121 /274
臺大管理論叢
第
27
卷第
4
期
121
To the Answering Shout of A Thousand Tents: The Practice of
Agenda-Setting in Strategy Workshops
Summary
This paper draws on a practice-based view to examine the articulation of agenda setting,
a key activity important to both strategy meetings and open strategy. To engage in strategic
agenda setting is to construct and articulate frames, discourse, or interpretations capable of
enabling individuals or participants to locate, perceive, identify, and label occurrences within
their life space and the world at large. They, in turn, can seek agreement in an open setting,
and thus craft solutions and promote collective actions.
The practice perspective has its roots in contemporary social theory, but has recently
received much attention in management and strategy studies. In general, practice research is
concerned with what people actually do to carry out their particular activities, often relying
on some wider social contexts but being sensitive to their institutional links at the same time.
Practice concerns the centrality of human activity and interaction with the workings of the
institutional context, often in the face of securing consensus and winning legitimacy.
Creative, strategic actions are possible because actors are potentially reflexive enough, and
with open and sufficient social systems, they are enabled to free their activity from mindless
reproduction of initial conditions.
Drawing on the practice perspective, in particular, the strategy-as-practice approach,
this paper will recognize strategizing as an activity individual actors perform in practice. We
study a key activity of strategizing—agenda setting, which is generally seen as important to
strategy processes or activities, including workshops, conferences, off-site meetings, annual
reviews, or reviews of budget cycles. These various kinds of strategy workshops (or ‘away
days’) are events, often within a wider strategy process, for which executives typically set
aside one or two days, frequently off site, to consider strategic issues. In so doing, they may
employ strategy concepts, analytical tools, and specialist facilitators to review and develop
strategy or plan its implementation. During these strategizing activities, agenda setting plays
an important role in enabling the participants to reach consensus, build new visions, and plan
collective actions—hence, agenda setting is a key strategic activity for professional
managers, project coordinators, and business leaders.
In terms of empirical application, we examine the practice of agenda setting by policy
Yung-Ching Tseng
, Assistant Professor, College of Management, Yuan Ze University
Shih-Chang Hung
, Professor, Institute of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University