This proposal considers one of the key challenges of complex organizational settings and environments for strategy-making. When strategic decisions must be made, the question of how to orchestrate multiple, intertwined, and often conflicting logics of pooling and exploiting resources together, or action nets Czarniawka (2004, 2006, 2010), underlying firms’ competitiveness remains crucial. In this research, we argue that the ability of complex firms to develop a concrete way to effectively “muddle through” such situations, instead of working against conflicting logics, denying them or submitting to choice, is vital for their success. An in-depth case study of a European Global Biotech Firm in the vaccine industry – characterized by a number of sensitive strategic implications – provides the empirical grounding to explore the micro-foundations of this orchestration capability enhanced defined as the ability to enact coherence between multiple logics. The findings of this ethnographic study suggest that the orchestration capability is a process allowing a situated construction of strategy. In particular, we were able to identify three types of work that characterize its breadth dimension (Sirmon et al., 2011): the repairing, innovating and maintaining of meta-connections between action nets. These connections that we call strategic knots are the locus in which different action nets are constantly synchronized for greater competitiveness. Yet, strategic knots are never stabilized once and for all. They are the site of an on-going flow of knowledge enacted for some, being enacted and de-enacted for others.
