Bringing Theories into Conversation to Strategize for a Better World
In this article, Ann Langley, Rikkie Albertsen, Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, Katrin Heucher, Marc Krautzberger, Pauline Reinecke, Natalie Slawinski, and Eero Vaara reflect on the inspiration behind their research article, “Strategizing Together for a Better World: Institutional, Paradox and Practice Theories in Conversation,” found in the Journal of Management Inquiry.
Bridging across theory silos is necessary to be able to strategize together for a better world. While management scholars have been shifting their research towards societal challenges, there is a need to continue to provide new insights by working collectively on these complex problems.
The paper “Strategizing together for a better world: institutional, paradox and practice theories in conversation” is based on a symposium held at the 2022 Academy of Management Annual Meeting. In this article, we present a discussion moderated by Ann Langley between established scholars in the field of grand challenges – Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, Natalie Slawinski, and Eero Vaara – focusing on the role of institutional, paradox, and practice theories in research on grand challenges.
We bring these theoretical perspectives into conversation, reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the lenses, and discuss potential intersections for future research on grand challenges. We highlight how well these lenses connect, how much this connection inspires our theory development, and how it contributes to dealing with grand challenges. These three quotes from the panel debate capture this in the words of the panelists:
“If it weren’t for this session, I don’t know if I would have dug so deeply into how to combine these different theories. And now I’m seeing all kinds of possibilities in my own research for how to bring in more of a practice and/or institutional lens together with paradox theory.”
– Natalie Slawinski
“Connecting a detailed analysis of practices with broader issues of institutional change would help us a great deal to better understand the processes and mechanisms of change, and to comprehend how particular practices, especially practices of decision-making and strategizing enable or impede change. Finally, paradoxical tensions are also very closely related to a practice-based angle when analyzing tensions and struggles and how to deal with them.”
– Eero Vaara
“Barbara Gray was mentioning […] that we have to think beyond the self and get to ‘we-thinking’ which is a commons approach … We believe that this idea of a commons logic, how it emerges, gains traction, picks up momentum, and diffuses in different ways is an exciting area for both research and practice to collectively tackle the grand challenges that we confront.”
– Shaz Ansari
In the article, we discuss how bringing paradox, institutional and practice theories together can contribute to (1) overcoming limitations of concepts and theories, (2) bringing new forms of materiality into our theorizing that really matter in addressing grand challenges, (3) provide better advice to practitioners and (4) overcoming – at least in parts – the theory-practice gap we are confronted with.
We, the organizers Rikke Albertsen, Katrin Heucher, Marc Krautzberger and Pauline Reinecke, are thrilled to see how this idea for a panel, which emerged from our own discussions across these theoretical lenses at an EGOS PDW, grew into such an insightful panel. We are pleased that these insights and discussions can now reach an even larger audience through publication in the Journal of Management Inquiry.
Therefore, we would like to conclude with a call to action for bringing the need for collaboration associated with grand challenges into theorizing – in order to develop better theories for strategizing together for a better world.
