Rethinking Participation in Strategy and Innovation : Attention- and Practice-Based Perspectives

This doctoral thesis focuses on a critical yet often taken for granted phenomenon in management research: participation, i.e. actors’ (voluntary) involvement in organizational and strategic processes. Prior research has largely converged on the benefits of participation for organizations, such as enabling strategic renewal, facilitating the development of superior strategies, and enhancing innovation outcomes by harnessing the wisdom of the many. More recently, we have seen the rise of open forms of strategizing and innovating, which fundamentally revolve around participation. For instance, firms increasingly employ what came to be called Open Strategy, including actors beyond top managers to contribute to the strategy process. Despite the importance of voluntary participation in such initiatives, it has widely remained an implicit and taken for granted phenomenon in the literature without being explicitly theorized. This doctoral thesis builds upon the attention-based view of the firm (ABV) and practice-theoretical perspectives to develop novel theoretical insights into voluntary participation in organizations. It consists of five papers employing review, conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative approaches: Paper I is a literature review of the ABV, providing the foundation for the subsequent papers. Paper II draws on the ABV to theorize (non-) participation in Open Strategy as the result of ‘attention contests’. It is grounded in the observation that, although firms invite the crowd of employees to participate, only a small fraction ultimately chooses to do so. Paper III focuses on voluntary participation in strategy work with important implications for open strategy and strategy-as-practice. The conceptual paper draws upon practice theory in order to develop a process model of voluntary participation as an ongoing accomplishment. Paper IV is a qualitative paper that explores (non-)participation choices in an internal innovation contest through an ABV and sensemaking lens. Internal innovation contests typically present incoherent attention structural conditions: They encourage participation while simultaneously requiring employees to sustain attention to their regular work. The paper theorizes participation in corporate innovation as the interplay of incoherent attention structures and sensemaking practices. Paper V takes another perspective on participation, focusing on the effects of participation in social media on managers. Using an experimental approach, it demonstrates that exposure to strategic conversations on social media significantly influences managers’ strategic preferences. The paper stresses social media participation as a powerful means of shaping strategies from outside a firm’s boundaries. Each of the papers makes several theoretical contributions to distinct literatures, while offering important practical implications. For instance, the thesis highlights that inviting the crowd to participate in strategy and innovation does not automatically result in diverse participation, as tacit structural constraints may exclude particular actors. The doctoral thesis concludes with broader reflections on the potential and limits of voluntary participation in organizations.