Bricolaging Knowledge and Practices in Spatial Strategy Making

This book chapter is included in the book “Making Strategies in Spatial Planning. Knowledge and Values” edited by Cerreta M., Concilio G., Monno V. and published in 2010 by Springer (Dordrecht). It tries to look at strategy making by abandoning the vision of strategy as an end-product and also considering that the future is changing along the path from present to future which means that it cannot be known in advance. Therefore the chapter is aimed at reframing the concept of strategy making. The attempt to re-conceptualize strategy making starts from considering modes for complex organizations to develop a strategy by using, producing and appropriating knowledge and practices while composing knowledge and practices in a coherent whole towards a needed change. In the first part, this chapter, explores the connection between knowledge and action in strategy making, recognizing that knowledge and action are linked together by a mutual framing dependency. Being embedded in social relations, routines, and day-to-day practices, knowledge cannot be moved towards the planning action; it is rather action that needs to be developed inside those spaces of the organization where knowledge is available for use, i.e. is actionable. Referring to strategy making, such spaces are identified as strategic episodes through which organizations appropriate knowledge and practices while testing them against a needed change. Strategy is seen as a dynamic entity evolving together with the organizational structure and is described as the dynamic product of a bricolage activity: resources for the bricolage are knowledge and practices explored and internalized by the organization with respect to a needed change. In the second part the ‘story of a strategy’ is described and analyzed: it refers to the planning experience carried out in Torre Guaceto, a Natural Reserve in southern Italy. This experience shows clearly that strategy is not a predetermined entity and that the organization does not know a-priori what its future will be. The strategy, in Torre Guaceto, is a bricolage product of diverse resources: knowledge and practices developed in very particular organizational spaces, defined as strategic episodes, where an organization is forced to re-think itself against and towards a needed change. Finally, the chapter considers the possibility to look at strategic episodes as spaces for the micro-foundation of strategy and opens a small perspective for further research towards other micro-foundational aspects or spaces in strategy making.