, which hitherto has been under-investigated in construction management research.

This article aims to better understand how empowered middle manager engage in change translation? Relying on the notions of building and dwelling strategizing, the authors analyze the micro-practices of middle managers during organizational change, when middle managers are freed from time-consuming administrative activities.

This empirical study relies on a qualitative embedded case study approach that involves comparing two banking units belonging to a large French bank. The qualitative data were collected from three different sources: exploratory and semi-structured interviews, observations and secondary data. The coding analysis enables to distinguish middle managers' dwelling and building strategizing during organizational change.

The study’s findings show how managers translate organizational change relying on both building and dwelling strategizing. By doing so, managers enable to adapt the prescribed strategy to local circumstances and foster front-line empowerment.

Even though the findings are based on the analysis of a single organization, the authors provide several theoretical insights. First, the authors contribute to the recent academic debate in strategy-as-practice literature by showing the recursive relation between building and dwelling strategizing. The authors also shed a new light on middle managers' strategizing by emphasizing the idea that middle managers are not only passive change “translators” but that middle managers enact a real agency in the organizational change process.

From a managerial perspective, the study’s findings enable to enlight what empowering middle managers means in practice. Indeed, the authors show clear empirical illustrations of how middle managers can be empowered by both organizational structure and top-management support. The results also reveal how empowering middle managers enable to empower their team by three different activities: (1) federate the team spirit to facilitate collaboration; (2) develop employees' capabilities and (3) adjust managers' activity according to employees' needs.

While multiple current new ways of organizing encourage to transform organizations from inefficient bureaucracies into flatter and more dynamic project-based teams, calling into question the importance of middle managers' strategic role, this study provides an original case study of an organization that chose to run against the tide and created an additional middle management level.

This study draws on technological frames to provide an understanding of organizational processes of strategizing by exploring how strategizing organizational capabilities for industrial digitalization could be understood through managers' perceptions of digital technology applications. This study complements earlier research focused on industry outcomes by addressing technological frames to understand how strategizing organizational capabilities within industrial digitalization may provide insight into socio-cognitive aspects which may affect technology-induced organizational change.

The single case study uses 14 in-depth interviews collected over two years (October 2020 to February 2022). The study follows an interpretative research design exploring managers' perceptions of industrial digitalization through a digitalization project.

The case study contributes to research by emphasizing socio-cognitive aspects through technological frames exploring how and why managers' perceptions of industrial digitalization affect strategizing organizational capabilities. The study contributes to practice by bringing attention to the disparate views of industrial digitalization. By illustrating how socio-cognitive aspects shape organizational capabilities, this study offers managers valuable insight into the relationship between an organization's capabilities, the individual and the shared structures affecting a digitalization project.

The case study is limited to Swedish manufacturing industries and is not aiming to be transferred or generalized to other industrial contexts or countries.

This study recognizes that strategizing organizational capabilities depends on managers' ability to illuminate the socio-cognitive aspects. Hence, the study contributes to practice by bringing attention to the disparate views among managers on the enhancement efforts made using digital technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize strategizing as a playful design practice; illustrate this view by describing a process for fostering effective strategic play; outline the benefits of the process and discuss how executives can play effectively.

The paper presents a concept development with a case illustration.

The paper finds that strategizing through playful design offers both an alternative conceptual lens as well as a novel practice of strategizing.

Strategizing through playful design is a useful complement to dry, conventional strategic planning processes and helps to open up and orient fruitful debate about an organization ' s particular strategic challenges.

Traditionally, management scholars have conceptualized the business model as a locus of innovation, planning tool, heuristic logic, or market device. However, so far, little is known about how the model is being applied in practice. To address this gap, this study aims to introduce a strategy‐as‐practice perspective and to explore the implications and limitations of applying the business model as a strategizing device.

A single‐case study design was selected to explore the implications and limitations of using the business model as a strategizing device in a high‐tech firm.

The business model provides a valuable structural template for mapping the current business model of a firm. However, in developing and discussing strategic options, it acts more as a symbolic artifact stimulating a creative decision‐making process than as an analytic tool with a clear sequence of steps.

When working with the business model concept in practice, its technical and linguistic legitimacy is initially highly limited. In the process of gaining legitimacy, however, a collective lock‐in to the current strategic identity may arise. Managers have to be aware of these limitations and need to achieve an appropriate balance within the organization.

The study introduces a social practice perspective into the business model debate, with a special emphasis on the implications and limitations of applying the business model concept as a strategizing device in a real‐life setting.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the ways in which standardization for patient safety is approached from different positions in the field, namely nurses and managers in a hospital department, the hospital management and standard inventers. We understand safety standardization and the responses to it as a strategizing process, where standards are legitimized, taken up, handled or countered.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a Danish hospital department. The study included observations, interviews and documents studies. The authors apply a Bourdieusian perspective, where the authors focus on the narratives told by standard inventers, managers and nurses to examine and understand their strategizing activities in relation to safety standardization. We understand strategizing as interested action emerging in the dialectics between a habitus and a position in a field.

The authors show how the standardization of work rests on the master narrative of patient safety management and how this narrative clashes with the nurses’ practical perception of good care, which rests on the counter-narrative of the clinical judgment.

Safety standardization in healthcare is often studied within the broader framework of performance management using functionalist outside-in and prescriptive approaches. This study contributes to this literature by approaching standardization and the responses to it as taking place in a dialectic movement between subjective shop floor experiences and wider field-level forces. Furthermore, the study contributes to the organization and management literature concerned with change and strategic action by endorsing the Bourdieusian conception of strategizing.

This paper aims to develop a theoretical framework to understand the role of leadership and organizational learning in intra-organizational digital business strategizing, to contribute to our understanding of how digital business strategies emerge.

Based on a theoretical analysis of relevant literature to connect leadership and organizational learning to intra-organizational digital business strategizing, a co-creation model was developed.

The model demonstrates that digital business strategy emerge through the mediating role of leadership and organizational learning processes, facilitated by the moderating effect of contextual factors, which includes; strategic alignment, information technology competence, institutional trust and organizational change readiness.

Two major limitations of this paper that warrant further research are as follows: the paper’s focus on intra-organizational digital business strategizing which excludes collaborative inter-organizational digital business strategizing among network organizations in Industry 4.0; and the need for empirical examination of the model to evaluate and validate it.

This paper offers a framework that will ensure that digital business strategizing maintains a fit between organizational strategy, structure, knowledge, culture, systems and processes that must align together to achieve the desired strategy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the extendibility of leadership and organizational learning to digital business strategizing and to propose how digital business strategies emerge.

While recent research has established that businesses can benefit from engaging with people at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP), the authors know little about the practices that managers can use to effectively strategize this ethically sound and financially attractive proposition and turn it into new business.

To address this gap, the authors reported on an action research study in which the authors collaborated with a major Mexican agribusiness, ANSA, to expand its market through value co-creation with the country’s poorest farmers. To shape the strategizing, the authors combined dynamic capability theory and options theory, and the authors used the asset hexagon framework to understand the BOP population’s needs.

The authors offer a detailed account of how ANSA’s management team collaborated downstream with distributors and farmers and upstream with suppliers to grow a new micro-franchise business that increases the well-being of the poorest farmers and creates additional business opportunities. The research describes how firms can strategize and implement new business ventures for co-creating value with the BOP population. The results are a process model and related propositions for strategizing value co-creation with BOP.

The authors offer new empirical insights, a grounded process model and model-related propositions on strategizing BOP options. As such, the study contributes to the BOP literature by joining critical ethics with actionable knowledge of how such efforts may unfold and by demonstrating how theory may be enacted and developed in the process.