Cooperation in the Conceptualization of Autonomous Strategic Initiatives: The Role of Managers’ Intellectual and Social Capital

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the social position of functional managers, as defined by their stocks of intellectual and social capital, influences their attitude towards cooperation for the integration of distributed knowledge in the conceptualization of bottom-up (autonomous) strategic initiatives. Bourdieu’s social practice theory was employed for integrating the organizational conditions in the initiative conceptualization-as-knowledge-creation process. By developing and analyzing two case studies on strategic operations, it was found that the degree of engagement in productive cooperation, and hence the potential and effectiveness of functional managers as knowledge-creating agents promoting their particular interests, are influenced by their social position which in turn depends on the path of accumulation of their intellectual and social capital resources.