The international scientific journal Strategic Organization has chosen an article written by acting professor Saku Mantere as the best scholarly article of the year. Saku Mantere acts as professor in management and organization at Hanken School of Economics and is the first Finnish researcher to be distinguished by the journal with this honour.

The journal appoints annually the winner of the so called So!What Award among the articles it has published. The winner is determined by seeing how often the article is quoted and by judging the impact it has had on subsequent research. As the impact can only be measured with delay, the journal chooses the best article five years after each annual volume. Consequently, Mantere's article was already published in an issue of the 2005 volume. Mantere's article is praised, for instance, for being "a rich process study", and because his "impressive study also highlights the tremendous potential of rigorous qualitative work to contribute to our understanding of strategy." Mantere's research article builds on 301 interviews within 12 organizations.

The title of Mantere's article is "Strategic Practices as Enablers and Disablers of Championing Activity". Strategy research focuses typically on the top management level, but Mantere deviates from this trend. His article explores how an organization encourages or discourages other members of the organization than the top management to come up with motions that influence the strategy of the organization.

According to Mantere, there are persons that willingly take on more responsibility for the organization they are part of than what is expected from anyone in the same position. These persons typically present motions that apply to the organization on a wider scale, even though they themselves are not members of the top management. These persons may be extremely valuable resources and Mantere calls them "champions".

"It might be harder to champion strategic ideas at lower levels of the organization as the practices for presenting them might not exist. In this case, there is a chance that the organization cannot renew itself. All ideas may not be good, but it is important that the strategy of an organization allows possibilities to produce, develop and screen adaptable and useable ideas", says Mantere.

Strategic Organization is ranked as the second most influential journal within its field, following the Strategic Management Journal.

"Continuing the tradition of excellent practice research in Strategic Organization, in this paper Mantere pries open the black box of micro-practices that underlie strategy making and implementation in organizations. Through his rich, process study of "strategic champions", Mantere gets under the skin of strategy-as-practice and his findings provide fundamentally important insights into some of the reasons why strategy implementation succeeds or fails. In particular, he identifies enabling and disabling practices which support or thwart championing and connects them back to previous work on recursive and adaptive practices in the strategy-as-practice literature. Mantere's impressive study also highlights the tremendous potential of rigorous qualitative work to contribute to our understanding of strategy and stands as an example of best practice in qualitative research." Nelson Phillips, Imperial College

Web-addresses

Strategic Organization Volume 8 (2010) - Editors' Introduction

Strategic Organization

Saku Mantere