ABSTRACT
The organizational literature offers many different, and at times contrasting, definitions of strategy. Depending on the conception of the organization, views of what strategy means thus have similarities and areas of convergence with the approaches taken to organizational goals and rationality. In the system-centered approach, the organization’s goals can be fully determined a priori, and strategy is formulated before it is implemented. Formulation starts from an analysis of the organization’s environment to identity general trends: economic, political, social, demographic. In the actor-centered approach, the strategies, like the identities of the individual and collective actors, separated from practice – a social skill – that all initiates to a culture end up sharing unwittingly and unintentionally as a consequence of their daily interactions. Strategy concerns the series of decisions that partially preorder which of the various possible behaviors should be adopted for a given period of time, barring changes of mind and adjustments, in order to achieve the organization’s ends satisfactorily.
