Strategic Practice Drift: How Open Strategy Infiltrates the Strategy Process

This paper builds theory on the process of open-strategy infiltration through an ethnographic study investigating how open strategy entered a financial services firm's strategy process behind the backs of top managers. Based on our analysis, we show how open strategy infiltrates the strategy process through a ‘strategic practice drift’, i.e., a gradual and partly unnoticed shift towards open strategy that occurs through ‘accommodating’ and ‘legitimizing’ the performance of transparency and inclusion in the strategy process. We show how the ‘goal-based ambiguity’ and ‘procedural certainty’ of initiatives that latently imply the performance of transparency and inclusion in the strategy process enable open-strategy infiltration. Furthermore, we show how top managers' ‘goal-based rationalization’ and ‘procedural renegotiation’ of practising transparency and inclusion contribute to the eventual reproduction of open strategy in the strategy process. Our model generates an understanding of how and why open strategy can enter the strategy process behind the backs of top managers and adds nuance to extant understandings of the role of top managers in this process. In addition, our findings contribute to research on strategy as practice by theorizing ‘strategic practice drifts’ and extending our understanding of the role of ambiguity therein.     

Evaluation recommendations for nonprofit social marketing campaigns: An example from the Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco‐Free Living

Nonprofit organizations with limited capacity and resources must be strategic when designing, implementing, and evaluating social marketing campaigns. The Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco‐Free Living, a nonprofit public health program, implemented a mass media campaign in 2012, with the goal of increasing advocacy for policy change around the smoke‐free movement. The campaign was accompanied by a mixed–quantitative evaluation that was grounded in the diffusion of innovations theory. The evaluation consisted of unique, yet complementary, analytical components, employing traditional survey methods to measure population exposure to the campaign and Google Analytics to segment campaign website visitors into actionable categories for future programmatic efforts. Results from this study demonstrate that the 2012 Tobacco‐Free Living mass media campaign was moderately effective in reaching its target audience and highly effective in using Google Analytics to identify a group of activists (i.e., innovators) in support of the smoke‐free policy change. This study offers several recommendations for nonprofit organizations to consider when implementing and evaluating similar social marketing campaigns.