The mission of the SAP Interest Group is to create a developmental community for academics and practitioners who wish to advance knowledge and understanding of strategy as something people do rather than something organizations have. We aim to offer opportunities for lively and stimulating engagement to scholars sharing this interest.

1. Enable the growth and visibility of a body of scholarship that is showing significant potential for scholarly contribution in opening up a venue for exploring activities of organizing, strategizing, and entrepreneuring as they are practiced within and across organizations
2. Enable further development of an emerging community of international scholars
3. Meet the development needs of this community of scholars through recognizing and advancing their particular methodological and epistemological traditions
4.  Increase the vibrancy of the Academy through a body of scholarship that enables connections to, yet has no exact overlap with, many other AoM Divisions and Interest Groups

The SAP Interest Group is a diverse community that values a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. What unites its members is a shared conviction that management and organization studies can be advanced by focusing on the processes and practices that constitute the everyday activities of organizational actors, and by relating these activities to broader organizational and societal outcomes. This focus allows researchers to reassert the agency of actors and to critically interrogate assumptions that are often taken for granted within management and organization studies.

With its emphasis on the work of organizational actors such as strategists, managers, employees, consultants, and other external constituents, the SAP Interest Group is particularly interested in the generic practices through which organizing, strategizing, and entrepreneuring are accomplished, such as through planning routines, discourse, and the use of tools. Methodologically, this research orientation raises specific challenges, especially with regard to achieving sufficient closeness to practitioners. In response, the Interest Group encourages methodological innovation, including collaborative and mixed-method designs, action research interventions, as well as video-based and narrative approaches.

Theoretical pluralism is likewise encouraged, alongside an explicit recognition of the potential contributions of a broad range of sociological and organizational theories, including practice-based approaches, institutional theory, discourse analysis, sensemaking, routines, and cognition. At the same time, the linkage to broader outcomes remains a central concern. Ultimately, it is necessary to connect the outcomes of multiple activities, events, and behaviors within organizations to organizational and institutional contexts and, where appropriate, to broader societal outcomes.

The SAP Interest Group was proposed and inaugurated by Julia Balogun, Paula Jarzabkowski, and Richard Whittington in 2009. The first elections took place in summer 2010 and a formal Steering Committee was subsequently established. Over the years, the Interest Group has continually been reviewed and reapproved by the Academy of Management. Our continued success depends on the activity of our membership at and, equally so, beyond the AOM Annual Meeting. So if you want SAP to be successful, please submit your work for presentation at the Annual Meeting to us and become an engaged member!