Rethinking the concept of performance in strategy research: towards a performativity perspective

Abstract

Organizational performance is an important concept in strategy research. In this paper, we interrogate the predominant focus on organizational performance as an aggregate organizational-level dependent variable and review three ways in which its role might be fruitfully reconsidered: (1) broadening consideration of performance to more disaggregated levels of analysis, (2) orienting research around the idea of performance as both input and outcome and finally (3) recasting performance in terms of performativity. We provide examples of research that has adopted each of these alternative approaches. We then examine the contributions and drawbacks of each perspective, before proposing an agenda for future research.