Strategy, Intentionality and Success: Four Logics for Explaining Strategic Action

Strategic success is usually associated with having deliberate intentions, prior stated goals and a comprehensively formulated plan for effective execution. This way of thinking driven by means–ends logic underpinned the cognitivist assumption that conscious thought consequential reasoning drive action: such privileging over action endemic in strategic theorizing. Our purpose this paper to demonstrate plausibility other, pre-cognitive logics ‘intention’ as alternative explanatory bases success. We identify three their forms intentionality. A ‘logic practices’ views collectively shared habitus rather than cognition/deliberate intention basis action. situation’ emphasizes how situational momentum, tendencies affordances themselves contain ‘in-tensional’ impulses actively elicit appropriate responses. Finally, potential’ what Friedrich Nietzsche termed ‘will power’. It fourth logic, we suggest, becomes most effective. In will power, strategy entails relentless expanding degrees freedom from environmental constraints without presuming cognitive separation it.