As a distinct stream with Strategic Management, Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) is concerned with ‘what strategists do’ thereby creating rigorous, yet practically relevant knowledge that can inform strategy practitioners about their actual strategy praxis. In this paper we argue that SAP scholars should take the performativity of their research more seriously in order to avoid harm but also to facilitate the creation of more desirable futures. To do so, SAP scholars need to engage in ethical reflection by describing the implicit normative basis of strategy practices and by evaluating this normativity based on an ethical frame of reference. While SAP scholarship is aware of the normativity underlying strategy practices, they fall short in mobilizing ethical frames of reference required to evaluate this normativity. In this paper, we propose integrative ethics, grounded in a Kantian tradition of universalist ethics, as an ethical frame of reference for SAP. We unfold how scholarly praxis in SAP changes when ethical evaluation becomes an integral part of the research process and provide an orienting framework for ethical reflection in SAP research. We contribute to SAP research by developing a SAP framework for ethical reflection that allows SAP scholars to take a stance on what might constitute ‘bad strategy praxis’, thereby avoiding harm and doing good. Additionally, our framework allows SAP as a field to more closely connect to practice-based organization scholarship more broadly and to engage in value-led theorizing that is discussed as a crucial building block to contribute to desirable futures.
