Internal and external inclusion in open strategy-making

As part of the general societal trend to more open organizing, strategy is increasingly opened up. This implies being more transparent and including a wider set of stakeholders. Organizations can open to internal or external actors representing different modes of inclusion. The selected mode of inclusion will affect the open strategy process. However, little research has addressed the choice of internal and external inclusion, and therefore, this study aimed to understand why organizations use different modes of inclusion in open strategy-making. The strategy-making process for the circular economy (CE) in three local governments was studied. These three cases used the same strategy practices for the same strategic issue but adopted different modes of inclusion, allowing to study what determined inclusion. The context was found to be the reason for preferring a different mode of inclusion, as the internal context determined the objectives for the strategy-making, resulting in the need for different actors to be included. This finding demonstrates the importance of considering strategy as three-dimensional, taking into account the strategy content, process, and context.