Temporal Work in Strategy Making

By Sarah Kaplan, Wanda J. Orlikowski. Organ. Sci., 2013

561 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reports on a field study of strategy making in one organization facing an industry crisis. In a comparison of five strategy projects, we observed that organizational participants struggled with competing interpretations of what might emerge in the future, what was currently at stake, and even what had happened in the past. We develop a model of temporal work in strategy making that articulates how actors resolved differences and linked their interpretations of the past, present, and future so as to construct a strategic account that enabled concrete strategic choice and action. We found that settling on a particular account required it to be coherent, plausible, and acceptable; otherwise, breakdowns resulted. Such breakdowns could impede progress, but they could also be generative in provoking a search for new interpretations and possibilities for action. The more intensely actors engaged in temporal work, the more likely the strategies departed from the status quo. Our model suggests that strategy cannot be understood as the product of more or less accurate forecasting without considering the multiple interpretations of present concerns and historical trajectories that help to constitute those forecasts. Projections of the future are always entangled with views of the past and present, and temporal work is the means by which actors construct and reconstruct the connections among them. These insights into the mechanisms of strategy making help explain the practices and conditions that produce organizational inertia and change.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/218d6074625c0746acd0520de0b223a4db35e333

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Citations in the corpus

Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward (2014, methodology): “However, some recent research has returned to the idea of sensemaking that is oriented toward the future (Gephart et al., 2010), seeking to create more elaborated models of sensemaking that take into account the past, present, and future (Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Wiebe, 2010).”
Coding Practices and Iterativity: Beyond Templates for Analyzing Qualitative Data (2020, unknown): “…use of the literature for delimiting the field often occurs early in the process of data analysis or even prior to data gathering, in their study of temporal work in strategy making, Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013) described repeatedly using the literature to sensitize as they deepened their analysis.”
Making sense of blockchain technology: How will it transform supply chains? (2019, background): “As Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013) rightly argue, though the future will likely not turn out exactly as projected, this does not mean that our foresight practices are of no use.”
Moving Beyond Templates: A Bricolage Approach to Conducting Trustworthy Qualitative Research (2020, background): “Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013), for example, justified their intensive observations by stating it follows from taking a practice theory perspective in their study.”
Convincing the crowd: Entrepreneurial storytelling in crowdfunding campaigns (2017, background): “Over time, entrepreneurs thus engage in continuous “temporal work” (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2013) by connecting narratives about the past and future to inform their own actions and to mobilize support from critical stakeholders, including business partners, clients, and funders.”
Editorial Essay: The Tumult over Transparency: Decoupling Transparency from Replication in Establishing Trustworthy Qualitative Research* (2019, methodology): “Kaplan and Orlikowski (2013), pressed by reviewers to show their first-order/second-order data structure, offered an alternative to the Gioia approach in their appendix, showing how their analysis unfolded over five major rounds of coding and three substantial iterations with the literature along…”
The “Other” Time: A Review of the Subjective Experience of Time in Organizations (2020, background): “Our review suggests that some scholars have started this conversation (e.g., Dawson, 2014; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Orlikowski & Yates, 2002; Slawinski & Bansal, 2012), and our event time challenge above continues it, but more can be done to address research questions that fully integrate…”