Mobilising materiality for strategy work: the role of organisational spaces

Abstract

Much of the strategy-as-practice research addressing spatial aspects of strategy work focuses on analysing physical, transient, and transitional dimensions of organisational spaces. Building on these extant studies, this paper focuses on the lived-experience dimension of organisational spaces. Based on a rich case study of collaborations involving both informal sector and formal sector strategic actors, we demonstrate that strategic actors respond to and navigate distinct but tightly coupled organisational spaces in their mobilisation of materiality for accomplishing strategy work. Our findings show that a set of individual and group-level frames of reference and meaning-making mechanisms underlie mobilisation practices that may be motivated by both personal and business objectives. We offer a conceptual framework for explaining how strategic actors, embedded within disparate organisational spaces, accomplish strategy work by mobilising everyday organisational space-conditioned material artefacts. Our study therefore highlights the value of connecting micro-level materiality praxis and practices to macro-level organisational space structures in theorising strategy practice.