Abstract

SANABRIA, MAURICIO  and  MORENO, DIDDIER. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF EMERGING STRATEGIES IN ORGANIZATIONS THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF IMPROVISATION AND THE MUSICAL METAPHOR. Rev.fac.cienc.econ. [online]. 2018, vol.26, n.1, pp.27-68. ISSN 0121-6805.  https://doi.org/10.18359/rfce.2686.

This work is part of one of the great fields of organization studies: strategic management. The classical perspective in this field promoted the idea that projecting the organization to the future involves designing a plan (a series of deliberate actions). Further progress showed that the strategy could be understood in other ways. However, the evolution of the field privileged the classical view, to some extent, by establishing for example multiple models to ‘formulate’ a strategy, but leaving in a second place the way in which it can ‘emerge’. The purpose of this research is then to contribute to the current level of understanding regarding the emerging strategies in organizations. To do so, it was considered an opposite -although complementary- concept to that of ‘planning’ and, in fact, very close in its nature to such kind of strategies: improvisation. Since this one has been nourished by valuable contributions of the music field, we used the knowledge of this domain, resorting to the use of ‘the metaphor’ as a theoretical resource to understand it and to reach the proposed objective. The results show that (i) deliberate and emerging strategies coexist and complement each other, (ii) improvisation is always present in the organizational context, (iii) there is a greater intensity of improvisation in the ‘How’ of strategy than in the ‘What’, and, as opposed to the conventional idea concerning this, (iv) some preparation is required in order to improvise properly.

Keywords : Emerging strategies; Improvisation; Musical metaphor; Management; Organization studies.

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