Bringing Sociomateriality into Strategy: The case of strategy formation at Nudie Jeans Co

Abstract

Abstract Strategy-as-practice research has traditionally focused on the relationships between practitioners, practices and praxis. However, the “stuff” of strategizing (i.e. the material objects, artefacts and tools which are part and parcel of the social practice of strategy) is, despite its importance, surprisingly absent in strategy-as-practice literature. Based on an empirical case study of the Swedish garment company Nudie Jeans Co, this paper starts to address this gap in strategy-as-practice literature by analyzing how sociomateriality interacts in strategy making. In addition to contributing to the increasingly vibrant strategy-as-practice literature, this paper also contributes to the sustainability literature by introducing an empirical study of a sustainable strategy formation. There are numerous studies of how sustainability should be integrated into strategy, while empirically grounded studies of how sustainability is integrated are scarce. Our findings show the importance of taking practitioners at different levels into account and to include everyday activities, material objects and autonomous activities when investigating how a (sustainable) strategy is formed. The findings also show the importance of challenging previous strategy-as-practice studies’ restricted framing of strategy tools as mainly conceptual tools. By including material objects, used as strategy tools, we argue that it is possible to gain a richer understanding of the strategy formation process. Furthermore, the findings not only lends support to the argument in previous studies that abstract ideas become real by first being concretized, but also illustrate reverse and dialectic processes and relationships.