Rebecca Bednarek

Paula Jarzabkowski

In 2015, Paula Jarzabkowski (Cass Business School) and Rebecca Bednarek (Birkbeck, University of London), received SAP’s Best Paper Award for their paper “Toward a Social Practice Theory of Relational Competing“.

Recently, their excellent paper has been accepted for publication in the prestigious Strategic Management Journal and is already available online. The research summary reads as follows:

This article brings together the competitive dynamics and strategy-as-practice literatures to investigate relational competition. Drawing on a global ethnography of the reinsurance market, we develop the concept of micro-competitions, which are the focus of competitors’ everyday competitive practices. We find variation in relational or rivalrous competition by individual competitors across the phases of a micro-competition, between competitors within a micro-competition, and across multiple micro-competitions. These variations arise from the interplay between the unfolding competitive arena and the implementation of each firm’s strategic portfolio. We develop a conceptual framework that makes four contributions to: relational competition; reconceptualizing action and response; elaborating on the awareness-motivation-capability framework within competitive dynamics; and the recursive dynamic by which implementing strategy inside firms shapes, and is shaped by, the competitive arena.

Check it out!