Breaking organizational paths for strategic renewal: Towards a dialectical perspective

Strategic renewal is key to organizations' long-term success, but may be difficult to achieve if they are locked into a particular action path. Unfortunately, breaking organizational paths remains somewhat elusive due to a binary opposition in the strategic renewal literature between path breaking and path dependence, which hampers more complex process theorization. Asking what roles path breaking and path dependence exactly play in strategic renewal, we perform an in-depth case study of path-breaking interventions at fashion retailer Kiabi. This firm gradually moved from a path of disintegrative to integrative collaborative alignment between departments, whereby adaptive expectations regarding others' willingness to collaborate gradually improved. Chiefly, we find that strategic renewal is a function of two concurrent dialectics: 1) between path-breaking interventions and relapses into old path-dependent tendencies; and 2) between initiatives by upper management and their firm-wide implementation. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating that organizational path dependence, through managerial reflection and action, can be integral to path breaking, and, more broadly, strategic renewal. Furthermore, we extend common notions of managerial agency in path breaking by highlighting the involvement of various hierarchical layers, while, paradoxically, we relax the strong assumption of managerial agency that exists in studies on open strategy.