Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools: the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and Local Strategy Practice?

Abstract

While much of the literature on strategy and strategy as practice (SaP) focuses on traditional strategic tools, technologies and discursive practices of managers, this paper extends the understanding of strategic change implementation by proposing that mundane material tools, understood as text, translate global strategic discourse in ways that make sense to workers and orchestrate successful global strategy implementation at the local level. Based on a rich case study within one branch of a national bank, this paper demonstrates how a middle manager's materializing practices developed local strategy practice while simultaneously transforming work and producing strategic figures or indicators that satisfied senior management's global strategic change objectives. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) it advances the understanding of the multimodality of materiality by identifying the influence of three types of mundane tools produced locally by a middle manager as he performed his sense of the senior managers' strategic discourse; (ii) it reveals how these three types of physical texts materialized the manager's sense of this discourse, facilitating frontline workers' engagement and coupling materiality and orality in a coherent way that allowed workers to embody the company's global strategy in their 'sayings and doings'; and (iii) it highlights the importance of managers' ability to materialize a strategic discourse.

How things make things do things with words, or how to pay attention to what things have to say

“…They are telling us what some other non-human is saying by converting a non-human action into a form of human language. My contribution, by taking the more obviously physical example of a building, insists, along with Arnaud, Mills, Legrand and Maton (2016), that TMS scholars have not simply brought things into the realm of discourse, but that they have actually rejected the bifurcationa bifurcation that people, in their everyday work, routinely reject.…”

“…They are in fact rejecting the very terms of this alleged opposition. The distinction between the two realms simply does not hold, as illustrated in Arnaud, Mills, Legrand and Maton's (2016) study of the way texts, furniture, visual displays and geosocial arrangementsall material that can be readtranslate an organization-wide strategy in the context of local branches, and allow resistance and negotiation between the branch and the senior managers driving the change. Such cases suggest we need to go past 'either/or' considerations and embrace the plurality of reality (Friedberg, 2000;Latour, 2000;Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, & Thaning, 2014).…”

How things make things do things with words, or how to pay attention to what things have to say

“…They are telling us what some other non-human is saying by converting a non-human action into a form of human language. My contribution, by taking the more obviously physical example of a building, insists, along with Arnaud, Mills, Legrand and Maton (2016), that TMS scholars have not simply brought things into the realm of discourse, but that they have actually rejected the bifurcation -a bifurcation that people, in their everyday work, routinely reject.…”

“…They are in fact rejecting the very terms of this alleged opposition. The distinction between the two realms simply does not hold, as illustrated in Arnaud, Mills, Legrand and Maton's (2016) study of the way texts, furniture, visual displays and geosocial arrangements -all material that can be read -translate an organization-wide strategy in the context of local branches, and allow resistance and negotiation between the branch and the senior managers driving the change. Such cases suggest we need to go past 'either/or' considerations and embrace the plurality of reality (Friedberg, 2000;Latour, 2000;Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, & Thaning, 2014).…”

“…My choice to focus on buildings and on the way they can tell about their condition, as opposed to managerial examples (such as the strategy case described by Arnaud et al, 2016), allows me to make my argument clearer by avoiding what some readers could view as a 'feedback loop' (i.e., humans reading tools that describe their own human activity). Of course, from the moment we are discussing human-made artifacts, we are, as Cooren (2015) rightly says, in the 'middle of things' or, to say it in another way, in a 'chain of agency ' (2006) where humans and technology cannot be clearly distinguished.…”