from autonomous strategic behavior to emergent … · (hutzschenreuter and kleindienst, 2006: 673...

Strategic Management JournalStrat. Mgmt. J., 35: 1202–1229 (2014)

Published online EarlyView 1 August 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/smj.2149

Received 31 October 2011 ; Final revision received 29 April 2013

FROM AUTONOMOUS STRATEGIC BEHAVIORTO EMERGENT STRATEGY

LAURENT MIRABEAU1* and STEVE MAGUIRE2

1 Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario Canada2 Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

This study develops a model of emergent strategy formation at a large telecommunications firm.It integrates prominent traditions in strategy process research—strategy as patterned action,as iterated resource allocation and as practice—to show how emergent strategy originatesas a project through autonomous strategic behavior, then subsequently becomes realized asa consequence of mobilizing wider support to provide impetus, manipulating strategic context tolegitimate the project by constructing it as consonant with the prevailing concept of strategy, andaltering structural context to embed it within organizational units, routines, and objectives. Thestudy theorizes the role of “practices of strategy articulation” in emergent strategy formation,and explains why some autonomous strategic behavior becomes “ephemeral” and disappearsrather than enduring to become emergent strategy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

The importance of emergent strategy has long beenrecognized. Textbooks (e.g., Johnson, Scholes,and Whittington, 2010a) suggest that Mintzberg’s(1978) model distinguishing emergent from delib-erate strategy has become canonical, while Hamel(2009: 91 and 94) recommends that firms “reinventstrategy making as an emergent process” in orderto “reinvent management and make it more rele-vant to a volatile world.” In contrast, the strategyliterature emphasizes deliberate rather than emer-gent strategy (Bower and Gilbert, 2005), separatesstrategy formulation from implementation whileassuming the former precedes the latter (Huff andReger, 1987), and focuses on strategy content overprocess (Hafsi and Thomas, 2005) by emphasizing

Keywords: emergent strategy; autonomous strategicbehavior; strategy process; strategy formation; strategyas practice*Correspondence to: Laurent Mirabeau, Telfer School of Man-agement, University of Ottawa, 55 Laurier Avenue West, Ottawa,ON K1N 6N5, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

a “choice” perspective over a “social learning” one(Wooldridge, Schmid, and Floyd, 2008).

Few empirical studies focus on emergent strat-egy explicitly (Bower and Gilbert, 2005), despiterecognition of the relevance of insights from stud-ies in the “social learning” tradition that implicitlyor indirectly address strategy making as an emer-gent phenomenon. We address this gap by posit-ing and empirically validating “autonomous strate-gic behavior” (Burgelman, 1983b) as a precursorto emergent strategy, and by exploring strategiz-ing practices (Jarzabkowski, 2003; Johnson, Melin,and Whittington, 2003) that are key to the tran-sition. To do so, we leverage strategy processresearch, viewing strategy as “an iterated processof resource allocation,” captured under the label“Bower-Burgelman (B-B) process model of strat-egy making” (Noda and Bower, 1996: 159 and160; also see Bower, 1970; Burgelman, 1983a,b,c),and strategy as “practice” (Jarzabkowski, 2003;Vaara and Whittington, 2012).

We draw on a case study of a multina-tional telecommunications firm over a ten-yearperiod, tracking individual projects in a bottom-up

From Autonomous Strategic Behavior to Emergent Strategy 1203

manner. We develop a model of the formation ofemergent strategy, which illustrates its origins inautonomous behavior resulting from local prob-lem solving, and shows how it becomes real-ized through mobilizing support to provide impe-tus, manipulating strategic context to legitimatethe project by constructing it as consonant withthe prevailing concept of strategy and alteringthe firm’s structural context to embed the projectwithin organizational units, routines, and objec-tives. We also theorize how the manipulationof strategic context is accomplished by enacting“practices of strategy articulation” that link the“discursive work” (Maguire and Hardy, 2013) offront line and top managers.

As an empirical study of emergent strat-egy, our study adds to understanding a phe-nomenon for which there is a paucity of research(Lowe and Jones, 2004) and makes several con-tributions. First, by integrating prominent tra-ditions in strategy process research—strategyas patterned action, as iterated resource allo-cation, and as practice—our process model ofemergent strategy formation represents theoreti-cal refinement (Edwards, 2010), countering thetrend toward framework proliferation (Hutzschen-reuter and Kleindienst, 2006) while opening upavenues for further research. Second, it contributesan important discursive dimension to the under-standing of strategy as the outcome of iteratedpractices of resource use—a core notion of theB-B model, which emphasizes the use of mate-rial resources rather than symbolic ones leveragedthrough practices of strategy articulation. Third,our synthesis yields an expanded view of strat-egy formation; we address a notable asymme-try in Mintzberg’s (1978) model by introducing“ephemeral autonomous strategic behavior”—aconcept that relates to emergent strategy in thesame way as unrealized strategy relates to deliber-ate strategy.

EMERGENT STRATEGY AND ITSFORMATION

We begin by situating emergent strategy within theliterature on strategy process, before connecting itto research traditions viewing strategy as iteratedprocesses of resource allocation (Noda and Bower,1996) and practice (Jarzabkowski, 2003), to gen-erate our research questions.

Strategy and strategy process research

Despite its importance, strategy carries multiplemeanings (Hafsi and Thomas, 2005; Mintzbergand Lampel, 1999). One issue stems from con-ceptual distinctions that, while serving as thepremises of much strategy research, are in factblurred empirically, thereby contributing to anoften lamented, uneven development of the field(Farjoun, 2002). The literature typically distin-guishes strategy formulation from implementa-tion , assuming that the latter follows the formerand prioritizing research accordingly (Huff andReger, 1987; Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel,2005). Similarly, strategy content , and in particu-lar how specific strategies are related to perfor-mance when undertaken in a given context, isaddressed far more often than strategy process(Hafsi and Thomas, 2005). Another tension relatesto intentions and the assumed extent of strategists’foresight. Porter (1996: 64) asserts that strategy“means deliberately choosing a different set ofactivities to deliver a unique mix of value.” Incontrast, Mintzberg (1978) illustrates that “emer-gent strategy”—a pattern in action that is realizeddespite or in the absence of intentions (Mintzbergand Waters, 1985)—is an important component ofempirically realized strategies.

We problematize the assumed distinction andsequencing of strategy formulation and implemen-tation to address the relationship between particu-lar strategy content and the processes from whichit is generated. Such a “process” emphasis has along tradition (e.g., Huff and Reger, 1987) andremains important: “Although seemingly funda-mental to the study of organizations,” the question“Where does a firm’s strategy come from?” hasreceived “less attention than it merits” (Gavetti andRivkin, 2007: 420). Approaches to this questioncan be grouped into “two broad classes of modelsthat have dominated”: “the content-oriented ratio-nal choice class and the process-centered learningclass” (Gavetti and Rivkin, 2007: 422). Similarly,Wooldridge et al. (2008: 1193 and 1194) also dis-tinguish the choice and social learning perspectivesin strategy research. We situate our work in thelatter tradition, which views “strategy making asa social learning process” (Burgelman, 1988: 74)and directly addresses what “we have seen to becentral in actual processes of strategy formulationand change; namely, the sociocultural and sym-bolic processes which preserve current ways of

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strat. Mgmt. J., 35: 1202–1229 (2014)DOI: 10.1002/smj

1204 L. Mirabeau and S. Maguire

doing things, the cognitive bounds of those whotake and influence decisions, and the importanceof political processes” (Johnson, 1992: 34).

Strategy process research can be classified intosix perspectives: rational-mechanistic, cognitive,upper-echelon, middle management, organic, andmicro (Hutzschenreuter and Kleindienst, 2006).We situate our work in the organic and microperspectives. The former views strategy makingas “dialectic, involving rationalization and struc-turing through upper-echelon and strategic initia-tives of lower levels,” and includes work viewingstrategy as the outcome of multilevel processesof resource allocation (Bower, 1970; Burgelman,1983a) that is possibly emergent rather than delib-erate (Mintzberg, 1978), while the latter addresses“the myriad micro activities that make up strategyand strategizing in practice” (Hutzschenreuter andKleindienst, 2006: 703). Strategy process researchprovides a realistic, empirically grounded accountof strategic management, overcoming deficien-cies of the choice perspective, which tends to beahistorical and acontextual as well as to assumerational processing of information through neu-tral cognitive frames by managers with convergentgoals. It assumes organizations to be “systems ofdistributed attention” in which managers focus ona limited number of issues; managerial attention isunderstood to be situated in “procedural and com-munication channels,” which therefore must factorinto explanations of patterns in firm behavior (Oca-sio, 1997: 192).

Strategy process research is, however, “char-acterized by an ever-increasing plurality of con-cepts and frameworks,” yielding “an amazing setof partly competing, partly overlapping models”(Hutzschenreuter and Kleindienst, 2006: 673 and674). Our approach is therefore one of “theoreti-cal refinement” (Edwards, 2010) to integrate well-accepted perspectives.

Emergent strategy

Our starting point is Mintzberg’s (1978) cele-brated parsing of intended and realized strate-gies, which has become canonical in the field.Figure 1 highlights how a portion of a firm’sintended strategy does not necessarily come tofruition, thus resulting in unrealized strategy;and how realized strategy, defined as a pat-tern in an organization’s actions over time, isnot simply the residual planned activity, termed

1. Intended Strategy

4. Realized Strategy

2. Deliberate Strategy

3. Unrealized Strategy

5. Emergent Strategy

Figure 1. Mintzberg’s model of strategy formation(Source: Patterns in Strategy Formation , 1978)

deliberate strategy. Rather, realized strategy alsoincludes patterned action that does not derivefrom the intentions of top management. Thisportion of realized strategy is termed emergentstrategy.

Since Mintzberg’s (1978) identification of emer-gent strategy, researchers have validated the con-cept by demonstrating in various empirical settingshow realized strategy can, with reference to priorintentions of top managers, be parsed into delib-erate and emergent components (Boyett and Cur-rie, 2004; Lowe and Jones, 2004; Mintzberg andMcHugh, 1985). Research has also focused on therecognition of emergent strategy once it appearsand its legitimation by top management, whichleads to changes in the organization’s intendedstrategy such that “patterns from the past” become“plans for the future” (Mintzberg, 1987). Forexample, Mintzberg and McHugh (1985) describehow the “personal,” “unconnected strategy” ofa single filmmaker at the National Film Boardof Canada became adopted organization-wide asother filmmakers acknowledged and followed hisapproach. Similarly, Pascale’s (1984) account ofHonda’s foray into the U.S. motorcycle industrywith a strategy of promoting small bikes standsin contrast to the celebrated Boston ConsultingGroup account (1975), which emphasized top-down, rational foresight and planning, with theformer highlighting serendipitous events and local,bottom-up decision making. Other research hasidentified features of an organization’s structureand environment that foster emergent strategy.For instance, Slevin and Covin (1997) found apositive correlation between emergent strategiesand firms with “organic” structures operating in“benign” environments, while Osborn (1998) sug-gests emergent strategy is more likely in contextscharacterized by semiformal systems and interac-tive controls.



In sum, the literature is unambiguous in itsevidence of emergent strategy but contains sur-prisingly little about its formation. Further, whilefront line and middle managers figure promi-nently in accounts of emergent strategy, theactivities they carry out have not been fully expli-cated. To address this gap, we draw on strat-egy process research that views strategy as aniterated process of resource allocation and aspractice.

Strategy as an iterated process of resourceallocation

The B-B process model of strategy making (Nodaand Bower, 1996) derives from work on resourceallocation and internal corporate venturing (Bower,1970; Burgelman, 1983a,b,c, 1984). It offers pro-mise for the study of emergent strategy becauseit features actors at multiple levels of anal-ysis (cf. Bower, 1970), directly addresses thedeliberate-emergent tension, albeit with differ-ent labels (cf. Bower and Gilbert, 2005; Burgel-man, 1983b), and is connected conceptuallyto the more general variation-selection-retentionparadigm of evolutionary organization theory, thuspresenting opportunities for bringing strategy andorganization theory together (Burgelman, 1983b,1996).

Bower (1970) argues that the traditional capi-tal budgeting model, in which the decision ruleof maximizing discounted cash flow is used tochoose among competing projects, is empiricallyinaccurate. He proposes a model featuring bothtop-down decision premises from top managementand bottom-up idea generation from operationallevels. It features three processes: project defini-tion, which is the economic-technical process ofgenerating projects, using a largely rational logic;impetus, which consists of giving legitimacy to andpromoting projects, following a largely politicallogic; and structural context, which refers to rules,rewards, and decision procedures that conditionthe behavior of organizational actors. Determinedby top management, the structural context estab-lishes an organizational logic that channels activityand acts as a selection pressure on novel initia-tives, i.e., variations in an organization’s activities.Burgelman’s (1983a,b) internal corporate ventur-ing model extends this work by adding a fourthprocess shaping internal selection pressures: strate-gic context, which resembles structural context in

emanating from top management but is differentin that it is an ideational phenomenon referringto the organization’s explicitly articulated strate-gic intent. Top management plays a key role in itsdetermination through strategy articulation—theissuing of formal statements that describe partic-ular strategic directions in favorable terms (Nodaand Bower, 1996). The prevailing concept of strat-egy is the set of strategic categories used toexpress the firm’s priorities (Burgelman, 1983b).Whereas an organization’s structural context rep-resents administrative arrangements that can bealtered by top management to influence the per-ceived interests of organizational members, anorganization’s strategic context represents vocab-ulary that can be manipulated to reconstruct theorganization’s and its members’ interests. Burgel-man (1983b) echoes Mintzberg’s (1978) deliberateversus emergent distinction, albeit with differentlabels, by parsing induced from autonomous strate-gic behavior. The former refers to projects that arealigned—i.e., consonant—with the firm’s prevail-ing concept of strategy, while the latter refers toprojects that, when initiated, are not so aligned.Rather, they are dissonant in that they clearlycontradict prevailing premises and are difficult todescribe in terms of the strategic concepts avail-able to managers. It is not that the projects are notrational; rather, the rationality upon which they arebased is of a local sort.

Autonomous projects can become legitimated,however, through the manipulation of strategiccontext, which “reflects the efforts of middlemanagement to link autonomous strategic behav-ior at the product/market level into the corpora-tion’s concept of strategy” (Burgelman, 1983b:66). Middle managers make sense of autonomousprojects and “engage in political activities toconvince top management to rationalize, retroac-tively, these successful initiatives by amendingthe concept of strategy” (Burgelman, 1983b: 66).Similarly, Noda and Bower (1996: 188) assertthat “[t]he iterated model therefore contributesto the field of strategy by enriching our under-standing of intraorganizational strategy processand elucidating multilevel, simultaneous, interre-lated managerial activities which are combinedto generate emergent strategy.” Despite prelimi-nary conceptual connections such as these, fewstudies have explored systematically the connec-tions between the B-B and emergent strategyframeworks. We draw on the strategy-as-practice



(Jarzabkowski, 2003) approach to strategy processto do so.

Strategy as practice

The strategy-as-practice (SAP) approach to strat-egy and its formation focuses on the ways inwhich practitioners involved in strategy makingare enabled or constrained in their activities,i.e., their praxis, by accepted organizational andsocial practices (Whittington, 2006). Practices are“accepted ways of doing things, embodied andmaterially mediated, that are shared between actorsand routinized over time” (Vaara and Whitting-ton, 2012: 287). Despite commonalities with thework of Burgelman and Mintzberg, the practice-focused approach is distinct in that it “definesitself in opposition to methodological individual-ism and emphasizes instead the embedded natureof human agency” (Vaara and Whittington, 2012:288).

Largely, SAP research “has concentrated on for-mal planning and strategizing activities” (Vaaraand Whittington, 2012: 313), i.e., what Regner(2003) calls strategy making in the organization’scenter. These include “formal procedures involvedin direction setting, resource allocation, and mon-itoring and control” (Jarzabkowski, 2003: 32),practices associated with strategy workshops (e.g.,Hodgkinson et al., 2006; Johnson et al., 2010b)and meetings (Jarzabkowski and Seidl, 2008), andthe use of analytic tools such as SWOT (strengths,weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; Jarratt andStiles, 2010). Although emergent strategies havereceived less attention in SAP research as com-pared with formal strategizing (Vaara and Whit-tington, 2012: 313), the approach has nonethe-less yielded insights. For example, Grant (2003)found that the strategic planning routines of majoroil companies during the late 1990s exemplifiedplanned emergence in so much as their enact-ment combined bottom-up initiatives with top-down constraints in the form of mission state-ments, company-wide initiatives, and performanceexpectations. Regner (2003) found that strategymaking in the organization’s periphery tends to bemore inductive than deductive, and is character-ized by exploration and the establishment of newknowledge structures rather than the exploitationof current ones.

Other SAP research sheds light on specific com-ponents of the B-B model. With iterated resource

allocation at the model’s core, it is clear that prac-tices of allocating resources shape resource mobi-lization and strategy making (cf. Jarzabkowski,2003). Whittle and Mueller (2010) found, forinstance, that accounting practices constrainedwhich activities could be constructed as beingadded value and were, therefore, often the focusof “games” and politicized contests over resourceallocation. Similarly, Ezzamel and Willmott (2008)illustrate how accounting practices can becomeimbued with strategic significance through strategydiscourse that privileges the allocation of resourcesto certain prescribed strategy content over otherpossibilities.

This emphasis of SAP research on discursivepractices is especially relevant to understandingthe strategic context prevailing inside an organi-zation. Strategy can be seen as discourse, i.e.,as a socially constructed object of knowledgethat emerges from discursive practices (Ezza-mel and Willmott, 2008) through which initia-tives are constructed as strategic (Vaara, Kley-mann, and Seristo, 2004). It is through specificdiscursive practices that opportunities for harness-ing rhetoric to persuade colleagues of the mer-its (or demerits) of particular projects are cre-ated and acted upon (Samra-Fredericks, 2003). Inother words, an organization’s strategic contextis reproduced or sometimes changed by actorscarrying out “discursive work,” which refers tothe production, distribution, and consumption oftexts (Maguire and Hardy, 2013), and this work isstructured by organizational practices (Vaara et al.,2004).

SAP research has highlighted the important roleof texts in strategy formation. Giraudeau (2008)noted drafts of planning documents encouragestrategic experimentation, while Eppler and Platts(2009) found managers draw heavily upon visualrepresentations to understand their organization’sstrategy. PowerPoint presentations are particularlysalient texts as they are a key part of the“epistemic machinery” through which strategy,as a form of knowledge, is produced: “strategymaking is not only about analysis of industrystructure, competitive positioning, or resources andcapabilities, as assumed in content-based strategyresearch, but also about how the production anduse of PowerPoint documents shape these ideas”(Kaplan, 2011: 321).

Such an emphasis on discursive practices com-plements the B-B model, which emphasizes



material resource flows. Thus, both the B-B modeland the SAP approach can shed light on emergentstrategy formation, which remains undertheorizeddespite the importance of the concept. Our study istherefore guided by two questions: (1) How doesemergent strategy form from autonomous strategicbehavior in organizations? and (2) Besides prac-tices of allocating material resources, which strat-egy practices are involved in this transition andwhat role do they play?

METHODS

Research design and site

We conducted an exploratory longitudinal casestudy of strategy formation in the technical supportorganization (SO) of a global telecommunica-tions equipment provider (The Telecommunica-tions Company or TTC), from 1997 to 2006. Wechose TTC-SO for several reasons. First, telecom-munications organizations are fertile sites for stud-ies of strategy formation (e.g., Boyett and Currie,2004; Burgelman, 1994, 1996; Burgelman andGrove, 1996; Noda and Bower, 1996). Second,TTC-SO is large—it is organized around multi-ple levels of hierarchy and physical sites, whichprovided scope for us to anticipate that bottom-uplocal activities might diverge from the deliberatetop-down strategic plans. Finally, we secured priv-ileged access.

TTC sells a broad portfolio of network compo-nents and services to corporate clients as well asto telephone, internet, and cable companies aroundthe globe. During our study, it had more thanUS$1 billion per year in revenues from six busi-ness units organized around product technologies,and competed with firms like Alcatel, Cisco, andNortel using a business strategy of differentiationbased on quality. The TTC-SO organizationprovided technical support to customers of all sixunits with a workforce that varied from 1,000 to4,000 employees.

Data collection at organizational level

One author worked on site at TTC-SO from 2005to 2007, and began by collecting a range of datawith the assistance of a TTC-SO director whoacted as the project’s sponsor and key infor-mant. Data came from TTC and TTC-SO annual

reports, other regularly produced internal reports,and archived documents such as PowerPoint slidesproduced for investors and for TTC-SO’s “townhall” meetings. We also collected all corporatee-mails that announced changes to strategic pri-orities, organizational structure, or the executiveteam, and were given access by our informant tosome 2,000 archived e-mails.

Data analysis at organizational level

In the first stage of analysis, we drew on orga-nizational level data to construct a timeline ofevents relevant to TTC-SO’s strategy. In the sec-ond stage, we determined an appropriate period foranalysis of TTC-SO’s strategy, then organized ourdata at this coarseness of grain. Six-month periodswere analytically insightful and methodologicallyconvenient; this coarseness of grain aligned withTTC-SO’s internal rate of formally communicat-ing its strategic objectives and accomplishments,while nothing in our timeline indicated that a finergrained analysis would yield different insights.Next, we tracked the strategy of TTC-SO for eachperiod. Because strategy is a hierarchical concept(Johnson et al., 2010a) capturing a firm’s corporatestrategy (i.e., choices about products, markets, andfirm boundaries, cf. Burgelman, 1983b) and busi-ness strategy (i.e., business unit level choices aboutcost leadership vs. differentiation vs. niche, cf.Porter, 1980) as well as operational strategies (i.e.,finely grained choices about how to combine andperform specific activities, cf. Porter, 1996), wecoded our data for strategic categories (Burgelman,1983b) relating to these levels. Table 1 summarizesthe strategic categories identified, while Table 2illustrates those prevailing at specific times.

In the third stage, we reviewed our data toidentify instances of strategic behavior (Burgel-man, 1983b), i.e., projects of sufficient importanceto be given labels and reported on, and parsedthe 24 projects we found into 17 induced and 7autonomous projects according to whether theywere, respectively, consonant or dissonant withthe concept of strategy prevailing when initiated.Because we wished to build theory about projectsthat were truly dissonant rather than consonant,we resolved ambiguities conservatively: if theevidence was not clear, we classified the projectas consonant, and we reviewed our categorizationswith our TTC-SO director informant who agreedwith our final list of dissonant projects and also



Table 1. Strategic categories making up the prevailing concept of strategy at TTC-SO

Strategic category Description

Strategic categories related to corporate strategy product decisionsSelling Services Supporting services, including hosting of customer networks and

performing network management for customersBroad Portfolio Supporting many technologies to cover all the network elements of

customers such as access, core networks, enterprise, switching, opticaland wireless equipment

Mergers and Acquisitions Supporting products added to portfolio as a result of mergers andacquisitions activities

Divesting Products Supporting a reduced breadth of products to focus on core parts of thebusiness

Security & Crisis Management Providing security and crisis management servicesFocused Investments Investing selectively in areas with potential for novel products and high

growthStrategic categories related to corporate strategy market decisionsGlobal Markets Supporting customers in all regions of the globeTraditional and New Operators Supporting ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) as well as the

new CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) entering the marketresulting from deregulation with the Telecommunication Act of 1996

Strategic categories related to corporate strategy boundaries of the firm decisionsInternal and External Technology Supporting, in-house, technology developed both by TTC in-house as

well as by other vendors working in partnerships with TTCOriginal Equipment Manufacturer Supporting, in-house, products developed by other companies and sold

under TTC’s brand, rather than outsourcing this activityOff-Shoring Outsourcing support for TTC products from TTC-SO to other

region-based TTC unitsStrategic categories related to business strategy decisionsProduct Quality Differentiating products and services through very high reliability, by

implementing the carrier grade standard of 99.999% uptime for allcomponents

Product Supportability Differentiating products and services through speed and ease ofproviding support

Design for Supportability Differentiating products and services through speed and ease ofproviding support, by designing new products that have supportabilityfeatures built into them

Strategic categories related to functional strategy decisionsCustomer Satisfaction Tracking and measuring customer satisfaction via surveys and ensuring

high quality interaction and processes with customersEmployee Satisfaction Tracking and measuring employee satisfaction via surveys and ensuring

high quality work environment and processes with employeesCost Containment Continuing to deliver the same level of support for existing and new

customers, while reducing new spendingCost Recovery Developing programs and tools that enable the support group to track its

time accurately and to achieve 100% cost recoveryWorkforce Reductions Supporting existing and new products with reduced number of peopleService Profitability Deploying support resources on projects and activities that are profitableService P&L Measuring and reporting cost of supporting products against the service

revenues for supportService Standardization Offering common levels of support across the product linesProcess & Tools Standardization Supporting all product lines using common processes and toolsTrue Two-Tier Support Model Supporting products using a two-tier model (first tier handles basic

support functions, second tier handles advanced troubleshooting)Process Measurement Managing operational activities by emphasizing the need to develop

metricsSix Sigma Applying Six Sigma methodology in support processes48-Hour Case Closure Resolving all cases within 48 hours of initial customer call



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2005

2005

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2006

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Cas

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losu

reY

YY

Y



Table 3. Autonomous strategic projects

Project description Strategic categories with which project is initially dissonant

The Supportability Project was launched in the second halfof 1999 by a director who assigned three engineers todevelop tools and procedures to proactively support aparticular product experiencing frequent outages incustomers’ networks—i.e., to deal with issues beforethey resulted in customer downtime.

Cost Recovery : Engineers working on this project could recoveronly part of their time against case management, whichcontradicted the prevailing mandate to recover all supportcosts.

Service Standardization: This project involved the collection ofnetwork data that was nonstandard, i.e., unique to thisparticularly problematic product.

The Automated Install Base Tracking Tool Project waslaunched in 2004 by a director from the “core data” lineof business. The problem he was facing was hisengineers’ inability to have a complete view ofcustomers’ networks. The idea that came from thedirector was to apply an internal tracking tool used inTTC-SO’s labs—and implementing it to track equipmentin customers’ networks.

Service Profitability : This project initially created significantdevelopment costs, but had no revenue stream associatedwith it. This contradicted the prevailing mandate to ensurethat services were profitable. (Indeed, prior to the director’sresurrecting of this project, the laboratory manager hadpreviously ordered a halt to it for this specific reason.)

The Real Time Data Metrics Project was launched in thesecond half of 2004 by a manager responsible forproducing metrics and reports on TTC-SO’s operations,for use by managers (for oversight and control) andengineers (for identifying emerging issues, prioritysetting, etc.). The inability of engineers to have areal-time view of all TTC-SO’s customers’ cases wasconsidered a problem, and the solution involvedmigrating metrics and reports data to a single database.

Service Profitability : This project initially created significantdevelopment costs, but had no revenue stream associatedwith it. This contradicted the prevailing mandate to ensurethat services were profitable. (Indeed, the relevantinformation system manager refused to fund this project forthis specific reason, i.e., it was costly and generated norevenues.)

The Multilingual Call Center Project was launched in 2000as a result of a group of North American Call Centermanagers identifying a problem common to all of them:the call centers they managed regularly dealt withimportant customers who preferred to be served in Frenchor Spanish, but the mandate for service standardizationhad always been interpreted in North America asinvolving service in English. The solution they proposedwas to serve customers in the language of their choice.

Cost Recovery : This project was inconsistent with the mandatefor cost recovery because it involved the recruitment ofmultilingual staff and the duplicating of call flow activities inmultiple languages.

Service Standardization: This project was dissonant with theprevailing interpretation of what constituted standardizedservice in North America, which was that all customers wereserved in English.

The Follow the Sun Project was launched in the first half of2000 by a product support director who was dealing witha problem of very low morale among her engineers. Herteam was being called upon to support an acquiredtechnology that experienced frequent failures, whichmeant her engineers were constantly being paged. Hersolution was to relocate some second tier supportfunctions to regional teams located in the same timezones as non-North American customers, and to exchangesupport cases at the end of each region’s business day.

Service Standardization and True Two-Tier Support Model :This project was viewed as dissonant with the mandate toserve customers in a standardized two-tier way because itinvolved dissociating second tier support functions from theNorth American Center of Excellence, which had beenspecifically co-located with the product designers in order tohandle all second tier cases centrally and consistently withinput from product design.

The Customer Advocacy Project was launched in the firsthalf of 2000 by a director who faced a problem ofcustomer frustration stemming from the complexities ofnavigating TTC-SO’s two tiers of support for technicalissues, and engaging multiple TTC units for nontechnicalissues. The director’s solution was to create a group ofengineers who would act inside TTC-SO asrepresentatives of important customers, helping to solveboth technical and nontechnical issues.

Cost Recovery : This project was inconsistent with the mandateto recover engineers’ costs because the time the advocatesspent addressing nontechnical issues could not be billedagainst customer cases.

Service Standardization: This project was viewed asinconsistent with the mandate to standardize service offeringsbecause it was available to large customers but only for asmall set of products.

The Optical Off-Shoring Project was launched in the secondhalf of 2004 by a director who faced the problem ofimplementing workforce reductions in order to reducecosts with no change in the customer base his engineerswere to serve. The director’s solution was to relocatesecond tier level support, for optical equipment only, toTTC’s India-based unit.

Process & Tools Standardization: This project was viewed asunique to optical and inconsistent with the mandate tostandardize support processes and tools.

True Two-Tier Support Model : This project was dissonant withthe service model of providing two-tier support, with firsttier issues handled in the regions and second tier issueshandled centrally.



Deliberate Strategy

D1: eServiceD2: Year 2000D3: EntitlementD4: Time TrackingD5: RQMS / TL9000D6: Centre of ExcellenceD7: Express Routing Code / Escalation D8: Lab ConsolidationD9: Six SigmaD10: Off-ShoringD11: Merit PoolD12: 1-800 ConsolidationD13: Electronic Software DeliveryD14: Outage ReductionD15: CRM Platform

Unrealized Strategy

U1: Baldrige Management Award Gold AccreditationU2: Market Organization

Emergent Strategy

ES1: SupportabilityES2: Automated Install Base Tracking ToolES3: Real Time Data MetricsES4: Multilingual Call CentreES5: Follow the Sun

Ephemeral AutonomousStrategic Behavior

EASB1: Customer AdvocacyEASB2: Optical Off-Shoring

InducedStrategicBehavior

AutonomousStrategic

Behavior

With Patternin Time

Without Patternin Time

Figure 2. Projects and their outcomes at TTC-SO

confirmed that the projects were strategic ones.(In a later step, we reconfirmed these categoriza-tions by drawing on detailed project-level data.)Table 3 summarizes the autonomous strategicprojects, each initiated through local problemsolving to address an immediate operational issue,as well as our rationale for considering themas autonomous and not induced (cf. Burgelman,1983b).

In the fourth stage, we determined whether ourprojects resulted in “patterned action over time”(cf. Mintzberg, 1978; Mintzberg and McHugh,1985) by assessing whether there was evidenceof ongoing activity in at least four consecu-tive time periods. In this way, we populated a2 × 2 (Figure 2), and had our sponsor-informantdirector confirm the classifications. We use con-cepts from Mintzberg’s canonical model to labelthree quadrants and to introduce the concept ofephemeral autonomous strategic behavior for thefourth one—a concept that relates to emergentstrategy as unrealized strategy relates to deliber-ate strategy, but refers to activity that originates as

autonomous rather than induced strategic behavior,as discussed below.

Data collection at project level

The next stage involved conducting and tran-scribing thirty semistructured interviews withindividuals at various levels including directors,managers, and project managers, for each of theseven autonomous projects. Initial intervieweeswere identified by our sponsor-informant, whilesubsequent interviewees were identified throughsnowballing (Patton, 2002). During interviews,project-specific documents were identified andassembled. We interviewed at least one personfor each of three levels per project—i.e., vice-president (top manager), directors (middle man-agers), managers and/or project managers (frontline managers)—and the number of intervieweesranged from five to ten per project. (Intervieweesat higher levels spoke about multiple projects, thusthirty interviewees allowed us to achieve our tar-geted coverage.)



Grounded Data Constructs (First Order Codes) Theoretical Constructs(Second Order Codes)

Theoretical Dimensions(Aggregates)• Statements that unit contributed engineers’ time, budget or

equipment used by the project

• Statements that unit other than initiating unit contributed engineers’ time, budget or equipment used by the project

• Statements external actor contributed engineers’ time, budget or equipment used by the project • Emails or project documents identifying client commitment to purchase service or product if project realized

Support from organizational unit

Support from other organizational unit

Support from external actors

Stretching existingstrategic category

Introducing newstrategic category

• Project described as ‘strategic’, ‘important’, key to success’ in the context of existing organizational objective • Statements that project would ‘help achieve’, ‘contribute to reaching’, ‘further our objective’ an existing organizational objective

• Project described as ‘strategic’, ‘important’, key to success’• Statements that project would ‘help achieve’, ‘contribute to reaching’, ‘further our objective’ of general success

New teams

New proceduresand routines

New organizationalobjectives

• Organizational charts feature newly created team for the project• Statements that ‘informal’ team was created to work on project

• Project documents describing new procedure or routine• Statements about new ‘scripts’, ‘processes’, ‘ways of doing things’, ‘work tasks’

• Project documents featuring new objectives as a result of project realization• Statements about new ‘goals’, ‘objectives, ‘metrics’

Text flows linking front line and middle

managers

Text flows linking middle and top

managers

• Power point slide decks about projects prepared by front line managers and recycled for multiple meetings• Presentations of project slide decks at ‘operational review meetings’

• Power point slide decks for ‘town hall meetings’ containing recycled slides from project slide decks• Statements from middle managers that ‘town hall meetings’ are key to making project ‘visible’

Mobilizing Wider Support for

Impetus

Manipulating Strategic Contextfor Consonance

Altering Structural Context for

Embeddedness

Practices of Strategy

Articulation

Figure 3. Coding structure

Data analysis at project level

Drawing on interviews and documents foreach autonomous project, as well as on ourorganizational level data, we prepared sevendetailed project narratives (Patton, 2002), sum-maries of which appear as project descriptionsin Table 3. Next, we coded these narratives andprimary data for each project to note similaritiesand differences in order to develop a model ofthe process through which autonomous strategicbehavior becomes (or does not become) realizedas emergent strategy, and to identify practicesinvolved in this process. Our analysis continuediteratively, moving between data, emerging pat-terns, and theory, until we postulated relationshipsthat were not only clear but also anchored theoret-ically and empirically in our data (cf. Eisenhardt,1989). Our coding structure is shown in Figure 3.

In this way, we identified component activ-ities of the process through which autonomousstrategic behavior became realized as emergent

strategy, as described in our first set of findings:mobilizing support for impetus, manipulatingstrategic context for consonance, and alteringstructural context for embeddedness. Comparisonsof instances of ephemeral autonomous strategicbehavior with emergent strategy highlighted thatthe former involved attempts at all three activitiesbut failure at one or more, as discussed in oursecond set of findings.

We next turned to identifying practices (otherthan those of allocating material resources) thatplayed a role in the transition from autonomousstrategic behavior to emergent strategy. By arrang-ing data from our various sources chronologically,we noted the overall prominence of PowerPointslides and differences in the PowerPoint slides forthe five projects that became emergent strategy ascompared to the two that became ephemeral. Forthe former, we found more PowerPoint slides intotal as well as slides produced by top manage-ment, which was not the case for the latter. We



Emergent Strategy

Mobilizing Wider Support for Impetus

- Securing resources from organizational unit- Enrolling other organizational units and leveraging their resources

Practices of Strategy

Articulation- Channeling pressures from external actors to unlock resources

Manipulating Strategic Context for Consonance

• Discursivepractices linking

front line managersto peers and middle

managers - Introducing new strategic categories- Stretching existing strategic categories

RealizedStrategy*

AutonomousStrategicBehavior

Altering Structural Context for Embeddedness

- Creating new teams- Establishing new procedures and routines

• Discursivepractices linking

middle managers topeers and top

managers- Setting new organizational objectives

*Realized Strategy has two components, emergent strategy and deliberate strategy, as shown in figure 1. Only the emergent strategycomponent of realized strategy is represented in our process model, for clarity.

Figure 4. Process model for emergent strategy

thus returned to our data and coded it for mentionor use of PowerPoint. We identified two sets ofdiscursive practices that, together, linked represen-tations of projects produced by front line managersto those of top management: practices associatedwith operational review meetings through whichfront line managers communicated to each otherand to middle managers, and those associated withregularly staged town hall meetings, through whichmiddle managers contributed to and influenced thecontent of top management’s slide decks. We referto these practices as practices of strategy articula-tion, by which we mean repetitively activated, rou-tinized ways of producing, distributing, and con-suming texts that contain representations of whatthe firm has been, is, or will be doing—a definitionthat allows for strategy as both plan and pattern.Practices of strategy articulation are incorporatedinto our process model of emergent strategy for-mation, so are discussed in our first set of findings.

FINDINGS

We first focus on the five projects that becamerealized as emergent strategy to illustrate ourprocess model of emergent strategy formation,then the two projects that disappeared without

impact to introduce the concept of ephemeralautonomous strategic behavior.

From autonomous strategic behavior toemergent strategy

We present here our process model (Figure 4), withillustrations from autonomous projects that becameemergent strategy (summarized in Figure 5a–e).

Mobilizing wider support for impetus

One key activity in emergent strategy formationfrom autonomous strategic behavior is the secur-ing of support for autonomous projects in theform of various types of resources, including finan-cial (e.g., funding), technical (e.g., equipment),and human (e.g., staff). Bower (1970) describesimpetus as the force that successfully moves aproject toward funding, i.e., increases the willing-ness of top managers to sponsor a project. Ourfindings illustrate that impetus for expanding anautonomous project derives from resources thatcan be obtained from three sources—the initiat-ing organizational unit, other organizational units,and external actors.

We found (in four of the five projects) thatproject champions successfully sought support



(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 5. (a) Supportability Project; (b) Automated Install Base Tracking Tool Project; (c) Real Time Data MetricsProject; (d) Multilingual Call Center Project; (e) Follow the Sun Project



(d)

(e)

Figure 5. (Continued).

from other individuals within the organizationalunit itself. For instance, in the case of Follow theSun Project, the director, a middle manager, soughttime and expertise from his group’s engineers totrain the Australian regional team to be able tohandle second tier support calls.

“The support guys here were ready to helpthe new Australian engineers on the callsbecause they understood it would reducetheir pager hours . . . They were functionalpretty quickly and the customers in theirregion were very happy to deal with themdirectly.”

(Support manager).

Another example is the Real Time Data MetricsProject in which new reports were developedin response to the merger of two databases.

Given the push for cost recovery, the front lineproject manager was looking for ways to accountfor the significant amount of engineers’ timerequired for report development. Support camefrom operational managers who liked the idea ofhaving real time visibility of customer issues in theform of special accounting codes against which theengineers were permitted to allocate their time.

“They were all saying, give us the real timedata we need it to meet our targets. Thismeant we had to develop some reports and Ihad to account for my time somehow. Theyprovided me with time tracking codes so Icould charge my time against them.”

(Support manager).

Another source of support (identified in fourof the five projects) was individuals within other



interacting organizational units. For example, a topmanager from TTC-Design Organization (a sep-arate unit from TTC-SO) provided direct fund-ing to secure engineers’ time during the develop-ment cycle of new products. As a result, engineersbecame dedicated to the Supportability Project,insulating the project from shifting TTC-SO prior-ities and emergencies over its lifetime—the kindsof events that typically killed ad hoc initiatives atTTC-SO.

“The product manager from Research andDevelopment funded me directly a set ofdevelopment heads that would do a good partof the supportability work. And the reasonhe did that was that, in his terms: I want ano-excuses product. I don’t want to come onthe market and say that we didn’t invest insupportability.”

(Support director).

Finally, another source of support (identifiedin one of the five projects) was individualsexternal to the organization TTC-SO. With theSupportability Project, a customer who had seena supportability feature demonstrated on a productinsisted that the design team include this featurein the product. The project champion, a middlemanager, documented the customer’s endorsementin a PowerPoint presentation and used it to furtherthe initiative.

“This feature actually made the sale. It wasthe one thing the customer was really happyabout. It gave our box functionality that ourcompetitors did not have. Once they saw itin our demo, they wanted it.”

(Support director).

Manipulating strategic context for consonance

Also key to emergent strategy formation fromautonomous strategic behavior is the activity oflegitimating the autonomous project after it hasbeen launched, by discursively constructing it inways that render it consonant with the prevail-ing concept of strategy. According to Burgelman(1983b), manipulation of strategic context occursas middle managers introduce new strategic cat-egories. Surprisingly, our study found the intro-duction of new strategic categories in just one of

the five projects. More common (four of the fiveprojects), however, was legitimation of initiallydissonant projects by stretching existing strategiccategories, i.e., reinterpreting them in ways thatmade the projects consonant with them.

The Supportability Project, launched in the sec-ond half of 1999, was legitimated by introducingnew strategic categories: Product Supportability inthe first half of 2001 and Design for Supportabil-ity in the second half of 2003. The SupportabilityProject’s middle manager champion, a director,aimed to build supportability features into networkcomponents to allow for product monitoring andquick repair in case of failure. After starting theinitiative in isolation with a single product, thedirector began to look at ways to replicate the ini-tial success with other products. Eventually, by the18-month mark of the project, engineers on theSupportability Project were developing support-facilitating features for a series of products fromseveral of TTC’s lines of business. The concept ofproduct supportability had become accepted andwidespread by this point, and in 2001, the conceptof product supportability first appeared on slides ofthe vice president, where it was presented in a townhall meeting as a key to the activity of TTC-SO inhis summary of that period’s strategic update.

In subsequent periods, the team’s size continuedto grow, and more engineers were dedicatedto working on supportability issues. However, achallenge presented itself: the director found thatit was difficult to include supportability featuresearly in product development because of thetendency to give priority to revenue-generatingfeatures (as opposed to cost-avoidance featuressuch as supportability) and because in early stagesfeatures were “owned” by the design team sotended to reflect the design team’s rather than thesupport team’s priorities.

“You know if a product design guy has tochose between a feature that can generaterevenue for the client or a feature that willhelp us support the product they often pickthe former. Sometimes they have all thefeatures at the beginning but when theyrun out of money they tend to cut the nonrevenue stuff, like supportability.”

(Support manager).

In other words, for further success the mid-dle manager needed to expand the focus of



the Supportability Project to include the prod-uct design process. At meetings between TTC-SO’s engineers and their counterparts in TTC-Design, the director and his team presented aslide deck documenting key accomplishments andmetrics touting the benefits of including support-ability early in the product lifecycle, seeking toconvince the Design Organization to change theway they worked. This approach was success-ful and, in 2003, a new strategic category wasintroduced—Design for Supportability becamewidely accepted and began to appear on the vicepresident’s town hall slides. Notably, this changewas accompanied by a new formal requirementfor design teams to develop standard supportabil-ity features in order for a product to be considered“carrier grade” product, the stated level of qualityfor TTC.

“Design teams are provided with supporta-bility attributes which they must incorporate.It’s not always easy, and we still have tolook over their shoulder sometimes, but weare really a long way from where we started”

(Support director).

The other autonomous projects that becameemergent strategy became legitimated not byintroducing new categories but by stretchingexisting strategic categories in specific ways torender the projects consonant with them. Forinstance, the project champion of the Auto-mated Installed Base Tracking Project, a mid-dle manager, successfully linked his project withService Profitability and used this concept toconvince another middle manager, the directorin charge of the Warranty group, to integratethe two previously separate processes of trackingand billing for support services. This maneuverallowed the champion to prepare a compellingslide deck projecting an increase in warranty rev-enues by US$30 million for a single line of busi-ness.

In the case of the Real Time Data MetricsProject, the project champion, a front line manager,prepared a PowerPoint presentation outlining hisvision for a unified system of databases andused it to successfully argue that the metricsproduced were essential to closing cases within48 hours (i.e., making the project consonant with“48-Hour Case Closure”). Some serendipity was

clearly involved here because the 48-Hour CaseClosure category did not exist when the RealTime Data Metrics Project was first launched—instead, it was introduced by a top managerbrought in from the outside after the project waslaunched.

“I had initially produced analysis to showhow these metrics could make us moreefficient, but they did not believe my data. . . Everyone was saying, we really needthis: give us real time data because if wecan’t have visibility of our cases, we can’tmeet the 48-hour target. So the new 48-hourtarget really helped me.”

(Support manager).

The 48-Hour Case Closure category, as intro-duced by the top manager, did not have any obvi-ous direct connection to a capability for collectingreal time data about customer service cases, butthe front line manager successfully stretched itsmeaning to link the two.

“It sort of happened at the same time orshortly after since it was unfolding lastyear. That is why everybody was saying:yes, real time data, give it to us. And soI started telling everyone that was makingthese requests: unless you want to manuallycheck each case that you are working on weneed access to real time reports.”

(Support manager).

In the case of the Multilingual Call CenterProject, the top manager’s initial reaction to ensur-ing service in French for customers requesting itwas negative, he argued that a single customerrequesting a new process for a French call flowshould not be acted upon, as it constituted anexception. However, the project champion, a frontline manager, sought support from his Caribbeanand Latin American counterpart (the North Ameri-can Call Center manager) who wanted to provide aSpanish call flow in his region. Together, they suc-cessfully argued that the initiative should becomea standard approach for all customers instead ofserving as an exception process, stretching the“True Two-Tier Support Model” strategic cate-gory to include multilingual service to both NorthAmerican and Latin American customers.



“After pushing for each other’s language forseveral weeks, the committee accepted andwe implemented the trilingual call flow. Ithink it worked because instead of beingan exception this could become a standardway of doing business: French for Frenchcustomers, Spanish for Latin America, andEnglish for everyone.”

(Call Center manager).

In the case of the Follow the Sun Project, thedirector, a middle manager, collected initial datafrom early implementation of the project, and theresults were presented in a town hall meetingslide deck as best practice for products with veryhigh outages. Recycling data and slides forwardedby a front line manager reporting to him, thedirector argued successfully to use Follow theSun processes for all newly acquired but unstabletechnologies, thus stretching the category of TrueTwo-Tier Support Model. By casting the initiativeas a necessary exception process for productsnot yet meeting carrier grade stability standards,the director discursively dissolved the project’sinitial dissonance with the Service Standardizationcategory.

“Follow the Sun in its full implementationshould not require more heads than thecurrent headcount distribution . . . in fact, theexpected employee retention increase shouldlower labor costs due to reduced hiring andtraining. This is a best practice for anothertype of unstable product that we may haveto support in the future.”

(Support director).

Altering structural context for embeddedness

Another important activity in emergent strategyformation from autonomous strategic behavioris altering the structural context (i.e., formaladministrative mechanisms) of the organizationin order to embed the project within it. Ourstudy builds on Bower (1970) by identifyingthree constituent activities to altering structuralcontext: (1) creating new teams, (2) establishingnew procedures and routines, and (3) setting neworganizational objectives.

Each of the middle managers who championedan autonomous strategic project that became

emergent strategy embedded their projects byformally creating new teams. In the case ofthe Supportability Project, the director createda new team staffed with engineers dedicated tosolving supportability issues for a product that wasexperiencing frequent outages. Similarly, in thecase of the Follow the Sun Project, the directorestablished three new regional teams to handletwo-tier support calls. In other cases, projectteams became more firmly entrenched in TTC-SO by being formalized under different leadershipthan where they originated, and serendipity wassometimes involved. For instance, in the case ofthe Automated Installed Base Tracking Project,a new vice president took over the mandate oftracking customer equipment.

“The project stalled a little and we werenot going anywhere because we had a lackof leadership and ownership for the project.Then, a new vice president came in and tookover the ownership. Since then he has beenable to provide continuity for it.”

(Support manager).

Similarly, in the case of the Real Time DataMetrics Project, the front line manager cham-pioning the project was promoted to a newteam leader position reporting to a new vicepresident—a move that granted the initiative muchmore visibility inside the organization.

Our study also found that the championsof autonomous strategic projects that becameemergent strategy embedded their projects inthe organization by formally establishing newprocedures and routines. For instance, one of thefirst things that the Supportability Project teammembers did was to create a master documentthat documented all supportability features deemednecessary for a product to be considered carriergrade. The middle manager then distributed thismaster document and shared these requirementswith the entire organization.

“We put together a specification documentbased on our collective experience using allthe subject matter experts in the organizationto develop what we called product supporta-bility requirements.”

(Support director).



Once the document was finalized and sharedwith all product groups, it became the referencepoint for all new products designed in-house oradded to TTS-SO’s portfolio.

Similarly, the tool that became the basis for theAutomated Installed Base Tracking Tool Projecthad been developed by a laboratory engineer fora single product initially. The engineer’s direc-tor, a middle manager, recognized the poten-tial value of the tool when it was presented tohim in a PowerPoint slide deck, commissionedhis engineers to develop new scripts that wouldallow the tool to track other kinds of products,and ultimately had his team create thirty newscripts. In the case of the Real Time Data Met-rics Project, the front line manager along withhis metrics engineers developed and regularly pro-duced a series of standardized reports, givingaccess to the real time data—complete with offi-cial instructions—to a large number of engineerswho did not have access under the older databasescheme.

“Before, we used to have to build the reportsfor them. It was time consuming, and wewould only do it for people high up in thehierarchy. Now, most TTC-SO engineers canpull their own data so they can monitor casemanagement closure in real time.”

(Support manager).

Finally, in the case of the Multilingual CallCenter Project, the project champion, a front linemanager, developed detailed call flow proceduresand distributed them to phone operators alongwith instructions on how to route technical supportcalls to the appropriate product support groups.The procedures were translated into the relevantlanguages, and the manager conducted formaltraining sessions with the operators. In the caseof the Follow the Sun Project, the directorchampioning the project created new hand-offprocedures that described how and when a casewould be transferred between regional teams.

Our study also found that the champions ofautonomous strategic projects that endured tobecome the emergent strategy portion of realizedstrategy embedded their projects in the structureof the organization by formally setting neworganizational objectives. For instance, the directorchampioning the Supportability Project created

and distributed an official list of product attributesfor which supportability was a formally sanctioneddesign objective.

“We have gates where we review require-ments, and part of those gates talk aboutoperability under which you would find sup-portability.”

(Support manager).

In the case of the Automated Installed BaseTracking Project, the warranty director, a middlemanager, established new aggressive revenue tar-gets that were tied directly to the implementationof the new tracking tool. In other cases, opera-tional targets were set. In the case of the RealTime Data Metrics Project, each product supportgroup director established new targets for case clo-sure times for their backlog cases: in the case ofthe Multilingual Call Center Project, the directorchampioning it set new objectives for lost calls,wait times, and responsiveness; and the directorthat formulated the Follow the Sun Project set newtargets for cases diverted to regional centers duringoff-hours.

Practices of strategy articulation

Practices of strategy articulation—i.e., repetitivelyactivated, routinized ways of producing, distribut-ing, and consuming texts containing representa-tions of what the firm has been, is, and will bedoing—played an important role in the realizationof emergent strategy. We first describe practicesassociated with regular operational review meet-ings through which front line managers commu-nicated about TTC-SO’s activities to each otherand their middle managers using PowerPoint slidedecks. We then describe practices associated withregularly staged town hall meetings through whichmiddle managers contributed to the productionof top managers’ slide decks that representedselect TTC-SO activities as strategic by linkingthem to the concept of strategy prevailing at thetime—slide decks that were then presented by thetop managers to the entire organization. By enact-ing these practices, the manipulation of strategiccontext at TTC-SO was a joint achievement offront line, middle, and top management.

Autonomous strategic behavior begins itsbottom-up journey to becoming realized as emer-gent strategy through the enactment of discursive



practices linking front line managers to peers andmiddle managers. We found that representationsof autonomous projects made their way intooperational review meetings via PowerPoint slidesprepared initially by front line managers (or theirstaff). For instance, the definition of supportabilityunderpinning the project of the same name firstappeared in a slide produced by a front lineengineer in early 2000.

“Supportability is the relative degree towhich a product and its supporting toolsor processes allow field problems to bequickly characterized and resolved whileminimizing the overall impact of engagingtechnical support on the customer’s networkand operations.”

(Supportability Project slide).

The engineer’s front line manager, as well asthe middle manager to whom he reported, oftenrecycled this definition, which reappeared in slidedecks spanning the years 2000–2003.

In the case of the Follow the Sun Project, theproject champion documented the new processof routing second tier support calls to regionsin PowerPoint decks as early as the second halfof 2000; and in so doing he introduced newvocabulary to TTC-SO, describing a “COT [cur-rently open team] that would rotate throughoutthe RITZ [regional in-time zone]” (Follow theSun deck). While some of these acronyms werelater dropped, two main diagrams from theseearly slide decks—slides showing interactionsbetween the regional teams and other TTC-SOunits—remained largely stable for four consecu-tive periods spanning the second half of 2000 toearly 2002. The first diagram shows the variousteams across the world with the product that theysupport, a representation that began to reify theproject as well as changes to TTC-SO’s structuralcontext, which had been altered to accommodateit. The second diagram features a representationof the overall (i.e., first and second tier) supportmodel and positions the Follow the Sun Projectas one of four components of Customer ServiceProcess Excellence and True Two-Tier SupportModel, thus stretching this latter strategic categoryto include this autonomous project.

Slides containing representations of autonomousprojects and used in operational review meetings

sometimes had their origins in slide decks preparedfor peers and external audiences from whomthe project champion was seeking support. Forinstance, with the Supportability Project, theproject champion prepared a slide deck thatintroduced the supportability concept specificallyfor an important customer dissatisfied with TTC-SO’s support of a certain product.

“We worked with the customer . . . for asupportability feature. He wanted us to havea way to monitor the nodes in an automaticfashion. Once we presented it, they insistedwith Design that we have this feature andthat helped the team.”

(Supportability manager).

The middle manager who championed thisproject recycled some slides from this presentationin his own decks, which introduced the supporta-bility concept to the rest of his unit, stating that theteam’s Supportability mandate is to “inject sup-portability into existing and new products and fea-tures” (Supportability deck), and asserting that thesupportability feature would render TTC’s productmore attractive in the marketplace. Slides from thisdeck were then recycled by the middle managerinto a deck he prepared as an input into the produc-tion of yet another deck used by top managementin a town hall meeting—a pattern of slide flowfor which we found evidence for each autonomousproject that became emergent strategy.

In other words, through the enactment ofdiscursive practices linking middle managers topeers and top managers, autonomous behaviorbecame widely understood as strategic and madeto endure. We found that town hall meetingswere a regular feature at TTC-SO over the entireperiod of our study, practices that continuedto be enacted even with a change in TTC-SO leadership in 1999. Semiannually, the TTC-SO’s top manager (TTC’s vice president ofProduct Support) gathered organizational memberstogether to annotate a PowerPoint presentationfocusing on recent accomplishments, ongoingprojects, and future priorities. Discursive practicesassociated with town hall meetings included verbaldiscussions of the content to be presented, thecreation of the slide deck (described in moredetail below), presenting and annotating the slidedeck, and answering questions. We found strong



evidence in our interview and e-mail data that theinclusion of slides that described an autonomousproject served to legitimate the project:

“These town halls were useful becauseit gave visibility across the organizationand could help the middle managers gainacceptance for their projects . . . Once theVP presented the initiative, he had littlechoice but to begin owning it and makingit his own.”

(Process director).

“The town hall was important, and it wouldsignal what our leader cared about. Oncehe mentioned [my project], it became a loteasier for me.”

(Support manager).

“If you think about it, it was a way for thedirectors to put their own words in the mouthof our vice president.”

(Process director).

As the town hall meeting approached, the vicepresident engaged middle managers in developingcontent for their PowerPoint presentation. Typi-cally, he sent a preliminary e-mail to middle man-agers (i.e., directors) outlining thoughts on organi-zational priorities. The directors then exchangede-mails with the top manager as they tried toensure their own initiatives featured well in thetown hall meeting. One set of middle managers,the Process directors, played a special role as theywere tasked with producing the slide deck. Theysolicited slides from all the Product Support direc-tors, editing them for format consistency whilealso filtering out slides. Each town hall slide deckwas structured with a front end attributed to thevice president, and a back end featuring the slidesof particular directors. In producing the deck, theProcess director generated some new or updatedslides (e.g., one showing key metrics reappearedmany times but with different numerical values fordifferent time periods), and combined them withslides recycled from decks presented in prior townhall meetings and slides forwarded to him by thedirectors that had been recycled from operationalreview meeting decks. Once the deck was com-plete, the top manager reviewed it in a meetingwith all the middle managers and made final edits.

By enacting these practices at regular inter-vals, middle managers regularly reflected on theirunit’s activities and represented them in particu-lar ways to top management. While representa-tions of induced projects dominated these slidedecks, representations of previously unsanctionedautonomous projects also made their way intothese town hall meetings. For example, with theSupportability Project in the second half of 2000,a middle manager included the phrase “productspecific supportability/quality improvement” on aslide describing a Center of Excellence, whichwas an induced project. By the first half of 2001,the Supportability Project had four full Power-Point slides devoted to it in the directors’ por-tion of the town hall deck, and was linked tothe strategic category of Customer Satisfaction(CSAT): “Proactive support increases CSAT.” Alsoin the first half of 2001, the concept of ProductSupportability began appearing in the vice pres-ident’s portion of the town hall deck as part ofan officially sanctioned product support model.The project appeared in a diagram representingthe organization, its priorities, and its projects,and this particular slide was then reused in sev-eral town hall meeting presentations. By the endof 2001, the vice president had labeled ProductSupportability as strategic in the major outcomeslide and presented it as one of the “four pillars ofsupporting carrier grade products along with reli-ability, upgradeability, and maintainability.”

Also in 2001, the director championing theSupportability Project began to push supportabilityfeatures beyond TTC-SO into TTC-Design byrequiring them in new products. In the directors’portion of the town hall deck (second half of 2001),the following point was made:

“Our aim going forward is to inject support-ability into existing and new products andfeatures . . . to increase education of GlobalNetwork Product Support and Design on toolset and debug techniques.”

(town hall deck).

In 2002, the director continued to promote theinclusion of supportability as a design attributeand introduced the acronym DFS (design forsupportability). In the first slide, he argued it to be

“ . . . critical to Design for Supportabil-ity to improve efficiency; ensures TL9000



targets are met, which is required to achieveProduct Quality [a strategic category atthe time]; reduces outages to provide reli-ability, another gauge of product quality;and increases Customer Satisfaction [anotherstrategic category at the time].”

(town hall deck)

In the first half of 2003, the notion of DFSappeared in the vice president’s portion of the townhall deck, officially sanctioning this concept:

“We will continue to drive and evolveboth a Design for Supportability mindsetand toolset into existing and new productoffering; technical support teams work handin hand with design teams to ensure productsare Designed for Supportability.”

(town hall deck).

We found evidence of similar slide flowsfor each autonomous project that became emer-gent strategy. The discursive practices associatedwith town hall meetings provided opportuni-ties for middle managers to introduce unsanc-tioned autonomous projects to top managementusing PowerPoint slides, and for these projects tobecome legitimated. In this way, the manipulationof strategic context at TTC-SO occurred throughthe enactment of practices of strategy articulationand was a joint achievement of front line, middle,and top management.

Ephemeral autonomous strategic behavior

Our study revealed two instances of autonomousprojects that were ephemeral, insomuch as theydisappeared without lasting impact: the CustomerAdvocacy Project and the Optical Off-Shoring toIndia Project (see Figure 6). We found numeroustraces of these projects in the text flows that linkedfront line managers to each other and to middlemanagers, but no traces of them in the text flowsthat linked middle and top managers. In otherwords, as practices of strategy articulation wereenacted across multiple organizational levels, theseprojects were not written into TTC-SO’s strategydiscourse. Our analysis showed that the failure toaccomplish one or more activities in our processmodel contributed to the demise of these projects.

In the case of the Customer Advocacy Project,the director championing the project, a middle

manager, did not succeed at mobilizing supportor at manipulating strategic context. Support wassought— unsuccessfully—from the Service Rev-enue group. The director had envisioned a servicethat could generate revenue: the customer advo-cates would charge for their value-added serviceof acting as agents of important customers insideTTC-SO. One of his front line managers heldroundtable discussions with satisfied customersalready benefiting from the service for free, andobtained commitments from two customers whowere willing to purchase the service in order toensure that their advocates remained in place.

“We held a couple of round tables with someof the most satisfied customers receivingpremium advocacy services, and they toldus what a competitor was billing for similarservices. I had one customer committed topurchasing a full advocate and one willing topay for half. That alone would have recoupedhalf of my team’s overhead.”

(Support manager).

Given such strong interest from the two willingcustomers, the middle manager shared quotes andmetrics about the project in a presentation tohis counterpart, a director responsible for ServiceRevenue, in an effort to formally list the customeradvocacy service as a product in TTC’s portfolio.To accomplish this, the unit would have hadto create what was known as an “order code”to charge customers interested in the service.However, despite several meetings and numerouspresentations, the Service Revenue director refusedas he argued the service was nonstandard andwould not fit with the rest of TTC’s portfolio.

“We tried to create an order code. We hada guy working on this almost full time,negotiating with the guys from service packs.We presented the business case several times,but we were unable to generate the ordercode to bill the customer. We presented thatinformation, but they said the service was notaligned with other areas. In the end, we neverdid sell the service and the team folded.”

(Support manager).

In addition, the director championing the Cus-tomer Advocacy Project also made a failed attempt



(a)

(b)

Figure 6. (a) Customer Advocacy Project; (b) Optical Off-Shoring Project

at manipulating the strategic context by stretch-ing the Service Recovery category. The directorwanted to cover the cost of customer advocates byselling the service to interested customers, so hepresented the project in terms of service recovery.However, inside TTC-SO, service recovery wasunderstood to mean that the cost of technical sup-port (i.e., costs of engineers’ time) was chargedback to the appropriate TTC product groups bymatching hours worked on cases with productssupported. In other words, the support organizationremained a cost center; unless an exception wasmade, revenues from sales of customer advocacyservices could not be credited to TTC-SO. Despitepresenting to several top managers a slide deckcontaining positive customer quotes, the direc-tor was unsuccessful at making an argument thatthe notion of service recovery could include sell-ing customer advocacy services. Events in TTC-SO’s environment also made it more difficult for

dissonant projects to escape the attention of uppermanagement; by 2001, workforce reductions werebeing implemented and the vice president trans-ferred the mandate for customer advocacy outsideof the organization. None of the customer advo-cates transferred to the new organization, and theteam was disbanded.

In the case of the Optical Off-Shoring to IndiaProject, the director acting as project championfailed at both altering structural context and manip-ulating strategic context. This middle managerwanted to reduce operating expenses as he wasworking within a context of strong cost cutting atTTC-SO. His idea was to train front line supportengineers in India to field second tier support calls,diverting work from the high labor cost region ofNorth America.

“There was already an optical support pres-ence. I wanted to really leverage that team



and add resources for tier two. They weretier one but I wanted to give them moreemergency recovery responsibility and alsotier-two support responsibility on a few prod-ucts.”

(Support director).

In late 2004, the director expanded the projectby hiring and training people in India, andtransferring to them some of the workload of NorthAmerican engineers. However, in early 2005, thevice president, a top manager, asked the directorto transfer the mandate to Turkey, and activitiesin India were abandoned. The new team that hehad created for this project did not endure past afew months from its inception, and the routinesestablished between North American engineersand their India counterparts were also abandonedor transferred to Turkey.

“From a technical point of view, it wasthe right thing to do, but from a businessdirection for optical products, India was notthe place to go. There were other growinglocations such as Turkey, for example. SoI was going against the business strategicdirection from a location perspective. I wasbuilding up India when that was not the rightplace.”

(Support director).

In attempting to legitimate the India location,the director focused on potential cost reductions,but this approach, however, did not offset cleardissonance with Process and Tools Standardizationsince no other TTC engineers were exploring off-shoring activities with India. The initiative wasalso dissonant with the True Two-Tier SupportModel in which all second tier support was tobe performed by a North American team. Indeed,while India presented cost advantages, it did nothave significantly lower costs than its competinglocation, Turkey. The director thus failed to stretchthese categories to include off-shoring activities toIndia.

DISCUSSION

Emergent strategy is important (Hamel, 2009) yeta paucity of research exists (Lowe and Jones,

2004), so our empirical study adds to understand-ing what organizations actually do as comparedto what they plan to do. Our research questionsasked how emergent strategy forms and whichpractices, beyond allocating material resources, areinvolved and what role they play. Our findingsillustrate autonomous strategic behavior to be aprecursor of emergent strategy, explicate key activ-ities through which autonomous projects endureto become the emergent strategy portion of real-ized strategy, and theorize the role of practices ofstrategy articulation in this transition. In validat-ing empirically the connections between emergentstrategy, autonomous strategic behavior, and prac-tices of strategy articulation, our research makesnotable contributions that we outline here.

Our study does have limitations. While a singlecase study is appropriate for theory building,generalizing from it must be done cautiously(Yin, 2003). We have used a narrative strategy tointerpret data on strategy formation—an approachof high accuracy but low generality (Langley,1999). Ultimately, “it is the contextual detailin the narrative that will allow the reader tojudge the transferability of the ideas” (Langley,1999: 695). To facilitate this, we have presentedthe steps of our method in detail, and havebeen transparent about our inferences as well aswhere we relied upon our sponsor-informant tocorroborate them. We also suggest directions forfuture research that might confirm (or refute) ourtheorizing.

A process model for emergent strategy

Our study highlights how emergent strategy origi-nates as autonomous strategic behavior—projectsthat, despite dissonance with the prevailing con-cept of strategy, are nonetheless launched asa result of local problem solving. Autonomousprojects become enduring patterns of action (i.e.,the emergent portion of realized strategy) throughmobilizing wider support to provide impetus tothem, manipulating strategic context to legitimatethem by constructing them as consonant with theprevailing concept of strategy, and altering thefirm’s structural context to embed the projectswithin organizational units, routines, and objec-tives (see Figure 4). The study also teased outdifferent ways of going about these activities. Tomobilize resources for impetus, project champi-ons can generate support by securing resources



from within their organizational unit, enrollingother organizational units to make resource com-mitments, or leveraging pressures from externalactors. To manipulate strategic context for con-sonance, champions can introduce new strategiccategories or imaginatively stretch existing ones.Altering structural context for embeddedness, wefound, involves creating new teams, establishingnew procedures and routines, and setting new orga-nizational objectives. These findings represent con-tributions by adding finer grained details to theB-B model. They also suggest directions for futurework in the microperspective of strategy processresearch, which could explore the questions ofwhether and how particular practices enable orconstrain the realization of emergent strategy.

For example, certain organizational practicescould render the mobilizing of resources or thealtering of structural context difficult. Considerresource mobilization. In our study, front line man-agers were able to channel pressure from cus-tomers for supportability features in ways thatresulted in the allocation of other units’ resourcesto this project. But they were unable to chan-nel pressure from customers for customer advo-cacy services in ways that would result in theallocation of rights to invoice customers. Theorganization’s accounting practices permitted thetransfer of budgets from one cost center to anotherbut did not permit cost centers to book rev-enues. Our findings thus build on research focus-ing on the role of accounting systems and datain strategy making (Ezzamel and Willmott, 2008;Whittle and Mueller, 2010), by illustrating howspecific accounting practices can enable the mak-ing of emergent strategy while others contribute toautonomous projects becoming ephemeral becausethey cannot be sustained.

In the case of altering structural context, organi-zational practices provided scope to middle man-agers in our study to create new teams and remakereporting relations. It is possible, however, that inother contexts where human resource policies aremore centralized and rigid or where labor unionsneed to be consulted, the practices available tomiddle managers may not afford the embeddingof autonomous projects into the structural fabricof organizational life. Such a postulation is consis-tent with research arguing that emergent strategy ismore likely to be fostered in “organic” structurescharacterized by semiformal systems, interactivecontrols, and local autonomy (Boyett and Currie,

2004; Osborn, 1998; Slevin and Covin, 1997). Inproviding nuance to the B-B model, we orientstrategy-as-practice research towards key activitiesin emergent strategy formation that may be facil-itated by some strategizing practices but not byothers.

Another contribution is our empirical illustra-tion of the convergence between the B-B notionof manipulating strategic context and Mintzberg’s(1987) theorization of how patterns from the pastbecome plans for the future—i.e., how bottom-upemergent strategy becomes recognized and legiti-mated to influence subsequent top-down deliberatestrategy. We identified practices of strategy artic-ulation (i.e., routinized ways of producing, dis-tributing, and consuming texts that contain rep-resentations of what the firm has been, is, andwill be doing) as playing a particularly impor-tant role in this transition. Our findings illustrateclearly that the manipulation of strategic contextinvolved in emergent strategy formation is a jointachievement of front line, middle, and top man-agers enacting practices of strategy articulationthat link them with middle managers playing a keyrole. PowerPoint slides from project-level decksfor autonomous projects, produced by front linemanagers and sent to middle managers, were fil-tered into unit-level slide decks (or filtered outin the case of ephemeral autonomous strategicbehavior) and represented in terms of new and“stretched” existing strategic categories, then sentto top managers where they were incorporatedinto organization-level slide decks. In this way,activities previously dissonant with the prevail-ing concept of strategy become consonant with it.Our research thus suggests that the transition fromautonomous strategic behavior to emergent strat-egy is facilitated by practices that foster regularlyiterated cycles of discursive work that combineretrospection with prospection and span multiplelevels of the organization.

Additionally, our findings illustrate that prac-tices of strategy articulation also figure promi-nently in the alteration of structural context (e.g.,as new teams were created, changes were madeto visual representations on slides that, as theycirculated and were recycled, contributed to thenormalization of new activities, relationships, andgoals) and in the mobilization of support (e.g.,slide decks served as a basis for discussions ofwhether human and financial resources would flowto an autonomous project, and as a record of agreed



commitments that regularized these flows). Figure4 therefore highlights how practices of articulatingstrategy are implicated in each of the activities inour model of emergent strategy formation.

In this way, we contribute an important discur-sive dimension to understanding strategy as theoutcome of iterated practices of resource use—acore notion of the B-B model, which emphasizesthe use of material resources rather than sym-bolic ones. We build on Noda and Bower’s (1996)concept of strategy articulation but expand it inimportant ways; whereas they focus on key actorsat one level, i.e., top managers who make formalstatements about the firm’s strategy, we focus onpractices that link actors across multiple levels. Wethus connect views of strategy as patterned action(Mintzberg, 1978) and as discursive construction(Vaara et al., 2004) by examining strategy as prac-tice. It may be more intuitive to conceptualizestrategy as discourse when it is intended, i.e., whenstrategy is understood looking forward as a plan,but our study underlines that the identification ofpast actions and of patterns therein, and the attri-bution of significance to them, are also discursiveaccomplishments, each of which is necessary tograsp strategy looking backward as a pattern.

By illustrating the central role played by Pow-erPoint slide decks in the discursive work carriedout by TTC-SO front line, middle, and top man-agers to realize emergent strategy, our findings alsoextend recent work exploring PowerPoint as partof the epistemic machinery (Kaplan, 2011) throughwhich strategy is made. Kaplan (2011) studiedchange carried out over an eight-month periodto illustrate how PowerPoint is used to structurecollaborative practices of sharing ideas to negoti-ate meaning and cartographic practices of drawingboundaries to adjudicate interests, while we illus-trate its role in practices of strategy articulationover a much longer time period. We thus build onRegner’s (2003) work on the inductive nature ofstrategy making in the organizational “periphery”by illuminating the epistemic machinery (Kaplan,2011) and discursive practices through which neworganizational knowledge structures become estab-lished and propagated, as with TTC-SO knowledgeconstructed around the concept of supportability.Future research could elaborate upon practices ofstrategy articulation by exploring them in othercontexts. For example, PowerPoint likely plays asmaller role in start-up organizations or small busi-nesses where strategizing is less formal, there are

fewer levels of hierarchy, and other types of texts,especially talk, are likely more prominent.

We also make a contribution by demonstratingempirically the applicability of the B-B model,which to date has been used to explain corporatelevel strategy, i.e., entry and exit from product sec-tors to multiple levels of strategy. The Supportabil-ity Project is an excellent example of autonomousstrategic behavior resulting in business-levelstrategy—differentiation through supportabilityfeatures that make the product more attractivefor customers. Whereas it is typically positedthat business-level strategy drives functional-levelstrategy, our study offers an empirical illustrationof functional-level activities in TTC’s supportorganization, TTC-SO, driving TTC’s businessstrategy. In so doing, we shed light on the proce-dural and communication channels that structuremanagerial attention in Ocasio’s (1997) attention-based view; our study highlights how patternedtext flows linking front line to middle and topmanagers contribute to generating and sustainingpatterned firm action. Future research couldexplore in more detail the connections betweenparticular practices of strategy articulation, theevolution of managerial attention at differentorganizational levels, and firm behavior over time.

Finally, our study connects the concept of emer-gent strategy to the variation-selection-retentionparadigm of evolutionary organizational theoryvia the B-B model (Burgelman, 1996). Our find-ings illustrate that the emergent strategy portionof realized strategy arises from intraorganizationalecological processes, as projects (i.e., variation)vie for development and impetus (selection) andfor integration into organizational routines (reten-tion). Our study also suggests that discursive prac-tices play a key role in selection and retentionprocesses—a proposition that resonates stronglywith the view of strategy as discourse (Vaaraet al., 2004). Our research therefore underlines theimportance of considering symbolic in addition tomaterial resources when conceptualizing processesof variation, selection, and retention; the discursivework carried out through practices of articulatingstrategy was as critical to the formation of emer-gent strategy as was the allocation of financialand human resources. Given PowerPoint’s ubiq-uity, future research could explore in more detailits role in emergent strategy formation, as well asits role in change processes more broadly, i.e., inprocesses of organizational evolution.



Implication for practitioners

Our conceptual and theoretical contributions haveimplications for front line, middle, and top man-agers. In combining Mintzberg’s model of strategyformation with the B-B framework and addingfiner grained detail, our process model of emergentstrategy formation provides guidance to would-be champions of bottom-up strategy making. Forexample, our study illustrates how pressures fromexternal actors can be harnessed by front linemanagers to mobilize resources internally, as withcustomers who advocated for the SupportabilityProject. Because of the customer service missionof TTC-SO, customers played a key role, but othertypes of external actors could be leveraged byanyone in a boundary-spanning role to advanceother types of projects; one can envision engag-ing key suppliers to an organization to support aninnovation in purchasing, or local nongovernmentorganizations to support a novel sustainability ini-tiative. Practitioners should keep in mind that orga-nizational boundaries are permeable not only toinformation but to influence as well—anyone withnegotiating power vis a vis their organization canbe harnessed to help redirect material resources totheir projects.

But material resources are not enough. Ourstudy also illustrates the importance of appreci-ating symbolic resources and manipulating themthrough rhetoric and skilled use of language.

The legitimation of autonomous projects is moredifficult than that of induced projects that arealready consonant with the prevailing concept ofstrategy. Our study suggests it is made easier bythe ability to imaginatively stretch concepts andmake new associations between them. The pointis that discursive work (Maguire and Hardy, 2013)is just that—i.e., work—and like other forms ofwork it can be taken seriously or not, done wellor poorly, and improved over time with experi-ence. The enduring impact of certain terms andphrases (e.g., supportability: by 2003, engineerswere designing for this concept which did not existinside TTC-SO before 1999, and TTC was differ-entiating itself from rivals based on it) appearing inPowerPoint slides underlines the respect that man-agers should pay to texts, which do not merelydescribe things but rather “do things in organiza-tional settings” (Cooren, 2004: 373).

Finally, top managers can take inspiration fromour view of strategy formation (see Figure 7),which not only overlays important concepts fromthe B-B model onto Mintzberg’s (1978) celebratedframework but also eliminates a notable asym-metry in Mintzberg’s theorizing by introducingthe concept of ephemeral autonomous strategicbehavior and showing how it relates to emer-gent strategy in the same way as unrealizedstrategy does to deliberate strategy. Top man-agers should wonder, “Are there potentially valu-able projects being systematically selected out

Figure 7. Model of strategy formation relating autonomous strategic behavior and emergent strategy



through intraorganizational processes?” As men-tioned above, this could be the case due tosomething as seemingly neutral as accountingpractices. Or, the organization’s practices of strat-egy articulation might systematically discriminateagainst certain types of actors or projects that areunreflexively considered nonstrategic in a taken-for-granted way. Bower (1970) argued cogentlythat the job of top managers is to design orga-nizational structures and processes that select inand reinforce valuable projects, and our studygives practitioners more to think about if theyare serious about encouraging bottom-up strategymaking.

In summary, our study bridges and extends theseminal works of Mintzberg, Bower, and Burgel-man while making connections to recent workexploring strategy as practice. In so doing, wecontribute to the SAP literature, which to datehas largely concentrated on formal planning activ-ities associated with strategy making at the cen-ter (Regner, 2003), by responding directly torecent calls “to do more on emergence” because“close studies of strategy emergence is a signif-icant opportunity for advancing SAP research”(Vaara and Whittington, 2012: 313). We providea solid theoretical foundation to further developthe emergent strategy concept by focusing on iter-ated processes of deploying material and symbolicresources.

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