ABSTRACT
Mintzberg and Waters’ (1985) work on deliberate and emergent strategy formation is one of the primary pieces of literature in what has been described as the ‘process’ school of strategy. This chapter adopts a process-based approach when examining entrepreneurship strategies. It elaborates a typology of strategy formation processes based on Mintzberg’s (1988) definition of strategy as a pattern in a stream of actions. The central themes and arguments are derived from a UK project (Gray and Gonsalves 2002), and build on Mintzberg and Waters’ idea that ‘emergent strategies imply learning that works’ to hypothesize a relationship between senior managers’ orientations to organizational learning, strategy making and environmental uncertainty. The chapter considers the methodological debate within entrepreneurial studies by attending to the structure-agency debate as duality rather than dualism. It also argues that a multidimensional approach to theorizing organizational learning will provide a more robust basis from which to deliver both diagnostic and normative models of learning within the field of entrepreneurship.
