Strategic Practices: An Activity Theory Perspective on Continuity and Change

TLDR

Activity theory frames strategy as emerging from four interactive components—collective structures, primary actors (top management teams), practical activities, and strategic practices—within organizations. The study applies activity theory to analyze micro‑level strategic practices—direction setting, resource allocation, and monitoring/control—in three UK universities. Using this framework, the authors model the findings into activity‑theory typologies that illustrate how practices distribute shared interpretations or mediate contested ones. The typologies reveal that strategic practices sustain continuity in one case but drive reinterpretation and change in two others, demonstrating how practice shapes strategy’s continuity and evolution.

Abstract

abstract This paper draws upon activity theory to analyse an empirical investigation of the micro practices of strategy in three UK universities. Activity theory provides a framework of four interactive components from which strategy emerges; the collective structures of the organization, the primary actors, in this research conceptualized as the top management team (TMT), the practical activities in which they interact and the strategic practices through which interaction is conducted. Using this framework, the paper focuses specifically on the formal strategic practices involved in direction setting, resource allocation, and monitoring and control. These strategic practices are associated with continuity of strategic activity in one case study but are involved in the reinterpretation and change of strategic activity in the other two cases. We model this finding into activity theory‐based typologies of the cases that illustrate the way that practices either distribute shared interpretations or mediate between contested interpretations of strategic activity. The typologies explain the relationships between strategic practices and continuity and change of strategy as practice. The paper concludes by linking activity theory to wider change literatures to illustrate its potential as an integrative methodological framework for examining the subjective and emergent processes through which strategic activity is constructed.