A message from Virpi Sorsa, the SAP IG Program Chair

The Strategizing Activities and Practices (SAP) interest group invites intellectually bold and stimulating research for submission to the 79th Academy of Management’s annual meeting 2019, held in Boston (United States of America). Over the past few years, the SAP interest group has established an inclusive and diverse community that sheds light on the everyday practices and activities that constitute strategy work in the established and more contemporary organizations. Some of the key questions for the SAP interest group are what, when, why, and how organizational leaders carry out strategic work –and how this work matters.

“Understanding the Inclusive Organization”, the theme of the AOM 2019, is particularly relevant for SAP research. Organizations actively engage in consultation and co-strategizing with both internal and external stakeholders. In inclusive organizations strategizing consists of empowering employees and the public, working collaboratively across organizational and sectoral boundaries, and finding ways to work together to solve problems and implement solutions. This may be called as “Open strategizing” in SAP research and such strategizing promotes transparency and inclusion, external and internal visibility of information about an organization’s strategy as well as inviting different stakeholders to voice their views and engage in finding meaning in organizational activities. Open strategizing challenges those conceptions of strategic management that emphasize secrecy over transparency, competition over cooperation, and mystification and technologization over concretization and communication. Thus SAP is calling for a new wave of scholarship that not only enriches extant theories but also develops new concepts and frameworks. The thematic stance of AOM 2019 therefore, offers a particularly exciting opportunity to develop SAP research toward understanding the inclusive organization!

We encourage the submission of conceptual and empirical studies that focus on the specific conference theme, works that address other issues within the general domain of the SAP Interest Group and those that explore the intersections of SAP with fellow divisions such as BPS, OMT, ODC, RM, TIM and MOC. We also warmly invite symposia that seek to change the conversation on existing scholarly approaches and develop new questions and ways of looking at phenomena. Keeping the importance of “Understanding the Inclusive Organization” in mind, we strongly encourage the submission of manuscripts that appeal to wider audience beyond the SAP community by building linkages with other divisions and interest groups.

The submission deadline for the 79th AOM Annual Meeting is Tuesday, January 15, 2019 at 5:00 PM ET (NY Time). Paper and symposia submissions must be made through the AOM Submission System (opens late November 2018). Please carefully review all the submission information and formatting instructions especially before submitting symposia. The scholarly program takes place from Sunday, August 11 through Tuesday, August 13.

Last but certainly not the least, allow us to emphasize that strong scholarship requires good reviews. Reviewing peers’ works is a fundamental process through which knowledge advances in a community. If you are submitting to the SAP Interest Group this year, please also consider reviewing for SAP! For more information on Strategizing Activities and Practices, kindly please visit the SAP Interest Group website.