Abstract:

This paper examines how strictness becomes strategically consequential in a large UK Pentecostal megachurch by conceptualising it as taken-for-granted categorisation work. Religious organisations remain underexplored in strategy research because strategic action is often narrated as calling, obedience, or discernment rather than managerial intent. Drawing on Strategy-as-Practice (SaP), organisational identity, and categorisation theory, the paper addresses how routine boundary-maintaining practices shape organisational direction in a legitimacy-sensitive setting.

The study adopts an interpretivist qualitative single-case design focused on Alpha Church, a UK Pentecostal megachurch. Data comprise 21 semi-structured interviews with staff and volunteers, participant observation, and documentary and artefact analysis. This design enables close examination of how everyday routines are enacted, normalised, and made consequential in organisational life.

The findings show that Alpha Church’s identity is organised through category-based, relationship-based, and attribute-based claims, with category-based claims dominating and setting the boundaries of legitimate action. Within this identity structure, strategy is enacted as spiritual practice: decision-making is guided by discernment, faith, and spiritual authority rather than primarily by cognitive-analytic reasoning. Strictness is not framed by participants as a deliberate growth lever. Instead, it is reproduced through taken-for-granted routines such as training-as-discipleship, membership gatekeeping, leadership selection, corrective practices, and identity-protective non-compromise. These practices repeatedly clarify “who we are,” stabilise category boundaries, and sustain recognisability under expansion pressures.

The paper makes three contributions. First, it extends SaP by showing that strategically consequential activity may be embedded in mundane identity-sustaining routines rather than in formal strategy episodes. Second, it specifies consequentiality as an identity-filtered mechanism through which some practices acquire strategic weight because they preserve category clarity and prevent drift. Third, it reframes strictness in the sociology of religion: rather than viewing strictness only as free-rider control, it shows how strictness operates as enacted boundary infrastructure that organises membership, legitimacy, and scalable growth through spiritual rationalities. Overall, the study broadens understanding of where strategy resides, how rationality is organised, and how legitimacy-sensitive organisations maintain coherence while expanding.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Strategy-as-Practice

Keywords: Strategizing;Strategy activities;Strategy practitioners;Strategy tools;Strategy-as-practice

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Dr. Ayodeji Makinde