Influence activity is a central aspect of organizations and has attracted a wide range of theoretical and empirical research. Most studies in this field rely on categorization schemes to classify either actors or acts. This article draws on the notion of organizations and actors as socially constructed phenomena and understands influence activities as social practices whose shape and meaning is derived from the social contexts they are embedded in. In this paper, we argue that it is necessary to gain an understanding of the activities’ diverging meanings in their organizational contexts before generalized typologies of tactics and strategies can be fruitfully applied. By drawing on ‘objective hermeneutics’ as methodology, our analyses focus on influence activities within three organizational contexts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.