The practice of shared inquiry: how actors manage for strategy emergence

ABSTRACT This paper problematizes the applicability of traditional top-down strategic planning in a continuously changing media industry and builds a practice-theoretical perspective for analyzing strategy emergence. Through a qualitative analysis of 22 interviews, with media professionals and consultants of a German-based print magazine company, we identify a jointly enacted practice that we call “shared inquiry”. This practice includes recursive and adaptive strategizing actions towards (1) searching and learning (actions of employees), (2) facilitating and questioning (actions of managers), and (3) guiding and reflecting (actions of consultants). We demonstrate how these actions form a mechanism through which media managers create the conditions to cope with continuous change and how they manage in order to achieve strategy emergence both locally and on an organization-wide level. Ultimately, we show how strategic actions can be mapped in a continuum that supports “responsive coping”.