Through the looking glass: Strategic organizational practices in strategic management

The field of strategic management indicates that there is no ‘one best way’ to manage strategy over time, leaving researchers with a pluralistic research setting. The findings here suggest that strategic organizational practices, a construct from the international business literature, can provide insight into the strategy formation process. I argue that strategic organizational practices, which are actor‐centered and embedded with values and beliefs, reflect both the content and process of strategy, and the organizational environment itself, thereby providing a pluralistic context of theoretical study. Through the exploration of four practices implemented by a large Canadian‐based multinational enterprise, the paper encourages a more explicit integration of strategic organizational practices, as a unit of analysis, into the field of strategic management. Copyright © 2017 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.