Despite increasing interest in the discursive aspects of strategy, few studies have examined strategy texts and their power effects. We draw from Critical Discourse Analysis to better understand the power of strategic plans as a directive genre. In our empirical analysis, we examined the creation of the official strategic plan of the City of Lahti in Finland. As a result of our inductive analysis, we identified five central discursive features of this plan: self-authorization, special terminology, discursive innovation, forced consensus and deonticity. We argue that these features can, with due caution, be generalized and conceived as distinctive features of the strategy genre. We maintain that these discursive features are not trivial characteristics; they have important implications for the textual agency of strategic plans, their performative effects, impact on power relations and ideological implications.
Despite the acknowledged importance of strategic planning in business and other organizations, there are few studies focusing on strategy texts and the related processes of their production and consumption. In this paper, we attempt to partially fill this research gap by examining the institutionalized aspects of strategy discourse: what strategy is as genre. Combining textual analysis and analysis of conversation, the article focuses on the official strategy of the City of Lahti in Finland. Our analysis shows how specific communicative purposes and lexico-grammatical features characterize the genre of strategy and how the actual negotiations over strategy text involve particular kinds of intersubjectivity and intertextuality.
This study examines strategy as situated discourse in performance appraisal interviews. Based on illustrative video-recorded data, our findings show how strategy is appropriated in face-to-face interaction between managers and employees who engage in evoking the pragmatic and functional meanings of strategy concepts and discourse. The study specifically highlights the embodied, intertextual, and material nature of strategy; how people use gestures to make the strategy more concrete and complete; how appropriation is often accompanied by the speaker's appraising attitude; and how strategic texts are ascribed agency when they are ventriloquized, that is, when life is breathed into them. This analysis extends the literature on strategy discourse in three interrelated ways: (a) by explaining how the constructions inscribed in strategic plans are appropriated, (b) by explicating the methods used by participants in constitution of the power of strategy discourse, and (c) by illustrating how these methods can be studied empirically through video-ethnography.
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