Beyond Adaptation: Advancing Shaping-Oriented Approaches to Strategy

Most current mainstream strategy paradigms are dominated by narratives of “adaptation” and “fit” with an expected future environment. This symposium answers calls for incorporating a “shaping the environment” sensibility into strategy paradigms and explores the implications of shaping-orientation for firms as well as societies at large. Considering observations that prevailing theoretical paradigms, behavioral assumptions, and research methods pose structural challenges for advancing a shaping-oriented discourse, this symposium aims to explore ways of infusing a shaping-orientation into mainstream strategy literatures. The four presenters, experts and prominent voices in the field of strategic management and organization theories in general, approach the topic of shaping orientation from diverse paradigms, perspectives, and theoretical streams. Overall, they propose ways in which current models of strategy-making need to be, and could be, revised to enable scholarly engagement with a shaping-orientation. ...