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How do clients manage external expertise in strategy-making? This question poses a challenge to numerous large corporations who employ highly specialized consultants at various levels and areas to help them strategize. While existing literature tends to focus on the consultancy side of the consultant-client relationship, how clients manage consultants through their everyday practices remains neglected. Building on a practice perspective, we address this lack of research by investigating how the client, through what we articulate as participation tests, manages the external consultant's participation in strategizing. Empirically, we draw on a one-and-half-year ethnographic study conducted in a large global manufacturing company, BEM. We theorize three participation tests that were embedded in the everyday practice of the client's management of consultants. These include introducing competition, scrutinizing consultants' work, and regulating the availability of information and physical access. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it contributes to the existing literature on the consultant-client relationship by proposing that participation tests are catalytic for the accomplishment of strategizing with external actors. Second, the findings problematize considering the client as either active or passive when engaging consultants. The client's everyday testing of the consultant is ongoing and consequential in comprising the consultants' authority as opposed to a general understanding of consultants as those who rationalize organizations. This understanding ascribes greater agency to the client than previously considered, and has implications for how to consider the role of clients in consulting engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aspires to contribute new insights to how strategist, assigned with writing strategy formulations in text, engage practices for concretizing abstract strategy discourse into fixated strategy formulations. In doing so, it reports the findings of an involved ethnography, following a project striving to formulate a grand strategy for digital transformation as they organize around the production of a strategy document. The paper thus explores how the strategizing process is influenced by an iterating artifact, as it becomes the locus of practitioners' strategizing activity through steering committee meetings and subsequent writing team meetings. In total, this paper builds on the strategy work leading to the production of 14 iterations of a strategy formulation document. The paper finally theorizes six practices of accepting, ignoring/avoiding, rephrasing/adjusting, illustrating, condensing and hijacking, that the writers engage as they discuss how to write the forthcoming iteration. Additionally, it elucidates that these practices are also consequential for how the writers challenge strategy discourse already as it is conceived on steering committee meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute new insight into how framing is involved in strategizing in situations of ongoing change. It examines how practitioners' strategy framing efforts constantly combine and (re)construct elements of past and current strategy proposals in a multi-episode setting over time. The paper furthermore responds to calls for more practice-based research on how information system strategists and practitioners frame and pitch strategic issues and initiatives. The article thus reports the findings of an ethnographic field study of strategizing for digital transformation within a large manufacturing company, showing how information system practitioners constantly reframe past strategy initiatives to gain support to new strategy proposals. It contributes to understanding of how framing in strategizing under ongoing change constantly draws upon, add distance too and even reconstruct framing elements of past strategy initiatives. The study examines these framing dynamics as they unfold over three consecutive, seemingly distinct processes of strategy formulation for digital transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]