World Media Economics and Management Conference 2016

Strategic media management is predominantly focused on market positing and strategy implementation. However, in times of unforeseeable change, we need new, more dynamic concepts and understandings to tackle emergent complexity. Therefore, we build on the literature of strategy-as-practice and organizational complexity to form a lens for capturing strategy emergence. To investigate this phenomenon empirically, we analyze the case of a large European print magazine publisher that needs to deal with continuous change. Our research questions are: (1) How do individual actors in the company perceive emergent change? (2) What can they do, to ensure continuous success of the organization? We uncover that journalists and managers struggle with finding and creating a new strategy, but identify possibilities to manage strategically on a short-term basis. Managers and employees actively inquire and then cope responsively in local contexts. From those insights, we propose that the concept of strategic recursiveness supports our knowledge of how to act strategically when facing rapidly evolving situations. Our study contributes to the literature on strategic media management by providing a framework for understanding and working with emergent complexity.