The Paradox of Strategizing: Embracing Managerial Agency without Throttling it

Abstract

Strategizing implies making agentic choices in some middle ground between un-analyzable free will and agency-denying determinism. Paradoxically, neither view can capture the strategist’s situation or process. So how are strategy theorists approach agency? In our opening sections, we review the mainstream literature and find seven main arguments or tracks. Five, by improving methodological accuracy and reducing variance, effectively throttle or deny the strategist’s agency. The two other tracks offer agency an ontological or epistemological place in the analysis but underplay the synthetic nature of the strategist’s practice. In our final sections, we treat strategizing as handling the practice-based constraints to the strategist’s agency. A positivist approach makes little sense here for ex definition strategy supposes a finite option-space into which the strategist’s agency is ‘thrown’. Practitioners focus on their choices within this space rather than on the application of a generalized ‘theory of strategy’. There is little new here; but analyzing it means moving away from causal modeling and towards exploring the options remaining after all reasonable determining causes have been identified - leaving the strategist with the under-determined middle ground s/he ‘synthesizes’ from incommensurable theories and empirically justified heuristics. Concluding, we propose a novel track of theorizing for those strategists seeking to engage their agentic capabilities rather than theorizing about agency as a component of a rigorous academic model.