The Political Dynamics of Opening Participation in Strategy: The role of strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness

Abstract

Practices of open participation in strategy-making share assumptions that enlarging participation outside the traditional circle of strategy specialists ensures a larger set of strategic options and a stronger commitment to strategy implementation. However, a greater variety of participants belonging to different organizational fields implies that different ways of understanding and doing strategy encounter during open participation processes and are likely to generate political struggles. We build on practice theory to conceptualize the enactments of open participation practices as the sites where more or less autonomous and powerful organizational fields encounter and where practices of open participation ‘mesh’ with other strategy, management and occupational practices and the local organizational context. Because ‘opening’ participation suggests that strategy used to be closed, we first focus on the organizational field of strategy and strategy specialists – who are expected to welcome the participation of people from other fields. We explain why strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness play a key role in patterning enactments of open participation practices. Then, we build on these two dimensions to stylize the political aspects of opening participation along with four ideal-typical enactments, namely exclusion, domination, conversation and controversy. Eventually, we discuss how management practices – such as dividing labour, coordinating and controlling – and provisional material arrangements orientate ‘actual’ enactments of open participation towards those four ideal-typical forms of enactments and how the participants’ learning during enactments affects subsequent enactments and cumulatively contributes either to the reinforcement or the decline of the strategy field in the organization’s hierarchy of power. Our article then provides a conceptual framework for analysing the political aspects of the enactments of open participation in strategy-making and contributes to a ‘post-processual’ understanding of strategy.