Becoming Strategic in Small Businesses

Becoming Strategic in Small Businesses

Colleen E. Mills
ISBN13: 9781466659629|ISBN10: 1466659629|EISBN13: 9781466659636
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5962-9.ch009
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MLA

Mills, Colleen E. "Becoming Strategic in Small Businesses." Handbook of Research on Strategic Management in Small and Medium Enterprises, edited by Kiril Todorov and David Smallbone, IGI Global, 2014, pp. 160-179. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5962-9.ch009

APA

Mills, C. E. (2014). Becoming Strategic in Small Businesses. In K. Todorov & D. Smallbone (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Strategic Management in Small and Medium Enterprises (pp. 160-179). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5962-9.ch009

Chicago

Mills, Colleen E. "Becoming Strategic in Small Businesses." In Handbook of Research on Strategic Management in Small and Medium Enterprises, edited by Kiril Todorov and David Smallbone, 160-179. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2014. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5962-9.ch009

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Abstract

While strategy has been described as a plan or pattern of actions aligned to a conscious intent, it can also be conceptualised as the deliberate activities those in business engage in to realise a strategic intent. It is this activity oriented conception of strategy that is fuelling the turn towards practice in strategy scholarship. This chapter draws on this perspective and the ‘communication as constitutive of organisations' (CCO) perspective to explore what is involved in becoming strategic in an active and experiential sense in a small business. To do this, it uses illustrations from a series of studies of business startup or restart from the creative, ICT, and construction industries in New Zealand. The empirically-based synthesis presents strategic management in small businesses as a relational process producing a narrative infrastructure that weaves together episodes of strategy praxis to produce a coherent thread that ‘tells the firm forward' (See Deuten & Rip, 2000). The chapter finishes by briefly exploring the implications of this view for those seeking to become more strategic in small businesses.

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