Making competitiveness more meaningful – A practice approach

Policy-makers, politicians and practitioners over the past few years have based the narrative of competitiveness around the idea of ‘rebalancing the economy’. This entails viewing competitiveness as a rational process (through the Porterian lens) and identifies strategies from a top-down perspective. However, there is generally a lack of understanding of how competitiveness is practiced from the bottom-up. Therefore, this study adopts a practice-based perspective to investigate competitiveness from a practitioner’s standpoint. In this paper, 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. From a constructivist perspective data was analysed using thematic analysis, codes generated and inferences made. The main contribution is that the reflexive practitioners’ past experiences shape existing practices and perceptions of competitiveness.