Strategies as Discursive Constructions: The Case of Airline Alliances

Vaara, Eero; Kleymann, Birgit; Seristö, Hannu

doi:10.1111/j.1467-6486.2004.00419.x

Cited by 207 publications

(191 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Parallel to these streams of research, we have seen the emergence of a literature concentrating on strategy discourse (e.g., Knights and Morgan 1991, Barry and Elmes 1997, Hendry 2000, Levy et al 2003, Vaara et al 2004. In a seminal analysis, Knights and Morgan (1991) examined strategy as a body of knowledge and analyzed the various kinds of power implications that the language of strategy has for organizations.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Other studies then focused on the role of narratives in strategy processes in organizational contexts (Barry andElmes 1997, Dunford andJones 2000). Still others studied how specific discursive resources can be used for strategic purposes (Hardy et al 2000, Maitlis andLawrence 2003) and how strategies become legitimized and naturalized through the extensive use of particular discursive practices (Vaara et al 2004). The analyses of Samra-Fredericks (2003 and Laine and Vaara (2007) in turn illustrated that conceptions about the roles and identities of organizational actors are easily reproduced in organizational interaction, often effectively impeding participation in strategy work.…”

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confidence: 99%

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On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective

Mantere

Vaara

2008

Organization Science

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We still know little of why strategy processes often involve participation problems. In this paper, we argue that this crucial issue is linked to fundamental assumptions about the nature of strategy work. Hence, we need to examine how strategy processes are typically made sense of and what roles are assigned to specific organizational members. For this purpose, we adopt a critical discursive perspective that allows us to discover how specific conceptions of strategy work are reproduced and legitimized in organizational strategizing. Our empirical analysis is based on an extensive research project on strategy work in 12 organizations. As a result of our analysis, we identify three central discourses that seem to be systematically associated with nonparticipatory approaches to strategy work: “mystification,” “disciplining,” and “technologization.” However, we also distinguish three strategy discourses that promote participation: “self-actualization,” “dialogization,” and “concretization.” Our analysis shows that strategy as practice involves alternative and even competing discourses that have fundamentally different kinds of implications for participation in strategy work. We argue from a critical perspective that it is important to be aware of the inherent problems associated with dominant discourses as well as to actively advance the use of alternative ones.

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective

Mantere

Vaara

2008

Organization Science

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346

298

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“…This has spurred an interest into strategic planning processes and the material artefacts involved from a strategy-as-practice perspective, since it 'focus on strategy making as it occurs through the actions, interactions and negotiations of multiple actors' (Jarzabkowski & Balogun, 2009:1256. The power of strategic texts has also been studied with the help of rhetorical (Eriksson & Lehtimäki, 2001) as well as discourse analysis (see for instance Hardy et al, 2000;Kornberger & Clegg, 2011;Vaara et al, 2004). Vaara et al (2010), who studies a strategic plan through critical discourse analysis notice for instance that 'strategy documents serve several purposes: they communicate socially negotiated meanings, legitimate ways of thinking and action delegitimating others, produce consent but may also trigger resistance, and have all kinds of political and ideological effects, some more apparent than others' (Vaara et al, 2010:686).…”

Section: Strategy and Documentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Textual objects and strategizing: the influence of documents as active objects on strategic recursiveness

Lundgren

Blom

2015

Journal of Change Management

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In this paper, we explore the role of document as influential objects in strategizing. Especially, we investigate how documents influence strategic recursiveness. By documents we do not restrict ourselves to explicit strategy-related documents (such as plans) but any document that generally talks about the long-term direction of the company. We argue that documents contributes to strategic recursiveness by legitimating courses of action but at the same time delimit future action also by the original authors of the documents. This effect is also self-enhancing over time when more documents are being produced.

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“…Whereas CSE stresses the importance of real-time actions and continuous change, the rationalistic view of the strategy process [24] focuses on the creation of a structured future plan that is temporally and practically separated from its implementation [26,27]. This separation thus relies on the assumption of a comparatively static and predictable business environment that allows the rational managers [26] to first create a plan based on systematic scanning and positioning [25] and then implement it while having sufficient control over the consequences of their actions [27]. The usefulness of such theories for practice has been questioned, as they do not sufficiently reflect today's volatile organisational reality [28,29].…”

Section: Business Management Views On Strategy and Strategic Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The CRUSOE Framework: A Holistic Approach to Analysing Prerequisites for Continuous Software Engineering

Karvonen

Suomalainen

Juntunen

et al. 2016

Product-Focused Software Process Improvement

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Abstract. Continuous software engineering (CSE) is used for customer experiments and repetitive integrated processes within and between business planning and software development. First, this paper defines a new framework, called CRUSOE, for analysing CSE prerequisites. The framework allows for a more precise analysis of the interrelations and estimation of the changes that are prerequisites for moving from traditional product development to CSE. CRUSOE addresses prerequisites associated with and interdependencies among (1) the strategy, (2) architecture and (3) organisation. Second, this paper describes a case study conducted as part of a smartphone platform project to investigate the CSE prerequisites for product-focused software development. The results are synthesised together with recent related studies using the CRUSOE framework. The findings confirm challenges in moving towards CSE in embedded system development. Moreover, context-specific prerequisites should be considered, while it is still unclear as to how CSE can be systematically applied to the non-website development context. Keywords:Continuous software engineering, strategy, architecture, organising, BizDev, software ecosystem IntroductionEmbedded and product-intensive software development project teams are becoming increasingly interested in applying practices and tools for continuous software engineering (CSE) [1]; e.g., the Lean Startup method [2], DevOps [3], continuous delivery (CD) [4] and continuous experimentation [5]. Although many of these practices are widely acknowledged in the field of website development [6,7], there are only a few frameworks that describe how CSE can be applied in product-focused embedded system development (e.g. smartphones, cars etc.). Moreover, there is still very little empirical evidence of the actual usage of these practices in this context. The existing studies have mostly indicated severe challenges in adopting these practices in business-tobusiness (B2B) and embedded system development [8,9,10,11] contexts. In addition, CD and continuous experimentation still seem to mostly be used for small-scale website development projects [6], [8], [12]. Fagerholm et al. [5] have recently investigated continuous experimentation in university software laboratory projects with two case companies and have introduced a model for explaining how the continuous experimentation can be organised. However, more empirical studies are needed to increase our understanding of how these practices could be implemented in different software development contexts. Consequently, in this paper, our goal is to clarify the key prerequisites for applying CSE in product-focused software development.The sustainable success of a company can be linked to its capabilities in terms of bringing new innovations to market. In today's competitive and turbulent business environment, time to market has also become very important. Consequently, business stakeholders have identified rapid fielding and continuous experimentation as important elements of th...

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Strategies as Discursive Constructions: The Case of Airline Alliances

Cited by 207 publications

References 55 publications

On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective

On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective

Textual objects and strategizing: the influence of documents as active objects on strategic recursiveness

The CRUSOE Framework: A Holistic Approach to Analysing Prerequisites for Continuous Software Engineering

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