The swinging role of visualization in strategic planning
- PDF / 6,435,327 Bytes
- 36 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 222 Views
The swinging role of visualization in strategic planning Filippo Zanin1 · Maria Lusiani2 · Carlo Bagnoli2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Embracing a practice-based approach to strategy and building on existing research on visual artefacts, this paper addresses the role of visualization in the processes of collective strategizing, which characterizes pluralistic settings. Specifically, it explores what happens when strategy mapping (a form of visual technique, sometimes employed in strategy making) is introduced in the strategic planning process of a public university. Building on the results of an inductive case study about the construction of a strategic plan in an Italian university, the paper shows that strategy mapping is a process able to take up different roles in different moments and performing three actions on knowledge in the accomplishment of strategy formation: formalizing, generating and bridging distributed knowledge. The paper thus unveils the swinging role that strategy mapping can have if it is conceived as a process which moves from closure to openness moments. In other words, our empirical insights contribute to shed some new light on the multiple (swinging) roles that visualization plays in ensuing moments of the strategizing process in pluralistic organizations, especially when the forging of collective knowledge about strategic direction is needed. Keywords Strategy as practice · Pluralistic organization · Visual artefact · Strategy mapping · Technical object · Boundary object · Epistemic object
* Filippo Zanin [email protected] Maria Lusiani [email protected] Carlo Bagnoli [email protected] 1
Dpt. of Economics and Statistics, University of Udine, Via Tomadini 30/A, 33100 Udine, Italy
2
Dpt. of Management, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Fondamenta S. Giobbe, 873, Cannaregio, 30121 Venice, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
F. Zanin et al.
1 Introduction Strategy as practice is an alternative approach to the objectified view of strategy that allows to reveal in more fine details the micro and local activities that constitute strategy-making as social, situated and materially mediated practices, and highlights the unfolding nature of the knowledge processes deeply grounded in strategy work (Whittington 1996; Jarzabkowski 2004; Chia and MacKay 2007; Vaara and Whittington 2012). Part of the research on strategy as practice has concentrated on the roles that material artefacts can perform to support strategy-making: they drive rationalization (e.g. Jarzabkowski and Kaplan 2015), they allow to connect distributed knowledge (e.g. Carlile 2004) and they facilitate the exploration of new meanings (e.g. Eppler and Platts 2009), working, in other words, as technical objects (Ewenstein and Whyte 2009), boundary objects (Star 1989), and epistemic objects (Rheinberger 1997), respectively. These roles have been found to be attached to different material artefacts (Carlile et al. 2013), including visual artefacts. However, these roles are r
Data Loading...
