CEO PRACTICE: TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK OF PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

This qualitative inquiry makes a credible contribution to knowledge by considering the past, the present and the future a small cadre of CEOs as they dwell, transition and manoeuvre within emerging sociomaterial practices. The researcher, who has taken a similar path and is largely an invisible participant, gives this inquiry a particular, if biased, piquancy. Essentially, the work examines, why and how CEOs engaged and learn to play the business game and lead. It unveils, in its visceral animus, something of what really goes on and what-it-is-like-to-be-there withiin the dynamics of strategic conduct.
Ontologically, the inquiry takes a process stance on being and becoming and, in epistemology, a practice-based, temporal framework. It is not overly concerned with theory development, but rather with embodied, sociomaterial practices, where it emphasises CEO dwelling and continuing doings in the temporal, lived -‘felt’- world.
The findings suggest the essential impact of contingent interruptions and their affordance in business. The CEO must sense, make sense of, clarify, give meaning to and manage these opportunities as they unfold. This draws attention to how the past and future are brought into the present, where suffused in identities, sensibilities and emotions this temporality culminates in ‘know how’. Put otherwise, a practical intelligibility and understandings that combine in unaware routines and deliberate intentions, creating teleoeffective performance. Here, and in the functionalities of their job, despite their idiosyncratic backgrounds, CEOs share more than divides them.
The CEOs are revealed as competitive, combative, somewhat self-centred, yet caring works in progress. They are often besieged by capricious and captious doings, when entangled within anticipated but unknowable outcomes. What is certain is that there is no such thing as a subjective or emotionally free space in strategic conduct.