Beyond network pictures: Situational strategizing in network context Sari Laari-Salmela ⁎, Tuija Mainela 1 , Vesa Puhakka 2 University of Oulu Business School, Department of Management and International Business, P.O. Box 4600, FIN-90014, University of Oulu, Finland abstract article info Article history: Received 29 November 2012 Received in revised form 12 February 2014 Accepted 21 August 2014 Available online 11 March 2015 Keywords: Network picture Strategizing Sense-making Process research Mechanism The present study combines industrial marketing and purchasing research on network pictures with a practice perspective of strategy research to examine strategizing by small firm managers in a network context. Network pictures are framed to function as a part of a situational mechanism of strategy formation, a dynamic process of emergence at the intersection of cognitive interpretation and network-embedded acting. The situational mech- anism is presented and the theoretical framework further elaborated through a case study of three small software firms. As a result, the situational mechanism of strategy formation is discussed in relation to how small firm man- agers make sense of change in industrial networks and reflect it in the strategic activities of their firms. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Strategizing in network context is about making choices concerning relationships and networking, and strategic change implies major changes in these relationships (Mattsson, 1988). Strategy formation is a combination of deliberate and emergent sides of strategy: a combina- tion of management activities whose objectives are to cause changes, and that are reactions to the changes in the relationships (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995; Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 1998). As these activ- ities are part of the everyday lives of the firms embedded in network context, a key determinant in strategizing is the way managers, through enactment, make sense of their network surroundings, actions and interactions (see Weick, 1979). Strategizing, therefore, is a question of individual cognitions and the historical and situational grounds for stra- tegic activities in an ongoing process. There has been an increasing interest towards influence of manage- rial cognitions, called even a “cognitive turn” within industrial market- ing research during recent years (Geiger & Finch, 2010). Network pictures have risen as one of the most popular themes (Corsaro, Ramos, Henneberg, & Naudé, 2011; Geiger & Finch, 2010; Henneberg, Mouzas, & Naudé, 2006; Henneberg, Naudé, & Mouzas, 2010; Kragh & Andersen, 2009; Leek & Mason, 2009; Mouzas, Henneberg, & Naudé, 2008; Ramos & Ford, 2010, 2011; Ramos, Henneberg, & Naudé, 2012) that promise to provide the needed linkage from network context to a company's strategy (Ford, McDowell, & Tomkins, 1998). The concept of network pictures refers to the managers' mental representations of the contexts, capturing actors' views of their surroundings and the un- derlying subjective logic for managerial action (Henneberg et al., 2006). However, extant literature has to a large extent treated the con- cept of network pictures as decoupled from strategizing and the empir- ical evidence on the relationship between actors' network pictures and action is limited (Corsaro et al., 2011). The present study focuses on what it is that small firm managers see of their network context and how this is related to what they do. The limited knowledge on strategizing might be due to the fact that network pictures as snapshot-like representations of dynamic network context are not dynamic as themselves (Henneberg et al., 2006). The dy- namism comes through the sense-making as an enacted cognitive pro- cess in which the network picture as a cognitive frame is embedded. If we wish to understand and explain the strategic actions taken by indi- vidual strategists, we must be able to see beyond the network pictures: in what kind of context, as a part of what kind of mechanisms do the pic- tures operate? Similarly as we cannot understand the cause–effect rela- tionship between sand and traction without knowing whether there is ice or not (George & Bennett, 2005, 145–6), we cannot explain the effect of network pictures on strategic action without knowledge of the other conditions — and of the mechanism that produces the outcome. The present study focuses on this entwinement of network pictures and strategic action in strategy formation. The research question then is how network picture affects strategizing, and how strategic action in turn affects network picture. We use research on network pictures and sense-making to depict the linking of the strategist's cognition and strategizing embedded in the context of industrial networks. Meth- odologically, this study represents process research (see Pettigrew, 1997; Whittington, 2007) and builds on mechanism-based explanation (Sayer, 1992). Through in-depth study of the developments over time in Industrial Marketing Management 45 (2015) 117–127 ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 294 483 922. E-mail addresses: sari.salmela@oulu.fi (S. Laari-Salmela), tuija.mainela@oulu.fi (T. Mainela), vesa.puhakka@oulu.fi (V. Puhakka). 1 Tel.: +358 294 482 595. 2 Tel.: +358 294 482 946. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2015.02.010 0019-8501/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Industrial Marketing Management