Learning More from Failure: Practice and Process

In their foregoing response, Hodgkinson and Wright (2006) claim that my article ‘Completing the practice turn in strategy research’ (Whittington 2006) contains misconceptions and unwarranted inferences with regard to one of its illustrations, drawn from their earlier paper ‘Confronting strategic inertia in a top management team: learning from failure’ (Hodgkinson and Wright 2002). They vigorously defend their professional competence as consultants in this unsuccessful episode. They also suggest that my article, in fact, neither completes the practice turn nor enriches the process tradition. My own response must begin here with an apology to Hodgkinson and Wright for any perceived slight on their professional competence as consultants: my focus was on academic issues and inattentive to other concerns. But I’d also like to do two more things: first, clarify what I mean by completing the practice turn and thereby adding to the process tradition; second, consider once more, Hodgkinson and Wright’s (2002) case in the light of their further gloss, concluding that my original interpretation was, in fact, pretty much warranted. In the original article, ‘completing the practice turn’ refers to the need to connect the detailed activity of individual practitioners with broader societal phenomena, these to be treated, not as organizational ‘context’ but as essentially involved in any particular strategizing episode (Whittington 2006). The alliteration in my terminology of praxis (the activity of strategizing), practices (strategy’s routines, tool-usages, norms and the like) and practitioners (the people engaged in strategy) is intended to reinforce exactly this connection. Practitioners and practices are constituents of societies as well as organisations. Practitioners are therefore more than individuals; they are classes of people — professional accountants or MBAs, consultants or business school academics — whose praxis is shaped, in part, by collective experiences within society. Practices are not just the innocent incidentals of particular praxis episodes, but, in cases such as Porterian analysis, strategy awaydays or PowerPoint presentations, come loaded with expectations derived from their trajectories in society at large. From a strategy-as-practice point of view, therefore, understanding what is going on deep inside organizations requires close attention to what is happening outside. This is not just to say that ‘micro’ phenomena occur in a ‘macro’ context; it is to recognize that such phenomena are intrinsically parts of that wider context. Completing the practice turn implies a broadening of the Organization Studies 27(12): 1903–1906 ISSN 0170–8406 Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi) Richard Whittington Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, UK