Bottoms up! – understanding competitiveness through the practice lens

Competitiveness policy has been firm-centred, standardised, incentive-based and state driven. In other words, a top down approach to competitiveness policy is been applied. This paper attempts to take a bottoms-up approach to understanding competitiveness policy. 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. The research employs a constructivist perspective to collect and analyse qualitative evidence from practitioners’ will benefit the understanding of how competitiveness is actually played out in real life. The main contributions are that reflexive practitioner’s lived experiences shaped existing practices and opinions of competitiveness. Individual practitioners when practicing strategy in their respective fields have different competitive thresholds. The struggle of becoming a competitive practitioner has bearings on being a competitive practitioner. The struggles behind becoming what they are justify the rationality behind the passive adoption of top-down policy. Three distinct threshold of competitiveness are presented: survival, progressive and strive