Pikka-Maaria Laine

Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering group

We have seen growing interest in discursive perspectives on strategy. This perspective holds great promise for development of an understanding on how strategy discourse and subjectivity are intertwined. We wish to add to this existing research by outlining a discursive struggle approach to subjectivity. To understand the complex subjectification and empowering/disempowering effects of organizational strategy discourse, this approach focuses on organization-specific discourse mobilizations and various ways of resistance. Drawing on an analysis of the discourses and practices of ‘strategic development’ in an engineering and consulting group we provide an empirical illustration of such struggles over subjectivity. In particular, we report three examples of competing ways of making sense of and giving sense to strategic development, with specific subjectification tendencies. First, we show how corporate management can mobilize and appropriate a specific kind of strategy discourse to attempt to gain control of the organization, which tends to reproduce managerial hegemony, but also trigger discursive and other forms of resistance. Second, we illustrate how middle managers resist this hegemony by initiating a strategy discourse of their own to create room for manoeuvre in controversial situations. Third, we show how project engineers can distance themselves from management-initiated strategy discourses to maintain a viable identity despite all kinds of pressures. Although our examples are case-specific, we believe that similar discursive dynamics also characterize strategizing in other organizations.

Mastery, submission, and subversion: On the performative construction of strategist identity:

While research on strategy-making has begun to focus attention on identity construction, we nevertheless lack a critical understanding of the ways in which socio-historical understandings of strategy are (re)constructed at the level of identity. In this article, we draw on Judith Butler’s theorizing on performative subject formation—first to explore identity constructions grounded in the simultaneity of submitting to and mastering the socio-historical discourses of strategy and second to consider the subversion of discourses and identities enabled by this simultaneity. We distinguish between three performative identity constructions and demonstrate that by submitting to specific understandings of strategy discourses such as the illusion of control (the analytical strategist), omnipotence (the strategic leader), and personal glory (the state-of-the-art strategist), managers face the unattainability of these projects, which drives them to increase their mastery of the dominant discourses in order to win acceptance from others. Highlighting the dynamics of identity construction in strategy-making, we argue that subversion of the dominant discourses and identities is at best subtle. This enables us to better comprehend the persistence of dominant conceptions and related problems in strategy-making such as the overemphasis on technical rationality, anxiety in the face of uncertainty, heightened expectations of heroism, and the inability to engage in genuine dialogue with others and to consider broader social and societal issues as part of strategy-making.

The knowing body as a floating body

This article enriches practice-based studies on bodily knowing by conceptualizing the knowing body as a floating body. This concept accords epistemic value to two forms of bodily existence – waking and sleeping – that are considered to be intertwined and floating. Based on an auto-ethnographic study conducted in Finnish academia, we propose three different sensorial flows that the knowing body engages in when participating in organizational practices: sensory release, within-corporeality and sensory entanglement in dreams. These forms highlight the inconstant and uncertain nature of embodied knowing, suggesting a novel onto-epistemological stance in which the knowing body is thought of as a floating body that is never still. The study also has implications for management education.

Sociomateriality and Affect in Institutional Work: Constructing the Identity of Start-Up Entrepreneurs

Identity construction as a form of institutional work has mainly been studied from discursive perspectives. We examine how the identity of start-up entrepreneurs is constructed within the sociomaterial setting of a major start-up and technology conference, to enhance institutionalization of start-up entrepreneurship. We draw from the theories of performative identity construction, sociomateriality, and affect. Our study contributes to research on institutional work by highlighting the sociomaterial and affective nature of identity construction as a form of institutional work. We demonstrate how the identity of start-up entrepreneurs is constructed as rock star, vital entrepreneur, and buddy in a start-up ecosystem. Furthermore, we present characteristics of sociomaterial agency that strengthen identification with the institution of start-up entrepreneurship: multisensority, temporal multidimensionality, and the dynamics of equality and exceptionality building. Our study also critically demonstrates how constructed identities tend to reinforce the link between entrepreneurship and masculinity.

Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice: Struggling over subjectivity: a critical discourse analysis of strategic development

Introduction Discursive perspectives provide opportunities to map out and critically examine some of the most fundamental questions in strategy and strategizing that are not easily approached with more traditional perspectives on Strategy as Practice (Hendry 2000; Knights and Morgan 1991; Seidl 2007; Vaara et al . 2004). This is the case with ‘subjectivity’, which can be understood as a discursively constructed sense of identity and social agency in specific contexts. In their seminal Foucauldian analysis, Knights and Morgan (1991) had already examined how strategy discourse can transform ‘individuals into subjects whose sense of meaning and reality becomes tied to their participation in the discourse and practice of strategy’ (p. 252). Thereafter, other discursive analyses have touched upon subjectivity. In particular, Samra-Fredericks (2005) has shown how organizational identities and power relations are constructed in strategy conversations. Mantere and Vaara (2008) have in turn demonstrated how different strategy discourses construct very different kinds of identities for organizational actors and consequently impede or promote participation. Nevertheless, empirical studies focusing on the discursive construction of subjectivity and its various implications in organizational strategizing are still rare in this area. In this chapter, we wish to add to this research by examining subjectivity in strategy discourse from a discursive struggle perspective. We approach organizational discourse as a dialectical battle between competing groups (e.g. Mumby 2004). From a discourse struggle perspective, discourses have a great deal of power over individuals, but at the same time individuals can also draw from specific discourses for their own purposes.