Strategy making as a communicative practice: the multimodal accomplishment of strategy roles

Abstract

We do so by investigating one significant activity within an organizational strategy making process, namely strategy meetings. Here, members of the upper management group create concrete drafts for the actual strategy document, and we focus on a specific action sequence where strategy actors propose changes to the strategy document. Specifically, we investigate how the participants subsequently deal with the proposal, how such interaction work facilitates the accomplishment of strategy roles, and how the interaction impacts the decision making process. Our study shows that strategy actors, when making these decisions, not only orient to an acceptance or rejection of the proposal but also to questions of entitlement (Asmuß & Oshima, 2012). This orientation involves multimodal resources, ranging from talk (Samra-Fredericks, 2003) to embodied and material resources. The study thus provides an empirical demonstration of the processual aspects of strategy work and their impact on strategic outcomes; further, it highlights the importance for practice studies to acknowledge communicative (verbal, embodied and material) aspects in capturing the complexity of strategy work.

Making connections: Harnessing the diversity of strategy‐as‐practice research

“…Capturing all these various modes likely requires the close observation of ethnography, supplemented by audio recordings (particularly for talk) and video or photographic recordings (for bodies, material artefacts and space, for example). Thus, Asmuß and Oshima (2018) take a multimodal approach to the detailed study of a management strategy meeting, carefully linking the discourse of managerial interchange to the incremental typing of a strategy document on a notebook computer, its projection onto a whiteboard and the bodily orientations of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and his Human Resource manager. The Human Resource manager's pauses at the computer, steady gazes at the CEO and silence in talk all work together to communicate resistance to his superior's proposals.…”

“…In particular, practice‐driven institutionalism (Smets et al., 2017) underpins a bridging strategy to connect micro‐praxis and macro‐institutionalism, overcoming micro‐isolationism (Seidl & Whittington, 2014). Multimodal approaches (Asmuß & Oshima, 2018) offer a sequential strategy that adds sociomaterial perspectives to existing discursive ones and addresses urgent questions raised by information technologies and the new virtual world. Critical insights into exclusionary discourse (Vaara, 2010) can be combined with practical managerial concerns via an interplay strategy, with implications especially for intendedly ‘open’ strategy processes (Dobusch & Kapeller, 2018).…”

A Literature Review of the Strategic Decision-Making Context: A Synthesis of Previous Mixed Findings and an Agenda for the Way Forward

“…The external and the internal environments of the firm set limits to the decision process, but the final outcome of decisions is shaped by the top management team (Child, 1997). Several studies have adopted a strategic choice perspective and strategy-as-practice to investigate the effects of the top management team on strategic decision processes (e.g., Asmuß & Oshima, 2018;Elbasha & Wright, 2017;Ericson, 2010;Jansen, Curşeu, Vermeulen, Geurts, & Gibcus, 2011). Other studies, though, have concluded that top management team characteristics may not impact strategic decision processes or that this impact is slight compared to other contextual characteristics (e.g., Lyles & Mitroff, 1980).…”

Observing to Coproduce a Collective Narrative: Emplotment of Multiple Parallel Stories

“…In the words of Easterby-Smith (2005, p. 345), it "(is) both for looking at social process over time and for looking at the experiences of those lower down the organizational 'food chain'." It is often difficult to hear the voices of nonstrategic actors (Asmuß & Oshima, 2018). Dynamic observation will be the starting point of emplotment, and enables us to integrate a group of actors into inquiry processes.…”