Introduction

In this chapter, I explore the potential the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has to contribute to strategy-as-practice scholarship. For many, Wittgenstein was the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. His realization that the only satisfactory way to understand language was to understand the social life it enables provided a basis for what was to become the practice turn in social sciences. His work has informed a diverse set of social theorists, from Giddens (1984) to Bourdieu (1977) and Lyotard (1986), all of whom build on Wittgenstein's elaborate inquiry into the ontology of language as a social phenomenon that is rooted in practice. Like these theorists, I shall focus on the concept of the language game, the central theme running through the ‘late and middle periods’ in Wittgenstein's thought. I argue that the language game is a useful concept in making sense of strategy practice in a theoretical as well as a methodological sense.

While Wittgenstein's work has not been utilized to a great extent within the extant body of work on strategy as practice (but see Seidl 2007; Mantere 2013), at least two groups of scholars have used his concepts in their work within management and strategic management scholarship. The first group focuses on meta-theoretical concerns, as these researchers have found Wittgenstein's work on language games useful in studying the methodology, philosophy and ideology of the management sciences. A particular area of interest is the relationship between management scholars and practitioners (Astley and Zammuto 1992; Beyer 1992; Donaldson 1995). This scholarship characteristically uses the language game concept to examine the knowledge interest in management scholarship – that is, the issue of whether the task of management scholarship is to explain or understand phenomena, help managers or emancipate the oppressed (Rao and Pasmore 1989). Hassard (1988) uses language games to seek a solution to the challenge of paradigm incommensurability in the management sciences. Seidl (2007) examines the processes through which strategy labels give rise to a variety of organization-specific strategy concepts within organizational discourses. Holt and Mueller (2011) draw on the normative powers of language games in an effort to resolve methodological misunderstandings between critical realist and social constructionist organizational scholars.