In this chapter we review practice-based studies that have examined the ontological and epistemological conditions for producing strategy research that proves relevant to management practice. Drawing on these works, we argue that researchers inevitably adopt a scholastic point of view, which makes it impossible to capture directly the logic of strategy practice. However, scholars can increase the practical relevance of their research by developing theories based on practical logic. We have outlined three approaches to capture the logic of management practice (1) theorizing through practical rationality, (2) the application of ‘participant objectivation’, and (3) the consideration of the dissociation process. We argue that if strategy-as-practice research builds on these insights, it can prove a particularly fruitful approach to generate knowledge that is of conceptual relevance to strategy practice.
In this paper, we propose reconceptualizing diversity management from a communication-centered perspective. We base our proposal on the observation that the literature on diversity management, both in the instrumental and critical traditions, is primarily concerned with fostering the diversity of organizational members in terms of individual-bound criteria (e.g., gender, age, or ethnicity). By drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony as well as the ‘communicative constitution of organizations’ (CCO) perspective, we suggest reconsidering diversity as the plurality of ‘voices’ which can be understood as the range of individual opinions and societal discourses that get expressed and can find resonance in organizational settings.We contribute to the literature on diversity management by moving away from a focus on individual-bound and inalterable criteria of diversity and toward a reconceptualization of diversity management as dynamic processes of voice articulation and mediation.
Most current cost-benefit analyses of climate change policies suggest an optimal global climate policy that is significantly less stringent than the level required to meet the internationally agreed 2 °C target. This is partly because the sum of estimated economic damage of climate change across various sectors, such as energy use and changes in agricultural production, results in only a small economic loss or even a small economic gain in the gross world product under predicted levels of climate change. However, those cost-benefit analyses rarely take account of environmental tipping points leading to abrupt and irreversible impacts on market and nonmarket goods and services, including those provided by the climate and by ecosystems. Here we show that including environmental tipping point impacts in a stochastic dynamic integrated assessment model profoundly alters cost-benefit assessment of global climate policy. The risk of a tipping point, even if it only has nonmarket impacts, could substantially increase the present optimal carbon tax. For example, a risk of only 5% loss in nonmarket goods that occurs with a 5% annual probability at 4 °C increase of the global surface temperature causes an immediate two-thirds increase in optimal carbon tax. If the tipping point also has a 5% impact on market goods, the optimal carbon tax increases by more than a factor of 3. Hence existing cost-benefit assessments of global climate policy may be significantly underestimating the needs for controlling climate change.
