Discipline and punish? Strategy discourse, senior manager subjectivity and contradictory power effects
运用福柯式话语心理学方法,分析高管访谈中的话语片段,揭示战略话语既赋予高管权力又使其脆弱,并指出对战略话语的抵抗不仅来自下级,也内在于精英自身的日常互动中。
Responding to calls to incorporate a more dispersed and localized conceptualization of power in the study of strategy as discourse, in this article we illustrate that while investing senior managers with the authority to speak and enact strategy, at one and the same time strategy discourse renders this group highly visible and vulnerable. Using a Foucauldian-inspired discursive psychology approach to provide a critical analysis of brief stretches of talk in a research interview, we expose the inherent instability and contingency of strategy discourse as it is used to construct and reconcile contradictory accounts of corporate success, failure and senior manager subjectivity. Our core contribution is to show that resistance to strategy discourse is discernible not only through how lower level or other actors contest or undermine this discourse but also by observing the efforts of corporate elites to manage temporary breakdowns (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011) that disrupt the background consensus that ordinarily provides strategy discourse with its ‘taken-for-granted’ quality. Resistance, we argue, is not only an intentional and oppositional practice but also inheres within the fine grain of strategy discourse itself, manifested as a ‘hindrance and stumbling block’ (Foucault, 1978) in the highly occasioned and local level of mundane interaction.