Strategy as Discourse: Its Significance, Challenges and Future Directions

摘要

Strategic management in organizations is to a significant extent discursive and rhetorical in nature. First, strategic management is a discipline - an institutional discourse -with a particular history. This discipline has developed its own social codes and knowledge that revolve around specific concepts (theories / models). These concepts are discursive constructions that both enable and constrain organizational strategizing and other action. The knowledge of these concepts has also become a symbol of profession-alization and competence in organizations, with important implications for organizational power relations and subjectivity construction. Second, strategizing in organizations is based on discursive and rhetorical work. This involves specific vocabularies, rhetorical strategies, storytelling, and metaphors. Also, it is through and within discourses that these two aspects of strategy practice the macro and the micro - are interlinked. At the macro level, the pervasive discourse of strategy and its status as a symbol of profes-sionalization give it an institutionalized presence. At the micro level, this discourse is enacted, reproduced and modified through the everyday practice of strategic actors. This interplay between macro and micro strategy discourses is not simply a theoretical abstraction but has consequential effects for how strategy work is done.