New Media and Strategy Research: Towards a Relational Agency Approach

• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Ib T. Gulbrandsen,Ursula Plesner,Elena Raviola
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12213

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 22, 33–52 (2020)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12213

New Media and Strategy Research:

Towards a Relational Agency Approach

Ib T. Gulbrandsen, Ursula Plesner1and Elena Raviola2

Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark, 1Department of Organization, Copenhagen

Business School, Denmark, and 2Academy of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Corresponding author email: elena.raviola@gu.se

A rapidly growing body of literature focuses on the relationship between new media

and strategy, and offers recommendations regarding appropriate strategic actions in

relation to new media. This paper systematically reviews 130 articles with a focus on

the diagnoses they provide and the directions they offer strategists regarding the role

of new media in strategy.The analysis identifies four main ways of conceptualizing new

media in the literature: as forces in an increasingly turbulent strategic environment;

as changing the role of strategists; as tools for strategically engagingstakeholders; and

as both increasing and decreasing the control necessary for strategy making. These

conceptualizations are based on often-implicit assumptions about ‘agency’ in strategy:

new media are seen either as forces influencing strategy or as tools in the hands of

humans, who are portrayed as the agents of strategy. In both cases, new media are

black-boxed, such that their specific properties and ways of becoming embedded in

particular contexts are rarely examined. After discussing these assumptions and a

limited number of studies that challenge them, the paper develops an approach to

strategy and new media based on a relational understanding of agency, an attention to

technological affordances and a methodological sensitivity to tracing strategy-making

assemblages of human and non-human elements. Weargue that future research based

on this approach will advance our knowledge of strategy making in ways that do not

take new media for granted and ways that are attentive to different kinds of agency.

Introduction

In this paper, we argue for the need to pay closer

attention to the question of agency in strategy

research on new media. We draw on Manovich’s

(2001) definition of new media as software, hardware

and informational phenomena. Over the past decade,

new forms of software (e.g. Google, Facebook and

Wikipedia), hardware (e.g. smartphones, tablets

and touchscreens) and informational phenomena

(e.g. hyperlinking, collaborative editing and geotag-

ging) have made technology usage more dynamic,

applications more interactive and peer-to-peer com-

munication and exchange more direct (Gulbrandsen

and Just 2011; Plesner and Gulbrandsen 2015). In

this interpretation, new media can be thought of as

a subset of the broader category of digital technolo-

gies, which also includes production technologies,

robotics and artificial intelligence. The concept of

new media points to the ‘mediation’ aspect of digital

technologies by emphasizing their transformative

impact on messages, experiences and interactions.

Since the introduction of contingency theory

(e.g. Thompson and Bates 1957; Woodward 1958),

technology has been considered a determining

factor for organizational activities, including strategy

(see e.g. Abell 1980; Abernathy 1978; Anderson

and Tushman 1990; Cooper and Schendel 1976;

Foster 1985; Maidique and Patch 1988; Porter 1983;

Tushman and Anderson 1986). More contemporary

scholarship on new media also views technology as

important for strategy in such areas as e-commerce

(e.g. Buhalis 2004; Kim et al. 2004), stakeholder

relations (e.g. Straker and Wrigley 2016; Vallaster

and von Wallpach 2013), intra-organizational coor-

dination (e.g. Andersen and Foss 2005; Guinan et al.

2014), management (e.g. Esteves 2008; Koushik

et al. 2009), production (e.g. Arakji and Lang 2007;

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34 I.T. Gulbrandsen et al.

Lang et al. 2015) and communication (e.g. Hanna

et al. 2011; Lettice and Brayshaw 2007). New

media have implications not only for organizations’

strategic relationships with their customers and

users (e.g. Advani and Choudhury 2001; Segars and

Kohut 2001; Stace et al. 2005), but also for their

information sources (e.g. Trantopoulos et al. 2017),

ways of analysingstrategic environments (e.g. Lettice

and Brayshaw 2007) and conceptions of strategic

necessities (e.g. Molteni and Ordanini 2003). In

short, new media have transformed the process of

strategy making – they are used by strategists, are

found in boardrooms and executive suites, and have

opened up the strategy process to new participants.

This paper contributes to the exploration of the

role and effects of new media in strategy by review-

ing contributions to the field published in the top 20

ABS-listed journals from 2000 to 2018. We analyse

the literature with a focus on the ‘diagnoses’ schol-

ars provide regarding the new conditions for strategy

work and on the ‘directions’ they suggest strategists

should take on the basis of those diagnoses. We aim

to tease out the assumptions about new media on

which the diagnoses and directions rest. By ‘investi-

gat[ing] and challeng[ing] existing assumptions in a

field’ (Alvesson and Sandberg 2014, p. 982), we pave

the way for alternative routes of understanding.

Our analysis reveals that strategy scholarship on

new media generally treats new media as rather fixed

entities. They tend to be black-boxed and treated as

‘forces’ or ‘tools’ that have implications for strategy

work. Most articles published on strategy and new

media in the past 20 years fail to investigate hownew

media are constructed within and outside a given or-

ganization, or what ideologies they carry. Likewise,

the extant research rarely closely examines the prop-

erties or agency of new media. From our perspective,

this is a significant gap in the literature.

To go beyond the view of new media as simply

drivers of change, tools or mediators (Haefliger

et al. 2011), we propose an alternative theoretical

route to understanding strategy and new media: (1)

relying on a relational view of agency; (2) using the

analytical concept of affordances; and (3) adopting

an agnostic and symmetrical methodology for tracing

strategy-making assemblages. We are inspired by

recent scholarship on technology in organization and

management (see e.g. Czarniawska and Hernes 2005;

Leonardi and Vaast 2017; Mazmanian et al. 2014;

Orlikowski 2007) as well as strategy as practice

(see e.g. Jarzabkowski 2005; Johnson et al. 2007;

Spee and Jarzabkowski 2009; Whittington 2006) and

contributions to the British Journal of Management’s

special issue on materializing strategy and strate-

gizing materials (see Dameron et al. 2015). Such

contributions, which have an eye for the interwoven-

ness of the material and the social, offer innovative

and fruitful insights into strategy development and

implementation. However, the contributions focusing

on new media rarely deal with strategy, while those

about strategy have rarely focused on new media.

This implies that the relationship between new media

and strategy has not been sufficiently theorized in

these traditions (see e.g. Haefliger et al. 2011 or

Whittington 2015 for exceptions). We address this

gap by proposing a relational agency approach to

understanding the relationship between strategy and

new media. That is, as a relationship in which strategy

is constituted by how different configurations of ac-

tors (strategists, new media and other actors), which

create different possibilities for strategic action.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. First,

we describe our review method, including journal se-

lection, article search and analysis of the final sample.

Wethen present our analysis of the literature, which is

divided into four main themes. Based on the findings

of our analysis, we discuss the main gaps in the litera-

ture with a particular focus on the issue of agency and

we propose a research agenda based on a relational

view of agency.

Review method

Inspired by Crane and Glozer (2016), we chose a the-

matically driven method of selection, and decided to

include articles from different streams of business and

management literature, including strategy, organiza-

tion, general management and information systems

(IS). The topic of strategy and new media has been

addressed in each of these domains. As Crane and

Glozer (2016) note, the theorization of a given theme

may rest on various management disciplines. Crane

and Glozer (2016) turned to five different disciplines,

which they argued offered rich and diverse avenues

for exploring their topic. In our case, we found that

strategy, organization, general management and IS

speak to each other through cross-references, and that

they each contribute different approaches to strategy

and new media. The strategy literature often focuses

on new media as either a threat or an opportunity;

the organization and management literature typically

examines organizational dimensions of new media

usage; and IS research tends to study implementations

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