Discipline and punish? Strategy discourse,senior manager subjectivity and contradictory power effects

Abstract

Responding to calls to incorporate a more dispersed and localized conceptualization of power in the study of strategy as discourse, in this article we illustrate that while investing senior managers with the authority to speak and enact strategy, at one and the same time strategy discourse renders this group highly visible and vulnerable. Using a Foucauldian-inspired discursive psychology approach to provide a critical analysis of brief stretches of talk in a research interview, we expose the inherent instability and contingency of strategy discourse as it is used to construct and reconcile contradictory accounts of corporate success, failure and senior manager subjectivity. Our core contribution is to show that resistance to strategy discourse is discernible not only through how lower level or other actors contest or undermine this discourse but also by observing the efforts of corporate elites to manage temporary breakdowns (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011) that disrupt the background consensus that ordinarily provides strategy discourse with its ‘taken-for-granted’ quality. Resistance, we argue, is not only an intentional and oppositional practice but also inheres within the fine grain of strategy discourse itself, manifested as a ‘hindrance and stumbling block’ (Foucault, 1978) in the highly occasioned and local level of mundane interaction.