Material artifacts: Practices for doing strategy with ‘stuff’

This paper addresses the dearth of research into material artifacts and how they are engaged in strategizing activities. Building on the strategy-as-practice perspective, and the notion of epistemic objects, we develop a typology of strategy practices that show how managers use material artifacts to strategize by a dual process of knowledge abstraction and substitution. Empirically, we study the practice of underwriting managers in reinsurance companies. Our findings first identify the artifacts pictures, maps, data packs, spreadsheets and graphs that these managers use to appraise reinsurance deals. Second, the analysis of each artifact's situated use led to the identification of five practices for doing strategy with artifacts: physicalizing, locating, enumerating, analyzing, and selecting. Last, we developed a typology that shows how practices vary in terms of their level of abstraction from the physical properties of the risk being reinsured and unfold through a process of substituting. Our conceptual framework extends existing work in the strategy-as-practice field that calls for research into the role of material artifacts. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.