Toward a Mid-Range Theory of Strategy Workshops

Strategy workshops – typically 2-3 day events involving senior managers – represent a common and frequent, yet under-researched, organisational practice relating to strategy development and therefore provide a natural extension of mainstream strategy process research. In this paper we seek to build upon the recent call for a more micro, activity-based approach to strategic management by identifying a theoretically informed empirical agenda for research into strategy workshops. We argue here that theoretical perspectives on ritual – specifically on transition ritual (i.e., rites of passage) – and ritualisation from social....