Missing the point of the practice-based view

In this article, we address Jarzabkowski et al.’s strategy-as-practice criticism of Bromiley and Rau’s practice-based view as ignoring the “who” and “how” of practice implementation. Bromiley and Rau explicitly note that any statistical model under the practice-based view should consider mediating and moderating variables that depend on the specific practice and context but that the article would not attempt to identify such variables. Strategy-as-practice’s focus on the “who” and “how” of a practice are two of many such potential mediating or moderating variables. More fundamentally, strategy-as-practice scholars’ discomfort with the practice-based view may arise both from their different definitions of practice and their different approaches to strategy research. Without diminishing the strategy-as-practice’s contribution to strategy research, we argue for the additional value in the practice-based view’s call for systematic, large-scale, quantitative studies that establish the performance impact of specific practices across populations of organizations.