EXPRESS: Not All Are Created Equal: The Interplay Between Individual and Collective Agency in Collective Strategizing

Collective strategy has become increasingly important for bringing diverse actors together to address societal challenges, yet creating alignment between them remains difficult. As actors strategize collectively, they explore and experiment together, seeking to create alignment on a shared direction in what is initially a disordered situation. Drawing on a three-year process study of CareHub, an emerging collaboration developing an innovative neighbourhood-based healthcare service, we traced how actors navigate these tensions and how their individual and collective agency evolved dynamically as they did so. We identified six agentic moves, associated with either positional (granting mandate, relinquishing control, and constraining initiative) or peripheral (crafting emergent action, recovering bounded opportunities, and contesting authority) agency. Their intertwining shaped collective strategizing, despite the inequality in individual actors’ capacity to act. We extend the literature on collective strategizing by adopting a relational approach to show how different actors, including peripheral ones, mobilize agency and how their distinct forms of agency become intertwined in the process.