This insightful and innovative book proposes a new theory of socio-material weaving for studying and understanding family business. It dissolves the family business into activities, constituted of the sociality of human interactions and relations and interwoven with materials that extend in both a bodily-lived and spatial existential sense.

Building on hermeneutic phenomenology, Mona Ericson explores a new approach to the field, which shifts focus away from entitized conceptions of family business contexts. Building on a ‘being-in-the-world’ understanding, the book emphasizes human entwinement with activities in amongst materials. Chapters draw insights from research on the social and the material, exploring the field through five unique stories that illustrate the intertwinement of family business activities and materials associated with buildings and land. Taking a critical stance towards systems-oriented family business research, Ericson weaves together the social and the material in association with narrative truth.

An innovative and imaginative exploration of an established field of study, this book is crucial reading for scholars, researchers and graduate students of family business, opening up new ways of approaching the field in scholarly work. It will also benefit practitioners through practical insights into the challenges family business owners face when establishing and managing business activities.

Drawing inspiration from classical music, this article introduces a musical metaphor - the fugue - to capture a flow of strategic activities, highlighting the motion aspect. This particular metaphor connotes dynamism, constituted in themes, which are repeated, expanded and varied through human voices and their communication. By giving voice to people who share and participate in globalization, internationalization and customization related to the efforts of a company to grow continuously, elevating movements inherent in these activities, a fugue is composed. As argued in the article, there is potential in ‘musicking’ interpretation of human activity. The fugue metaphor could assist our efforts to methodologize strategy process as dynamic multi-direction and multi-voice construct. While directing more attention to a musical, arts-based form of communicating research we could be able to listen more carefully to the moves inherent in a flow of human activity.

This paper suggests an approach to practice that takes into account ‘hermeneutical situatedness’, calling attention to history as a living tradition to which a human being always relates and belongs. Practice scholars, mainly concerned with increasing the degree of ‘realism’, tend to ignore the importance of bringing in a philosophically oriented discussion with reference to the relationship between self and world. Although the aspect of historical embeddedness of practice is considered, the question of how people live in history is not addressed. The paper is informed by the basic assumption that the individual and the world are internally interrelated through the individual’s lived experience of the world, and opens the window for an understanding of practice that dissolves the dualistic relationship between self and world, actor and activity. It focuses on activity as a way to describe practice and refers to the intersubjective relation in social interaction among people. Empirically, the paper directs interest to a world of practice with reference to a business that started up in the early 1920s and about 80 years later received the label, ‘a corporation with global presence’.

Business growth is related to developmental growth, which in turn is connected to the dimension of learning. Developmental growth is exposed by and manifested in complex, interconnected human acticvities that reflect social practice in terms of encounters between people. Extending the process-oriented growth literature that focuses on linear explanation of development and change, the thrust of the argument is that growth is 'lived' and cannot be considered an 'object' that presides over the individual. The concept of business growth as 'lived' growth is explored via a musical metaphor. The fugue is used to capture the dynamics inherent in business growth, asserting itself in themes that constitute multifaceted, interwoven activities affording dynamically varying movements. Empirically, the book directs interest to a world of practice with reference to a business that started up in the early 1920s and about 80 years later was presented in the annual report as a corporation with global presence.

Purpose: Studies of strategic change are mainly characterized by a linear time view, treating time as a variable, a package of narrative events or as a path that the organization ‘travels’ over time. The purpose of this paper is to move beyond this view providing an alternative, nonlinear conception of time.

Design: Framed by the logics of consequence and appropriateness an empirical example of strategic change within the Scandinavian consumer co-operation is given, illustrating the exploration of business opportunities and the exploitation of socially and historically rooted values and principles. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics a qualitative method is chosen, the basis on which the empirical material through interviews and documents is generated.

Findings: The empirical study illustrates that the logic of consequence communicates with the logic of appropriateness in a nonlinear manner while interrelating the future and the past. The exploration of business opportunities shapes the past, which is brought to light when opportunities are expressed through the present, continuously forming and reforming the present and in turn shedding new light on the past.

Values: Although various forms of intellectual bridging and transfer are encouraged within the field of strategic management, notably lacking are studies that focus on time. This paper brings to the fore an alternative conception of time. It acknowledges the past in its hermeneutical significance when ascribing the past a dynamic repetitive role.

In recent years, corporate accounting scandals have received considerable media attention, raising concerns about unethical practice in the business world. Faced with a decline in society's trust in business, research into the ethics of organisations and their leaders is now of critical importance. In this timely book, Ericson focuses on the moral human agency involved in business by leading the reader through the full span of the activities involved in coffee production, from-bean-to-cup. Illustrating the ethical implications and opportunities involved in producing Löfbergs coffee, Ericson highlights the importance of the morally-imbued connections made between practitioners and other participants. These activities can contribute to a sustainable, profitable and competitive future whilst, at the same time, accounting for justice through a reciprocity of mutual benefit, respect and meaning. Promoting the reintroduction of ethics in strategy research, this book will be of great interest and use to strategy researchers, business leaders and sustainability directors. Promotes a reintroduction of ethics and morality into business strategy and practice, at a time of growing public concern regarding the unethical practices of the business world Utilises an engaging real-world examination of coffee production to illustrate the inclusion of ethics and morality across the full span of the strategy-practicing activities involved in producing Löfbergs coffee, from-bean-to-cup Combines an interdisciplinary range of conceptual approaches, including strategy as practice, moral philosophical and temporal relational perspectives. 

This paper accentuates the need to dedicate more interest to movement inherent in change. It introduces a polyphonic process view into strategic management theory. Inspired by the composer Bach (1685-1750), the paper affords an approach to the study of strategy process that assumes ontological interrelatedness between the individual and the world, and between the past and the future. The polyphonic character of the process is exposed and played out in to-and-fro movements of alternating and interweaving human voices. A polyphonic process view that captures a nonlinear flow of activities and dynamics at work on an individual level could be a valuable contribution to strategic management theory.

The paper aims to contribute to the advancement of our understanding of how strategy practice processually unfolds. It directs attention to temporal relationality, accounting for a philosophical contextualization of practice in the application of the lived experience perspective. As pointed out, practitioners entwine with activities that constitute a nonlinear fluid and open strategy process. It accords to future-oriented movements a dimension of a past, and a dimension of a future to past-oriented movements. What is crucial are not linearity, event, cause, and an entity that moves but present future-oriented and present past-oriented movements, chiseled out by nouns and verbs and their interlinks. Present–future and present–past orientations also account for the iterational, projective and practical-evaluative dimensions of temporal relationality.

To enhance our understanding of strategic decision making, one of the most central phenomena in organizations, it is important to direct attention to the making of decision and the making of sense in relation to compatibility, time and information, and emotion. Prior research on strategic decision making has tended to adopt an overly reductionist view of the process involved. Generally, studies of decision making treat judgment and choice equivalent and in reference to compatibility, it is pointed out that decision making concerns the pairing of input and output information in terms of sets of stimuli and responses used in a specific situation. A decision making process extends in time, offering a forward movement through the search of information, judgment, evaluation of information, and choice. ‘Cold’ cognition is emphasized in the neglect of emotion.

   The purpose of the paper is to reflect upon the making of decision and the making of sense in relation to compatibility, time and information, and emotion, paving the way for a sensed decision making approach. A sensed decision making approach could provide deeper insights into the complexity of managers’ decision making in the face of turbulence. When the world is characterized by complex problems and unpredictability with ambiguity and its corollary uncertainty a constant companion to social actions, there is a need to make sensemaking part of decision making. The sensed decision making approach suggested in the paper provides a linkage between compatibility and managers’ beliefs and expectations, and attributes time to retrospective as well as prospective sensemaking. In addition, the paper opens up for emotion while bringing to the surface self-correction in association with filtration of information through managers’ beliefs and expectations. The concept of ‘bounded rationality’, commonly employed in the strategic decision making literature, helps dealing with complex strategic problems. Nevertheless, situations emerge in which a manager exercises judgment using emotion, as the empirical examples presented in the paper indicate. When there is nothing like a déjà vu episode that could enforce a rational (or bounded rational) decision-making process but a vu jàdé episode where managers suddenly feel that their reality is no longer a rational, ordering system, ’sensed decision making’ is induced.

The paper addresses the issue of contextualizing entrepreneurship, and this with reference to the exploration of new opportunities by people working together, and the exploitation of historically and socially constructed ideas. Treated as a dynamic phenomenon entrepreneurship thus stretches between present, forward-looking and past, back-ward-looking activities and interaction. Empirically the paper directs attention to strategic renewal in consumer cooperation that over time has pursued the specific ideas of member influence and mutually organized self-help for the purpose of contributing to the development of a “happier mankind”. A happier mankind is based on “responsible entrepreneurship” that, rooted in humanistic and liberal tradition, entails business ethics, social involvement, quality assurance, supplier inspection and health care. Operations toward creating a society characterized by ecological sustainability are also seen to be of utmost importance and therefore included in responsible entrepreneurship. The democratic structure, which links ownership to membership, allows the members to contribute to this, and in the light of the movement toward the development of highly integrated chains in the Nordic market for consumer goods, the idea of the consumer, the owner-member, as the driving player is strengthened.

The paper also addresses a strategic dilemma. Exploring economic opportunities in the Nordic market for consumer cooperative retailing, at the same time exploiting consumer cooperative ideas implicate a strategic dilemma. A strategic dilemma concerns the exploration of economic factors, primarily associated with the generation of scale economies and the gaining of access to new markets and technology, and the exploitation of non-economic factors mainly attributable to membership democracy.

Dualisms have been widely adopted in academic work on strategic change. The attractiveness of dualistic thinking lies in the equilibrium it supposedly offers. Order is created by postulating a harmonious balance between contradictory phenomena. However, the theoretically and empirically interlaced discussion in this book indicates that strategic change is less about harmoniously balancing opposites than it is about repeating, in a new ‘voice’ belonging to the future, the values and principles of the past.

The book embraces strategic change as motions constituted by talk and action, delineating time-space between present, future-oriented, and present, past-oriented managerial talk and action. In an attempt to approach a dynamic understanding of strategic change, a philosophical dimension attributed to existentialistic hermeneutics is invited.

Empirically, attention is focused on corporate consolidation on the European retail market, in particular, with reference to the ongoing establishment of Coop Norden, the cross-border merger of three co-operative retailers.

To strengthen connections between the theory and practice of strategic human resource development (HRD), it is important to direct attention to human rationality. Taking both calculative rationality and emotion into account provides a much-needed theoretical framework for strategic HRD in a complex world. The hermeneutical concept of historicity with reference to living tradition - the contextual account of human rationality - is accentuated.

This article directs attention to strategy formation in environments that managers experience as turbulent, and focuses specifically on how managers make sense of contingencies in turbulent flows of events. By the help of poetry, the article opens up for a discussion on emotions and their influences on strategy formation. The dichotomy of rationality and emotion is also addressed, in prior strategic management research, in history and philosophy, and in relation to the cognitive and affective processes of human mind.

Purpose – To call attention to the relative neglect in strategic decision-making research to include a sense dimension, proposing a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision-making that accounts for the processes through which managers generate sense when exposed to turbulence in their environments.

Design – Based on scholarly writing and empirical-oriented examples, the paper illustrates how managers cope with unusual and unexpected situations, and discusses fruitful directions for future research.

Findings – When faced with turbulence, managers generate and communicate sense through believing in and arguing for a certain course of action, and through meeting talk and interaction that entwine with emotions. The focus on both retrospective and prospective orientation of action unfolds a sense dimension integral to which are belief and emotion.

Research implications – Important questions for future research concern the role ‘plausibility’ plays in strategic action, the relationship between retrospective and prospective orientation of action, and the information conveyed by emotions.

Practical implications – The paper could contribute to an increased awareness among practitioners that they can act effectively when coping with turbulence simply by making plausible sense, and encourage reconciliation between calculative rationality and emotion, in practice promoting their complementarity.

Originality/value – The paper affords a broadened conceptualization of strategic decision-making through interrelating scholarly writing on strategic decision-making, sense-making and emotion. It also draws inspiration from Polanyi’s (1966) work on tacit dimension and knowing, furthering an understanding of how retrospective and prospective orientation unfold in connection with a tacit relation, constituting a so-called sense-made reality.

The paper focuses on how growth develops as exposed through managerial activities. By directing attention to ‘developmental growth’, incorporating the aspect of learning, in terms of changes in managers’ actions and interactions, manifested in the variation and richness of activities, some contribution could be made to strategic management and activity-based research. Growth is amenable to an understanding that brings to the fore dynamic, process-relational thinking, inclusive of learning, and as argued in the paper, the focus on growth needs to be ingrained in an ontology that is particular sensitive to the social, historical, learning individual. The recognition of activities in multiplex interwoven formations, where the past is appreciated in its philosophical hermeneutical significance, is thought to pave the way for a dynamic conceptualization of growth.

To enrich conceptually the study of identity work, the paper directs attention to how identity-self constitutes in individuals' interactions and relationships. By using a narrative approach that includes Ricoeur's notions of idem and ipse, it elevates temporal dynamics of identity work with reference to the becoming aspect of the individual self in relation to the other. Idem identity denotes sameness and permanence through time and space, and ipse identity concerns selfhood in the sense of change and interrupted continuity. As pointed out, a Ricoeurian conceptualization of identity helps to extend our understanding of practical actions beyond individual character and traits. In consideration of both concordance and discordance in narrative structure, this conceptualization suggests a middle way between stability and variability, refraining us from relying on a narrative that presupposes a linear plot based on a causal-type model of occurrences to construct and maintain a stable and coherent personal identity.