USING STRATEGY TOOLS IN PRACTICE: AN EXPLORATION OF "TECHNOLOGIES OF RATIONALITY" IN USE.

Recently there has been much debate about the usefulness of strategic management education and implicitly about strategy tools and frameworks. Yet, this debate is taking place in the absence of detailed knowledge about how, or indeed, whether, managers use the theoretical tools that they learn. This paper addresses this gap by taking a practice perspective to look at how strategy tools are mobilized inside organizations. Using illustrations from three vignettes of strategy tools in use, we explore how an actor's search for rationality and objectivity through the use of tools is actually a political, symbolic and socially interactive process. We provide a conceptual framework for analyzing strategy tools as key mediators of these contextual and political interests. We offer propositions associated with the functions of tools in use, the contextual factors that shape their use and the types of outcomes that can be examined using a practice lens on strategy making.