uncovering strategic assumptions: understanding managers' ability to build representations

~/ Pergamon European Management Journal Vol. I4, No 4, pp 389-398, 1996

Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

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Uncovering Strategic Assumptions'. Understanding Managers' Ability to Build Representations THOMAS DURAND, Professor of Business Strategy, Ecole Centrale, Paris; ELI~ONORE MOUNOUD, Doctoral candidate, Ecole Centrale, Paris and Groupe HEC, Paris; BERNARD RAMANANTSOA, Dean, Groupe HEC, Paris

Strategic management researchers are increas- ingly showing interest in the underlying assumptions behind strategic decisions made by managers. This article intends to revisit the conceptual framework currently available to study managers' representations. Many researchers in cognitive and social sciences have indeed suggested that construction may be a better metaphor for cognition than the traditional perception paradigm. We suggest that management research could learn a great deal on this matter from other social sciences. Two main arguments are put forward. First we argue that the cognitive/computational framework is not relevant to address the epistemological challenge of describing managerial cognition. Second we argue that adopting a perspective focused on either the individual or the collective level is not suited for the challenge. We suggest at least two simultaneous moves thus leading to a paradigmatic shift: introducing the social (and emotional) dimensions into the picture and recognizing the need for Interactionism as the core of representation-building processes. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

A key issue in the field of strategy has to do with knowledge and cognition, at various levels: individual, organizational, social. The importance of the strategic vision of managers has been pointed out

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UNCOVERING STRATEGIC ASSUMPTIONS

(Hall, 1984; Prahalad and Bettis, 1986; Johnson, 1988; Dutton, 1990; Huff, 1990; Lyles and Schwenk, 1992). Strategic management researchers are thus showing increased interest in the knowledge structures and thinking processes of decision-makers. This comes from increased recognition of the importance of the underlying assumptions behind decisions made by managers. These assumptions actually link the economic environment to the strategy of the firm. Selective perception is said to play a critical role in strategic issue diagnosis and problem formulation. Perceptions and past experience are supposed to build-up into cognitive structures, known as the so-called cognitive maps. This article intends to revisit the conceptual framework traditionally used to study managers' representations. As many researchers in cognitive and social sciences have already suggested, we argue that construction is a better metaphor for cognition than perception.

How do managers build up a strategic understanding, a representation, an interpretation to grasp the competitive context of their industry? Do they really build cognitive maps? How are these maps linked to the external environment and how, in turn, do they interact in the shaping of that environment? How - - to what degree, through which processes - - are these representations shared among managers in and across organizations'/These are some of the typical questions which we wish to address in this article, adopting a rather theoretical perspective. Because major limitations in research on cognition derive from the weaknesses of theoretical frameworks, we feel that it is important to better understand the mechanisms at work behind the formation of a managerial vision. The aim is to better manage the 'know what', 'know why' and 'know how' which, according to Sanchez's (1995) description of the 'strategic logic', lead to the vision of top managers.

We suggest that management research could leam a great deal on this matter from other social sciences. We present two main arguments. First, we argue that the cognitive/computational framework is not relevant to address the epistemological challenge of describing managerial vision. Second, we argue that adopting a perspective focused on either the individual or the collective level is not suited for the challenge. The computational framework prevents us from considering any other perspective. It is not only irrelevant but also ill-suited to our issue.

We first discuss the literature which deals with managerial cognition. More specifically, the influence of cognitive science is identified to be the source of major shortcomings. The main problem for research in managerial and organizational cognition is the absence of link between individual cognition and collective phenomena. We argue that management researchers have fallen short of succeeding in adapting the 'information processing' model of cognition to the collective level. Schneider and Angelrnar (1993) have rightly pointed out the theoretical weaknesses of concepts such as collective brains and organizational

cognition as well as the lack of empirical evidence. We then review the literature dealing with organizational cognition.

Finally, we suggest adopting a view of cognition based on interactions. This view is drawn from social psychology. The concept of social representation is presented in detail. It was first proposed by Moscovici (1961) to explain the way in which people organize their own understanding i.e. their knowledge about a specific field (psychoanalysis in the case of his study). The main argument is linked to Vygotsky's argument that higher cognitive processes are internalized social relationships. In addition, Moscovici suggests focusing more on content than on cognitive processes: what people think influence, how they think; values, norms, beliefs are rules for making inferences.

Major implications for research are drawn.

Two Major Streams

We identify two major theoretical streams dealing with cognition. On one hand goes the perceptual/computational path, stemming from cognitive science, mainly cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. The mushrooming of cognitive mapping studies resulted from the hope that cognitive science methodologies may be useful to study management knowledge. Should that research path have been successful, it would then have been possible to develop a truly scientific management science at the strategic level. In that perspective, reality is supposed to be given. It can be discovered through 'heedful' perception and described piece by piece. If it were not for bounded rationality, it would be possible to grasp the world and compute its elements.

On the other hand stands the construction perspective as in the socio-cognitive (Weick, 1979; Daft and Weick, 1984; Smircich and Stubbart, 1985) and autopoietic (von Krogh et al., 1994; von Krogh and Roos, 1995) approaches. Social interaction and discursive behaviors are said to both yield and disseminate representations. Reality is invented and constructed not just mirrored. We suggest that the 'construction' model is much more relevant to the field of strategic management than the 'perceptual/computational' model.

Managerial Cognition: Processes and Structures

Starting with the first perspective mentioned, it should be stressed that the concept of cognitive simplification is a useful starting point for managerial cognition. In 1957, Simon introduced the concept of 'bounded rationality' which suggests that decision-makers construct simplified mental models of reality, using only a small part of the information available for a problem. In doing so, they can clearly only approximate rationality in their attempts

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to solve problems. Another cognitive simplification lies in the selective perception which prevents managers from evaluating all the variables relevant to a decision. Topics in managerial cognition include the consequences of cognitive processes on decision-making.

Cognitive studies indeed distinguish cognitive structures from cognitive processes. Research on cognitive structures deals with concepts such as categories, causal maps, plans, scripts, frames, all in a sense resulting in strategic assumptions (Eden, 1992; Huff, 1990; Stubbart, 1989).

In that perspective, the human mind is regarded as a data processing machine, though a limited one, which has to cope with strategic problems complex by definition. As they attempt to understand complex problems, strategists will face biases affecting their strategic assumptions. Researchers have identified a number of heuristics or 'rules of thumb' that decision makers use to simplify complex problems and a number of biases which may have an effect on strategic decisions. One of the

which are extremely

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most important biases is the illusion of control that affects people's assessment of the chance of success or failure in strategic decision-making. This illusion is reinforced by the way people collect information because they usually tend to seek pieces of information which support their own views. It is likely that a decision will be affected by different biases. Biases interact and reinforce each other. For example the so-called 'availability bias' may reinforce the illusion of control.

The effect of cognitive heuristics and biases may be seen in decision makers' assumptions about strategic problems (Barnes, 1984; Stubbart, 1989; Schwenk, 1984; 1986; I988). Assumptions are considered to be the basis of the strategic decision-making process. They result from the complexity of decisions and the uncertainty under which these decisions are taken. Most assumptions deal with the behavior of groups or individuals who are important for the success of the strategy and who have a stake in its outcome. It is important that these strategic assumptions remain consistent with the available information of the strategist. The analysis of cognitive structures is said to be helpful in understanding the way strategic problems are formulated. The main concept used to understand strategic problem flaming is cognitive mapping (Axelrod, 1976; Huff; 1990). Cognitive maps consist of nodes generically called 'concepts' about different aspects of the environment and cause-and-effect relationships between these 'concepts'. Such maps are said to help the decision-maker focus on the important aspects of an issue. Cognitive maps are not supposed to represent the person's entire knowledge structure but only his/her causal assertions in a particular domain.

In that sense, strategic assumptions appear as cause- effect relationships which are then supposed to be used

to understand complex strategic problems. New problems are assumed to be treated through the same set of assumptions, by analogy or metaphor. In a way, each strategic problem is unique but in framing a new problem, decision-makers are said to draw on their previous experience base. Researchers studying govem- mental decision-making have already insisted on the role of analogy for problem definition. Analogy consists of using simple images or situations to guide complex problem definition. Reasoning by analogy has been shown to be effective in generating new creative solutions but it can be dangerous and may lead to an overly simplistic view of a given situation. Personal experience and borrowed analogous experience are the main sources for analogies (Huff, I982).

The influence of cognitive science has led to focus on mathematically tractable means of representing knowledge in the form of matrix or graphs. This is typically the case in cognitive mapping. Research is then directed towards eliciting maps by different methods, comparing maps numerically, calculating

mathematical distances between maps, explaining the differences in managers' cognitive maps by the influence of personal or environmental conditions. Very few studies have used alternative frameworks (Shrivastava and Mitroff, 1983; Cossette and Audet, 1992). Cognitive psychology considers man to be a cognitive miser due to lack of computational effectiveness.

Please note at this stage that, so far, we have viewed cognition (both from a processual and structural perspective) from an individual view point. We still have to discuss the link with the organizational dimensions.

Organizat ional Cognition Schneider and Angelmar (1993) argue that the organization/cognition relationship is not that obvious despite what some theoreticians have said and written. They also criticize research on managerial cognition for being too focused on the individual level. Research on cognition at the organizational level is affected by the problems of anthropomorphism and reification. The way and the extent to which knowledge is shared are difficult to grasp, even within a small group (Langfield-Smith, 1992; Allard-Poesi, 1994).

Many researchers (Kiesler and Sproull, 1982; Lyles, 1981, Dutton et al., 1990; Dutton, 1993) attempt to bridge the organizational/individual gap by distinguishing different steps in information-processing. Some processes are said to be individual, others are regarded as organizational. For Lyles and Schwenk (1992), the top management team shares 'organizational knowledge structures'. These structures are however different from the concepts of

- ~ °

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organizational climate and culture which are of a more affecting and emotional nature. Similarly, Prahalad and Bettis (1986) and Ginsberg (1990) use the concept of dominant logic, Hall (1984), the concept of natural logic. Johnson (1988) adapts the concept of paradigm derived from Kuhn's epistemology, and links it with structures, routines and culture. In these models, strategic knowledge is assumed to be shared among top management, thus playing an important role in strategy making. However, the question of organizational cognition remains wide open.

The link between individual thoughts and organizational phenomena is yet the most difficult issue. Research in organizational cognition has so far fallen short of properly connecting cognitive concepts with organizational learning and strategy.

Another limit of the perceptual/computational perspective has to do with the absence of emotional and affecting factors. Weick (1983) argues that cognition should not be limited to cogitation. Stubbart and Ramasaprad (1990) argue for the use of the notion of unconsciousness to provide interpretative clues to understanding individual behavior and cognition through defense mechanisms.

Our research concern here is to address precisely the individual/organizational issue while at the same time reintroducing emotions and feelings into the picture. We believe that this can be done only through a paradigmatic shift.

Alternative Theoretical Frameworks

Beyond the Behaviorism/Cognitivism Opposition

As Stubbart (1993) stated, 'the cognitive movement was chiefly motivated by the limitations and failures of behaviorism to sufficiently explain the relationship between environment, mind and behavior'. Behaviorism has greatly influenced organizational research. Behaviorists are not interested in the mind, some of them even referred to it as 'the mystery box'. They assume that they can adequately explain human behavior without analyzing mental phenomena. In contrast, the key concept of cognition is mental representation. Mental representations deal with the relationship between the extemal environment and 'inner states', assumed to be located in the mind. For cognitivism, the behavior is directed by computation, combining mental representations. For behaviorism, the behavior is directed by stimuli from an 'objective' environment.

More generally, in his work in psychology, Shanon (1991) identifies ten theoretical frameworks including cognitivism and behaviorism. He suggests a clear-cut distinction between the weak, philosophical sense of representation, referring to the locus which serves as the

substrate for mental activity, and the strong scientific sense, where representations are seen as units of computation. Shanon claims that cognitive scientists take the representativeness of representations too much for granted. Varela (1989) follows a similar path in his definition of the three paradigms in cognitive science (cognitivism, connexionism, autopoiesis).

In Shanon's view, cognitivism is the framework which bases the modeling of the mind on representational structures, in the strong sense. Mental representations are abstract symbolic structures, with well-defined elementary constituents, combined into large structures in accordance with rules of well-formedness. Representational structures comprise a code by means of which all knowledge can be fully characterized in a unified fashion. This framework is characterized by three hypotheses:

olo human beings behave by virtue of the possession of knowledge

o:o knowledge is composed of mental semantic representations

°~° behavior is executed through computational operations upon these representations

Shanon develops a strong argument: the orientation towards cognitivism will prevent research on cognition to deal with the main issue, which is meaning. This problem clearly applies to the specific case of managerial cognition.

In any case, the study of mental representations has inherent difficulties in meeting scientific standards for at least two reasons. The first, has to do with 'inner states' which are not easily observable. The second, relates to the question of meaning, regarded more as a philosophical than a scientific issue. To deal with these difficulties, researchers proposed various frameworks. For example, some models stipulate that cognition is rooted in action and that its locus lies in the external environment, either biological or socio-cultural. In those cases, the locus of cognition being external, there is no need to access the 'inner states' of individuals.

In turn, behaviorism has a symmetrical problem. It may indeed appear as an attempt to escape the issue of accessing 'inner states', thus building a psychological theory upon a non-psychological basis. It analyzes behavior in terms of entities that are observable in the external world, the stimuli. Behaviorism is an external framework of cognition without an internal counterpart, as cognitivism is an internal framework without an external counterpart. As cognitivism takes meaning for granted, behaviorism denies it. They thus both avoid the question of meaning.

All in all, two major problems appear in the traditional paradigms:

°~° the individual/organizational articulation °~° the internal/external locus problem

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Both behaviorism and cognitivism fall short of solving any of these two major problems. However behaviorism hints for interaction via the concept of external stimulus while cognitivism hints for some form of constructivism: the 'epistemic subject' plays a part in building representations.

The Social D i m e n s i o n of Cogni t ion

The development of cognitive psychology in the last few years has been focusing on the analysis of specific experimental situations rather than toward the world beyond the laboratory. Cognitive social psychologists have tried to extend the information-processing paradigm from the realm of individual mental representations to the realm of interpersonal social behavior. However it should be stressed that it may be irrelevant for social cognition to import theories derived from the study of non social phenomena (Landman and Manis, 1983). In a sense, the field of social psychology has been reshaped by cognitive science, yielding the so-called field of 'social cognition'. This field regards cognition as an extension of one's behavior in public (Forgas, 1981).

Interestingly enough, social cognition however usually does not involve the social context. It studies cognition as a non-social process. Paradoxically, it tends to be culture-blind. Social cognition pays almost no attention to cultural factors, differences between groups, historical contexts or information that circulate in a given society. Indeed, it relies upon the purely individual perspective, what Farr (1978) calls the individualistic fallacy. Social cognition also dissociates thinking from communication.

Social cognition focuses on biases and reasoning errors of the ordinary man whose thinking is characterized by inference troubles. Thinking in the social cognition perspective consists of stereotypes and incongruities. It cannot be seen as rational and logical but the resulting

nonsense may have its own meaning because of qualitatively different ways of reasoning as Piaget has shown for children. Piaget's pioneering work together with more recent research dealing with social interactions has infused cognitive studies with the idea that environment is more constructed than pre-given. The role of context has thus drastically changed. Context used to be seen as a source of interference during lab experiments. However, it is now often considered as the locus of interactions, thus playing a crucial role in sense-making. The role of context has thus evolved from a physical to a social nature. Context is now seen primarily as interactions between people.

More generally, some social psychologists have argued that it would be legitimate to draw more on child psychology, anthropology and even psychoanalysis to study how people create information and not only how they process it.

As summed up by Markus and Zajonc (1985), the behaviorist SR model (S for stimulus, R for response) first evolved into the SOR scheme where the so-called 'organism' O occupies a mediating position between the stimulus and the response. It then went one step further to end up with the OSOR scheme where the subject is supposed to define both stimulus and response by his constructive activity.

Sugges t ing a Paradigmatic Shift

Figure 1 synthesizes our view. It shows on one side, three dimensions of representations, the cognitive knowledge (cognition is computation), the emotional dimension and the social influence. It also shows three different possible paradigms on representations: Individualism adopting the individual level as the only relevant one; Holism, for which knowledge is inherently collective characteristics of a group. In contrast,

Shift 1 : computation Is not relevant

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Individualism managerial

Holism

Interactionism

cognition organizational

cognition organizational

mind

... emot iona l feel ing unconsciousness

culture

corporate identity

... social in f luence social cognition

collective representations

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Shift 2 : individualism is not adapted

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Interactionism, derived from 'micro-sociologies' (Knorr- Cetina, 1981), is looking at knowledge spread into units of the organization and 'produced' through interactions.

Most of the existing work on representations falls into the north-west comer of the table, typically the individual cognitive mapping along the lines of Huff (1990). We suggest at least two simultaneous moves in the matrix of Figure 1: introducing the social and emotional dimensions into the pictures and recognizing the need for Interactionism, thus leading to a paradigmatic shift. This is, in our view, the only way to reconcile representations at individual and collective levels.

As discussed before, the traditional computational view of cognitivism is not relevant while neither individualism nor holism are adapted to understand managerial ability to build representations. Social representations are not yielded by internal mental processes only, neither are they purely individual, nor are they socially imposed as purely collective characteristics. Representations are shaped, and in turn disseminated, through social interactions. Therefore, in our view, not only is the individual/organizational problem bypassed but the internal/external difficulty is also addressed by the social representations paradigm.

The third part of this article will discuss the implications of such a paradigmatic shift which, in a sense, corresponds to transferring the concept of social representations from social psychology into the strategic management literature.

Social Representations: a Refreshing View

We wish here to expand on the theory of social representations thus adopting a constructivist view, rooted in the crucial role of interactions as the key process both generating and diffusing representations.

Social representations connecting everyday thinking with 'people beliefs' The idea of social representations aims at dealing with the content of everyday thinking and the connections between ideas that give coherence to 'people beliefs'. It plays a role when it comes to categorizing people and settings, explaining behaviors as part of the social setting. It relates to the idea of the social construction of reality proposed by Berger and Luckmann (1967) after SchLitz, but with greater focus on the cognitions of the members of the society. It is also grounded in the concept of scheme (Bartlett, 1932). Schemes play an important role in everyday thinking and everyday knowledge. This also relates to the concepts of ideology and culture (Jahoda, 1988). More than representations as m e a n s of recognizing things, the idea of social representations supports the view of representations as means of constructing reality.

Social representations help people cope with strangeness Strangeness is not only a question of knowledge but also of feeling, as defined by social psychologists such as Schfitz or Heider. This emotional/motivational basis of social representation generated criticism from those following Piaget as they argued for a purely cognitive perspective (Jahoda 1988). To cope with a strange idea or perception, individuals are said to start from an already existing social representation. In the end, the unfamiliar is assimilated into a renewed representation. The rules applied to go from the pre-existing to the renewed representations, thus assimilating the unfamiliar, are suggested by Bartlett (1932):

'as has been pointed out before, whenever material visually presented purports to be representative of some common object, but contains certain features which are unfamiliar in the community to which the material is introduced, these features invariably suffer transformation in the direction of the familiar.'

Representations built through interactions are social and not collective The concept of collective representation was introduced by Durkheim to label representations imposed on all the members of a given society. In Durkheim's view the concept of representation refers above all to a vast class of intellectual forms: science, religion, myths, categories of space and time. These representations are collective means embedded in society and homogeneously shared by all members. They are static and linked to a closed society, partially autonomous and imposed by an institution. Social representations clearly differ from Durkheim's view of collective representations: social representations are clearly not homogeneous nor are they shared as such by all members of a society. Social representations imply plurality and diversity.

Moscovici (1961; 1963; 198I; I983; 1984; 1988) first introduced the concept of social representation. His theory aims at taking into account relationships between action and cognitive phenomena such as language and social communication. Moscovici attempts to rethink representation as a network of interacting concepts and images, the contents of which evolve continuously over time and space. He refuses to consider that people only reproduce the thoughts and representations of elites. Representations can be either hegemonic (as if they were collective as in Durkheim's view) or emancipated i.e., specific from subgroup to subgroup. In addition, representations can be controversial e.g., if they result from conflicting and antagonistic relations between different groups. That view of representations clearly departs from the 'group mind fallacy', which implicitly assumes symbiosis and consensus in groups.

Representations as myth and popular knowledge By borrowing representations for generating their own representations, people understand things that they never had first-hand knowledge nor experience of. Knowledge is thus not necessarily obtained through observation but mainly through interaction and corn-

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munication with third parties. Knowledge also circulates through mass media and by word of mouth. Representations thus relate to common sense and/or vulgarization (Moscovici, 1988). Representations can be seen as the myths and popular knowledge in modern societies. In a sense, representations are analogous to Kuhn's concept of paradigm in science.

Representations include not only abstract but also visual features Visual features are supposed to be the core of the representation, the figurative kernel (Moscovici, 1995). Studying social representations of mental illness, de Rosa (1987) showed that the figurative components develop independently of the intellectual components. De Rosa assumed that these figurative elements are rooted in an archaic state of social memory. Representations are thus supposed first to emerge from images and then to incorporate concepts and to be associated with words. The figurative elements are seen as being more stable and more directly social than the conceptual elements. By recombining various elements of a representation, an image is particularly able to render familiar things that would otherwise remain remote and unclear. There is a 'tendency to convert ideas and events into figurative thought which depicts instead of describing, shows instead of explaining thus reinforcing the day dreaming wishful thinking and dream world that are relentlessly churned out in public media and conversation places' (Moscovici, 1988). However this distinction between conceptual and figurative elements may appear secondary when dealing with the purely representational side of the matter. It is however essential when dealing with the main concern: acting and communicating. Representations are said to frame a given situation by being shared in a given group. Conversely, they also help the members of the group to communicate and act through shared images and concepts.

thought (Gardin, I974; D'Unrung, 1977; Potter and Wetherell, 1987).

At this stage, we would like to emphasize again that the information-processing model is inadequate for studying social representations. First of all, because representations are shaped through interaction and not through computation. Second, because communication and interaction are not of a computational nature. People perceive and think about the social world in ways which are different from what they would do if they relied exclusively on observation and rules of logic. The term perception is inadequate as social representations are ways of building worlds. There is nothing arbitrary in this process since the regularities of thought, language and life in society narrow down the set of possibilities (Knorr-Cetina, 1981). 'The act of construction is less a creative liberty of reality than an illusion about the conditions of this reality' (Moscovici, 1988).

Implications for Research

As Moscovici (1988) suggests:

'one should view society as a thinking system, just as one can view it as an economic or political system . . . . just as one visits laboratories to investigate how the scientific community produces facts and theories, one might visit these others kinds of laboratories, namely factories, hospitals, etc. to understand how other communities produce their facts and representations'.

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Representations shaped through communication Representations are shaped through communication and are thus inherently the result of simplification and exemplification. Communication is not just an expression of thoughts or feelings. It is action, even when ritualistic. It modifies or creates reality putting thoughts and feelings into a format accessible to others. Representa- tions are not 'inner states', they are communicated, reshaped, in a way materialized. This is done through words and speeches. Words are tumed into images, ideas into metaphors. Words are not the same as the things to which they refer and are nevertheless understood by a community of speakers. Some words have a power of concentrating images and meaning. Studying language and languaging with rigorous methods could give us access to representations even if the specific status of the analysis of speech remains vulnerable to philosophical controversy about the relations between language and

Research on managerial cognition faces a methodological problem because 'it does not look as though managerial and organizational cognition will adopt the experimental methods employed by cognitive science' so we are 'left puzzled about the alternatives'. Stubbart (1993)

further suggests going beyond lab studies, reaching out in the field to look for 'ecological validity'. Social representations allow for a diversity of methodological approaches because of the internal and external factors: representations can be found in the minds of people but also observing practices and listening to discourses. If the experimental method is useful to understand how people think, higher mental and social processes must thus be approached through other methods, including linguistic analysis and observation of how people act. Observation frees the researcher from premature quantification and experimentation that may lead to meaningless findings. The researcher needs to aim at understanding the genesis and structure of social representations in situ.

As Smircich and Stubbart (1985) stated, it is important to uncover and clarify knowledge among members of the organization as this knowledge is often untested and taken for granted. By describing assumptions and beliefs,

European Management Journal Vo114 No 4 August 1996 3 95


researchers can uncover practices trapping people in taken-for-granted representations and behaviors. In order to understand 'what it is like inside a strategist's world', they obviously need to conduct research from the view point of the industry participants. At the same time researchers have to struggle with their natural tendency to identify themselves with those they study. They also have to avoid accepting managerial commonsense. The constructivist posture leads to using confrontation of research models with managerial beliefs or wisdom as a way of validation.

As von Krogh et al. (1994) advocate, shared understanding among members of an organization is not to be pre-assumed due to the importance of tacit knowledge, such as skills and routines. Some data have a 'manifest' character and limited conversation may be enough for these data to become information, that is knowledge for organization members. But latent data may need extensive discussion to be converted into knowledge. Conversation (von Krogh and Roos,1995) and languaging (von Krogh et al., 1994) are key concepts to understanding the development of knowledge. Languaging refers to the process in which language is not only maintained but is constantly being developed. The role of language and conversations has attracted too little interest, with some exceptions (Fiol 1991, Fletcher and Huff 1990). In that perspective, dissemination and knowledge are seen as tightly bound together. As yon Krogh et al (1994) put it 'information is no more a substance, it is the process by which knowledge is acquired'. What is called information should be labeled data because 'information is dependent on the manager who makes use of it to develop knowledge'.

In other words observe, listen to conversations in situ and you may contribute with empirical materials, potentially relevant to the field, of social representations in strategic management.

Interviews are thus used to listen to people arguing, producing categorization and relating schema. Yet if observational studies stress the importance of conversa- tional social exchanges, some researchers (Jahoda, 1988) question that social representations' genesis may be uncovered in such a way. 'There is at present no con- ceivable way in which conversations could be sampled extensively enough in space and time to provide such a picture. The matter is further complicated by the fact, pointed out by Bourdieu, that the content of conversations as well as their style are strongly affected by the structure of social relations between participants in terms of age, power, prestige and culture' (Jahoda, 1988).

We still believe however that language and languaging is an interesting path to follow for research. We finally wish to make a last point. The idea that representations as ways of building worlds and making sense implies that researchers should pay more attention to social 'anchoring' of mental representations rather than just to contents for themselves. Anchoring can be related to figurative image-like elements. But it is also linked to

beliefs existing in a given society, prevailing ideology, the multiple positioning of the social subject, the social divisions and interactions among people. This second move towards the social dimensions is in fact much less advanced than the one towards Interactionism. Taking into account the multiple dimensions of social influence on representations are related to the emergence of a critical form of discourse in strategy it also leads us to face the ideological nature of strategic management (Rouleau and Seguin, I995). In turn this advocates for more work focused on social positions as a key-factor explaining representations.

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THOMAS DURAND, Ecole Centrale Paris, Grande Voie des Vignes, 92295 Ch~tenay-Malabry Cedex, France.

Thomas Durand is Professor of Business Strategy at Ecole Centrale Paris where he heads the 'Strategy and Technology' Research unit. He works in the field of

strategic management, the management of technology and innovation as well as public policies for research, science-technology transfer and the promotion of innovation. He has published a number of articles in these fields over the last ten years. Professor Durand has worked extensively with companies and government bodies on these topics both for research projects and consulting assignments.

ELI~ONORE MOUNOUD, Ecole Centrale Paris, Grande Voie des Vignes, 92295 Ch~tenay- Malabry Cedex, France.

El~onore Mounoud is a doctoral candidate in Business Strategy and Management, preparing a joint PhD at HEC Paris and Ecole Centrale Paris. Her research

interests are in representations and discourses, their social dimensions and their roles in strategy making. Her field of interest is the 'green industry': she previously worked for firms and research agencies as a consultant on environmental issues and technologies. She was educated at INA-PG in Paris where she graduated in agricultural sciences, she then studied strategic management and the management of innovation at HEC Paris and at Ecole Centrale Paris.

BERNARD RAMANANTSOA, Groupe HEC, Direction Generale, I rue de la Liberation, 78351 ]ouy-en- Josas Cedex, France.

After seven years in the Marketing Department of the SNCF (French Railways), Bernard Ramanantsoa became Professor in the Department of Strategy and Business Policy in

HEC-Paris. He is now the Dean of HEC-Paris. He has published several articles and books including Business Strategy and Diversification with ].P. Detrie (Nathan, I983), Strategic Technology Management with P. Dussauge and S. Hart (Wiley & Sons, I992), Strategor (Intereditions 1988-94) with the members of the Department of Strategy at HEC Paris. He has also worked for large industrial firms on consulting assignments. He holds an engineering degree from Ecole Nationale de I'Aeronautique in Toulouse, an M B A from HEC - ISA and a PhD in Management Science.

398 European Management Journal Vo114 No 4 August 1996

uncovering strategic assumptions: understanding managers' ability to build representations

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