Abstract:
The choice of strategy tools, in general, are an eclectic mix. How practitioners are choosing, using and adapting tools as influenced by the context of both the practitioner’s practice and institutionalised practices of the organisation, is still mostly underexplored. Drawing on S-a-P scholarship, this thesis reconsiders practitioners and practices, more specifically middle management and tools, by empirically questioning: how does the interplay between strategy practitioner and situated context, influence the type and use of tools in strategising? This research uses an embedded single case-study design to empirically investigate practitioners and their use of tools in strategising, performing an ethnographic-like study through complete immersion within an organisation for 25 days over a period of six weeks, collecting data from a variety of sources. Through thematic analysis, three key themes emerged from the data analysis: firstly, the disparity between actual and intended tool- uses stemming from their affordances versus the agency of the practitioners; secondly, tools as enablers of middle management agency and agenda setting through strategy distillation; thirdly, legitimisation of both the individuals and organisation from selecting and applying tools and the outcome of using them. This thesis contributes to the literature on tools and middle managers agency by offering a conceptual framework for the further exploration of the relationship between the affordances of tools and the agency of actors. This model shows that when the agency of actors is promoted and central to practice, the affordances of the tool may be backgrounded and vice versa.
