Making competitiveness more meaningful – A practice approach

Policy-makers, politicians and practitioners over the past few years have based the narrative of competitiveness around the idea of ‘rebalancing the economy’. This entails viewing competitiveness as a rational process (through the Porterian lens) and identifies strategies from a top-down perspective. However, there is generally a lack of understanding of how competitiveness is practiced from the bottom-up. Therefore, this study adopts a practice-based perspective to investigate competitiveness from a practitioner’s standpoint. In this paper, Bourdieu’s habitus and reflexivity is used along with Maclean, Harvey and Chia’s notion of life history storytelling through the lens of sensemaking and legitimacy. From a constructivist perspective data was analysed using thematic analysis, codes generated and inferences made. The main contribution is that the reflexive practitioners’ past experiences shape existing practices and perceptions of competitiveness.

https://www.bam.ac.uk/civicrm/event/info?id=3013