The influence of external actors on strategic activities

Abstract

The environment where the organizations operate in is saturated with different actors influencing their actions. This means that the actions taken by the organizations are quite often consequential to the interaction between these external actors and the organizations. Further, this interaction is rarely unintentional, and thus the actions of the organizations should not be examined in isolation from each other, but with the assumption that the interaction is a bidirectional process. Simultaneously traditional branches of strategic management have faced criticism, often based on the argument that they have neglected the influence of individuals, and concentrated too much on the industry-level company performance, founding the examination on the analytical assessment of that performance. This has influenced the emergence of a new field of research, called strategy-as-practice. This field aims to explain how the strategizing done by the organizations unfolds as a social practice, i.e., to examine strategy as something that is done by the organizational members. By combining these two viewpoints, the influence of various external actors on the strategic actions of the organizations, and the strategy-as-practice perspective as a theoretical foundation, this study aims to find out what are these external actors, and how exactly they influence the shaping of strategy within small Finnish technology organizations. Based on the results of this study, four groups of external actors are recognized. Further, regarding the interaction between these external actors and organizations, it seems that a common feature is the informality of the interaction. Respectively, the consequences of this strategizing, or the outcomes, seem to vary depending on the external actor, and the nature of the strategizing.