The Roles and Relevance of Strategy Professionals in Large Organizations: Session 1646: Embeddedness of Organizational Actors and Strategic Outcomes

Although strategy often recognized as a profession, the ambiguity of required expertise, variety of involved actors’ identity, and dependence of professional conduct on organizational context challenge the professionalisation of strategy. Moreover, the multiplicity of roles that corporate strategists perform points out to the potential of intraprofessional division of labour while strategic management literature often treats corporate strategist as a homogeneous group of organizational actors. This study aims to understand the roles and relevance of corporate strategy professionals. We report a longitudinal case study of four strategy teams in a large telecommunication organization Telco. Our study suggests the heterogeneity of strategy teams and identifies attributes of intraprofessional status differences. Besides that, we demonstrate how jolts in the strategy-making process effect perceived intraprofessional status of strategy teams.