Implications of the strategic agency of sociomaterial configurations for participation in strategy-making

The aim of this chapter is to answer calls for more studies on the role of materialities in enabling or restricting the participation of larger numbers of people beyond managerial ranks in strategy-making. Drawing on sociomateriality as a practice philosophical perspective, the chapter studies strategy-making in a community-based organization and explores how human actions and materialities interweave to enhance the participation of rank-and-file members in strategy-making. The results show how different sociomaterial configurations gain strategic agency in different phases of a strategy-making process and the implications of these for participation in strategy-making. The authors argue that it is not sufficient to focus on technologies or other materialities as such, and it is also necessary to acknowledge the whole sociomateriality of practices. Furthermore, they also argue that participation in strategy could be seen as a dialectic process of exclusion and inclusion.