This article builds on constructs that authors have labelled "strategic ambiguity", "interpretative viability", "umbrella constructs", and "boundary objects", and suggests that these constructs all articulate a central concern for collective action and the role of ambiguity therein. It characterizes as "pragmatic ambiguity" the condition of admitting more than one course of action, and elucidates and operationalizes this new construct. Drawing on the sociology of translation (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987),-super-[1] it argues that pragmatic ambiguity is both the result and the resource of a collective process of "intéressement" occurring during the rise in popularity of a new management approach. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006.

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This article examines the language of numbers as it is used in talk within a contemporary organization to provide a better understanding of the ways speech acts, performed during the construction of accounts, contribute to the process of organizing. Based on an in-depth case study of the site budgetary control process in a French construction firm, it shows that the business of doing calculations through talk generates respective obligations and, in turn, plays a central role in the constitution of the organization. Hence, this article shows how accounting, in all of its manifestations, produces the organization and does not simply occur within it.

Despite the growing interest in developing a micro-level understanding of strategy practices, there are few studies focusing on the official textual expression of these practices in the form of strategic plans. Using a large corpus of strategic plans from public and third sector organizations, this article examines the particular features of the strategic plan genre of communication. This corpus is systematically compared with nine other corpora derived from the same general domain (business texts) or having similar expected characteristics. Our analysis combines linguistic analysis with an analysis of the moves characteristic of the genre. The article seeks to advance a genrebased view of strategy practices to study the professional and institutional practices of strategists. KeywordsComputer assisted text analysis, corpus linguistics, genre analysis, strategic plans In recent years, there has been increasing interest among organizational and management scholars in understanding the distinctive practices of 'strategy', referring here to the activities inherent in formulating and implementing an organization's long-term objectives, goals and future orientations (Jarzabkowski and Spee, 2009;Johnson et al., 2007). The field of 'strategy' or 'strategic management' has been constituted over the past 40 years as an important body of knowledge that is taught in management schools and that derives its roots from an eclectic amalgam of economic and sociological thought developed through the contributions of both academic writers and corporate consulting firms (Ghemawat, 2002;Kiechel, 2010). While the academic study of strategy has traditionally focused on understanding the market and resource-based drivers of competitive advantage, adherents of the more recent 'strategy as practice' school have turned their attention to examining strategy as an activity accomplished by practitioners or