How do industry actors appropriate a rising trend to their strategic advantage while their participation and interaction propels and sustains such a trend? Central to this question lies one undertheorized question of the embeddedness of strategic work and two methodological challenges of capturing the embeddedness empirically. Guided by the social practice theory, this study aims to make a case for social practices as a unit of analysis and a locale where strategic work is observed as a bundle of practices. Based on an ethnographic study, this paper demonstrates embeddedness as one focal actor—technology ventures—enacts, participates in, and responds to practices shared by various actors—incumbents, intermediaries, and industry media—across differing locales of discourse, social, and collaboration in their strategy formation process as digital innovation gained its popularity in the insurance industry. The study explains what embeddedness means in strategy research, highlights the notion of knowing in doing practices, and demonstrates how a social practice approach can be a valuable tool for understanding emerging and large-scale phenomena.
