How received ideas about strategy and knowledge complicate production of useful strategy tools

What is it about?

This paper examines complexities of collaboration between developers and users of strategy tools from a stratgy-as-practice -perspective. Drawing on the literature on SST and the concept to epistemic culture (by Karin Knorr Cetina), the paper shows how strategy tools can be inscribed with particular normative beliefs and understandings about knowledge and strategy that complicate communication and interaction between scholars and practitioners in the field of strategy.

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Why is it important?

We find that that differences in epistemic culture may result in management scholars producing knowledge and strategy tools that lack practical pertinence for corporate actors. Our analysis suggests that many conventional strategy tools that have been designed for rational problem-solving may be ill-matched to the epistemic culture of contemporary, "post-bureaucratic" organizations. This is mainly because these tools do not necessarily support collective knowledge production and learning.