Strategy as a Practice of Thousands: The Case of Wikimedia

Research on strategizing focuses primarily on intra-organizational settings at the expense of external contributors. Against this background that this exploratory case study elucidates how strategy is practiced in the case of the Wikimedia organization in a collaborative fashion by literally inviting thousands of globally dispersed volunteers to contribute to strategy making. Hereby we complement existing strategy-as-practice approaches by reaching beyond organizational boundaries, including organized publics. We identify a sequence of practices enabling a genuinely collaborative strategy process. Finally, we call for recognizing the socio-materiality of practices for strategizing as is evidenced by the importance of technology for organizing organized publics.