p.2 individual agents are so constituted by everyday social practices that they act and interact, for the most part, spontaneously and purposively (in contrast to purposefully) in a self-referential manner to overcome immediate problems and obstacles without any need for theoretical distancing, conscious deliberation or an overall pre-designed plan of action.
p.3 a dwelling worldview... knowledge... is 'grown' and re-grown through social practice within specific sociocultural and historical contexts; unconsciously internalized and incorporated into the modus operandi of the individual in the form of skills, sensitivities, and overriding predispositions (Bourdieu 1990)... much of what goes on in the actual process of evolving a coherent strategy consists of small unspectacular everyday coping actions throughout an organization. These are carried out in a self-absorbed manner by individuals that do not presume deliberate forethought or conscious planning on their part.
p.3 two types of knowledge, episteme and techne, are intimately linked to the dominant building world-view whilst another two, phronesis and metis, constitute the form of practical knowing characterized by a dwelling mode.
p.4 In 'proper' epistemological inquiry... the facts, the theory, the alternatives and the ideals are brought together and weighed against each other in the creation of knowledge... The problem with relying on this type of knowledge in academic research is that it misses out on a wealth of tacit, inarticulate and often inarticulatable understandings of strategy practitioners as they go about their practical affairs. Indeed, for most of the time, practitioners themselves may be unaware of this tacit knowledge that they possess.
p.4 for research to be acceptable and publishable in prestigious journals, scholars are required to adopt 'discursive practices' that conform to the tight demands of an academic community that recognizes only propositional forms of knowledge and explicit causal explanations as the legitimate form of knowledge. Producing knowledge acceptable to the exacting demands of academic scholarship, therefore, risks killing off that very thing which makes research itself a worthwhile activity (Mintzberg 2004, p. 399).
p.6 Both phronesis and metis are relatively unexplored and hence unacknowledged in the Strategy as Practice research agenda. Yet they are vital tacit qualities of an effective strategy practitioner. In what follows, we show that phronesis and metis are alternative epistemologies intimately linked to a dwelling mode of thinking.
p.7 In the dwelling mode of theorizing... people engage in 'wayfinding'... by reaching out and feeling 'their way through a world that is itself [...] continually coming into being' (Ingold 2000, p.155)... decisions and actions emanate from being in situ and occur sponte sua. Here, the efficacy of action does not depend upon some pre-thought plan of action but results from internalized predispositions that facilitate continuous timely and ongoing adjustment and adaptation to local circumstances.
p.8 What is crucial to the dwelling mode of explanation is that it acknowledges the primacy of tacit knowledge over explicit knowledge. It recognizes that such forms of tacit knowing are acquired through living within and becoming intimately acquainted with local conditions 'on the ground', and not from some detached observer's point of view. In other words, the dwelling mode of engagement presupposes possession of phronesis and/or metis. Actions are taken in relation to changes observed in a specific local context and not as a universal rule or principle. Moreover, such small local adaptations and the timeliness involved in doings are incremental and 'unheroic' so that they often go unnoticed.
p.8 phronetic action... is inseparable from a person's being and internalized predisposition. Someone with phronesis cannot help acting in the was he/she does... the most important aspect of phronesis... it is a culturally shaped and socially internalized modus operandi or habitus (Bourdieu 1990)
p.9 phronesis may indeed be an immanent, and socially distributed, strategic orientation which is enacted and re-enacted through the everyday coping actions of a collectivity.
Metis, on the other hand, is the kind of practical intelligence required to escape puzzling and ambiguous situations and is particularly applicable to those research settings that do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic (Baumard 1999), p. 65).
p.9 Yale anthropologist James Scott (1998) maintains that 'Knowing how and when to apply rules of thumb in a concrete situations is the essence of metis' (Scott 1998, p. 316, emphasis in original).
p.9 Both phronesis and metis point to the myriad ways by which strategy actors, finding themselves in a given situation, are still able to spontaneously and without much forethought transform unfavourable circumstances into favourable outcomes through their practical wisdom, alertness, resourcefulness and guile. When referring to phronesis and metis, researchers can distinguish the everyday purposiveness of absorbed practical coping action from the purposefulness of planned action (Chia and Holt 2006, p. 648). Both phronesis and metic intelligence are internalized predispositions inscribed onto material bodies that generate the propensity to act in a manner congruent with the demands of shifting material situations... they are particularly well suited for dealing with transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous situations.
p.11 Strategy as Practice consists of both visible and manifest purposeful activities and more mundane everyday practical coping actions.
p.12 attending to and dealing with the problems, obstacles and concerns confronted in the here and now may actually generate a surprising consistency of action that through hindsight may appear as a relatively stable pattern to which we might ascribe the label 'strategy'. In this sense, strategy may be latent or immanent in such everyday coping actions... at the periphery decision-makers develop a phronetic awareness of the local context and strategy making is largely improvisational; strategy slowly emerges through the internalized predispositions that actors refer to.
p.13 Often, strategy emergence in actual practice happens quite serendipitously and relies more on an initial opportunistic intervention or on deeply embedded and unconscious dispositional tendencies than on expressed meanings, intentions and choices... Only through an appreciation of how phronesis and metis actively shape strategic behaviour can we begin to follow more closely the twists and turns of everyday absorbed practical coping; the opportunism, reversals, ruses, duplicates, disguises and inventiveness that is entailed in strategic doing.
p.14 What is needed in Strategy as Practice research is a redirection of attention from the declared overt activities traditionally associated with strategizing to the subtle manoeuvres adopted by individuals, organizations and businesses over the course of dealing with pressing immediate concerns that threaten their survival, growth and development.
