Dr Violetta Splitter

I am the Official Fellow and Tutor in Management at St Peter’s and an Associate Professor in Strategy at the Saïd Business School. I joined St Peter’s in March 2024 after being an Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich and a guest professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin.

Teaching

At St Peter's, I give tutorials in General Management, and I am the lecturer for Undergraduate Strategic Management at Saïd Business School. to first-year students. At the Saïd Business School I am the lecturer for the Undergraduate Strategic Management course as well as other strategy-related courses to MBA and executive MBA students.

Research

I am interested in sociologically oriented management and strategy research. Within these broad fields of study, my research focuses on a new organizational trend towards more inclusive and ‘open’ forms of strategy making (often referred to as ‘Open Strategy’), and its implications for the social dynamics of strategy work. Empirically, I examine this trend by using ethnographic methods. For example, as a non-participant observer, I followed an inclusive strategy process over seven months at an international financial institution in which frontline employees were asked to develop the corporate strategy. Theoretically, my research is informed by social practice theories (such as Bourdieu or Giddens), which allow me to focus on the actual doings and practices of strategy work as well as its social dynamics (e.g., in terms of power relations, influence, or control).

With my background in sociological practice theories, I am particularly interested in the practices of strategy-making. The new trend towards more inclusive, open strategy-making gave rise to new strategy practices, such as crowdsourcing, blogging, or strategic decision-making by frontline employees. These new, open strategy practices are likely to change our (traditional) understanding of strategy dramatically because they are no longer based on the premises of top-down decision-making, exclusiveness, and secrecy. After all, Open Strategy questions the functioning of established power relations, hierarchy and control in conventional strategy making.

Select recent publications

V Splitter, D Seidl, R Whittington. 2024. 'Getting heard? How employees learn to gain senior management attention in inclusive strategy processes.' Strategic Management Journal.

Langenmayr, T., Splitter, V., Tienari, J., & Vesa, M. (2024). Moving from the Business Case Towards an Equity-Based Approach: Theorizing Diversity and Inclusion in Open Strategy. Organization Theory, 5(3).

V Splitter, P Jarzabkowski, D Seidl. 2023. 'Middle managers' struggle over their subject position in open strategy processes.' Journal of Management Studies 60 (7), 1884-1923.

V Splitter, L Dobusch, G von Krogh, R Whittington, P Walgenbach. 2023. 'Openness as organizing principle: Introduction to the special issue.' Organization Studies 44 (1), 7-27