Saku Mantere

Role Expectations and Middle Manager Strategic Agency

Based on an analysis of 262 interviews, I argue that role expectations have the potential to both enable and constrain middle manager strategic agency. To explain why the same role expectations have contradictory effects on agency, I analyse enabling conditions corresponding to four strategic role expectations, based on Floyd and Wooldridges work on middle manager roles. After presenting eight enabling conditions for strategic agency, specific to the four role expectations, I argue that the dominant functionalist view of strategic roles should be augmented from a middle manager viewpoint. I suggest a reciprocal view of strategic role expectations, which elucidates the tensions between dialogue, legitimacy and rationality within a set of strategic roles. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.

Strategic practices as enablers and disablers of championing activity

Research into the practice of organizational strategy is centered on the work of individual strategists. Strategic champions, individuals going beyond their operative responsibilities in strategic issues, are key stakeholders in research into strategy-as-practice. In this article, interview accounts of 158 champions from 12 organizations are analyzed for how strate gic practices enable and disable strategic champions in their work. A tension is discovered between recursive practices contributing to ontological security, achieved through pre dictability, and adaptive practices contributing to individual ownership of strategy, achieved through personal interpretation.

Vices and Virtues of Corporate Political Activity The Challenge of International Business

The authors give a critical reading of the research interests of state-of-the-art corporate political activity (CPA) literature. They demonstrate that a noncritical tendency in the literature to view CPA as a strategic activity, aimed at making profit, may encourage firms to sociopathic behavior in their political activities. Using psychiatric literature, the authors explore the nature of sociopathic CPA. They draw on a recent discussion initiated by virtue theorists, exploring firm moral agency in order to suggest the opening of several new research areas, within CPA literature, more sensitive to moral questions.

Strategy as Storytelling: A Phenomenological Collaboration

This article presents a phenomenological inquiry into storytelling practices in corporate strategy-making processes, as experienced by nonsenior stakeholders. The authors utilize the potential of phenomenological methods to provide an enriched understanding of strategy as lived, embodied experience. Based on a strategy workshop in a company called ICARUS Inc., a large, international information technology corporation facing the challenge of reinventing itself after a period of considerable success, the authors identify three embodied narrative practices enacted during that workshop event: (a) discursive struggles over “hot” words, (b) the de-sacralization of strategy, and (c) recurring rituals of self-sacrifice. The article critically analyzes these practices in reference to recent research on strategy as a lived and narrated experience and discusses their implications as well as the implications of the workshop itself. Overall, the article aims at providing theoretical as well as methodological contribution for narrative practices of strategy in organizational lifeworlds.

Consuming strategy: The art and practice of managers’ everyday strategy usage

Although the managerial profession is subjugated by the discipline of strategic management, managers are not completely subordinate to it. Instead, they are able to use the institutionalized discourse of strategic management, which is not their own product, in novel and creative ways. In this paper, we focus on the tactics that managers, as central strategy practitioners, use to consume strategy. Drawing on the work of the late Michel de Certeau as a theoretical lens, we conduct an empirical analysis of discourse, produced by 36 managers operating in three case organizations. This analysis allows us to elaborate on three different tactics of strategy consumption: instrumental, playful, and intimate. The results capture the reciprocal dynamics between the micro- and macrolevels of strategy discourse, that is, between strategic management as an institutional body of knowledge and the discursive practice of individual managers.

What is Organizational Strategy? A Language‐Based View

Under what conditions does a collective strategy exist among organizational members? Where should a scholar look for one? To offer one way to start solving these puzzles I propose a view of organizational strategy as a language game that governs the use of strategy labels at the level of the organization. Organizational strategy exhibits a division of linguistic labour, where responsibility for key concepts is assigned to particular individuals or organizational functions. Such linguistic experts oversee the proper use and maintenance of strategy language. The language-based view helps to understand linkages between institutional, network, organizational, and micro level views on strategy. It also problematizes widely held intuitions regarding the relationship between strategy and organizational outcomes.

Music as a metaphor for organizational change

Purpose – To explore a musical metaphor in making organizational change a potentially pleasurable experience to participants.Design/methodology/approach – The paper begins by challenging ideological assumptions behind classical change metaphors. To build an alternative, the paper employs musical semiotics to understand the core dimensions in a musical experience.Findings – The paper discusses the dynamics of tension and resolution in the different dimensions of musical experience.Originality/value – The discussion regarding the dynamics of tension and resolution in musical experience helps the reader to make sense of how an individual organizational member can understand, structure and control the experience of organizational change.

Reasonability and the Linguistic - Division of Labor in Institutional Work

We examine institutional work from a discursive perspective and argue that reasonability, the existence of acceptable justifying reasons for beliefs and practices, is a key part of legitimation. Drawing on philosophy of language, we maintain that institutional work takes place in the context of ‘space of reasons’ determined by widely held assumptions about what is reasonable and what is not. We argue that reasonability provides the main contextual constraint of institutional work, its major outcome, and a key trigger for actors to engage in it. We draw on Hilary Putnam’s concept ‘division of linguistic labor’ to highlight the specialized distribution of knowledge and authority in defining valid ways of reasoning. In this view, individuals use institutionalized vocabularies to reason about their choices and understand their context with limited understanding of how and why these structures have become what they are. We highlight the need to understand how professions and other actors establish and maintain the criteria of reasoning in various areas of expertise through discursive institutional work.

Making and breaking sense: an inquiry into the reputation change

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to expand knowledge of reputation change as a social process and to explore the implications of a social constructivist view of reputation for the challenge of reputation management.Design/methodology/approach – The authors analyze the main characteristics of a social constructivist view of reputation, and study its implications for the task of reputation management by means of an interpretative arena model of reputation change.Findings – The authors build a framework for analyzing reputation change as dialogical interaction between an organization and active stakeholders.Practical implications – The arena model is a tool for analyzing the task of corporate reputation change management across a variety of contexts. The arena model provides a conceptual tool for making sense of the crucial and intricate challenge of strategic reputation management, which places organizations engaging in struggles and collaborations with the stakeholders in symbolic environments.Origin...

Cutting the cord : mutual respect, organizational autonomy, and independence in organizational separation processes

Based on a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of developments in the English National Health Service, we develop a process model of how organizations divest or spin off units with the aim of establishing two or more autonomous organizational entities while simultaneously managing their continued interdependencies. We find that effective organizational separation depends on generating two types of respect—appraisal and recognition respect—between the divesting and divested units. Appraisal respect involves showing appreciation for competence or the effort to achieve it, while recognition respect requires considering what someone cares about—such as values or concerns—and acknowledging that they matter. The process model we develop shows that open communication is crucial to the development of both. We also find that certain attempts to gain organizational independence and respect may unintentionally undermine the development of autonomy. Counterintuitively, we find that increasing or maintaining interorganizational links via communication may facilitate organizational separation, while attempts by units to distance themselves from one another may unintentionally inhibit it. By linking organizational separation, autonomy, independence, and respect, this paper develops theory on organizational separation processes and more generally enhances our understanding of organizational autonomy and its relations with mutual respect.