Strategy-as-Power: Ambiguity, Contradiction and the Exercise of Power in a UK Building Society
批判了战略作为实践学派和权力学派将权力视为管理层专属的观点，通过英国建房互助协会的案例，展示了权力如何以模糊和矛盾的方式运作，既支持又阻碍管理努力，并探讨了抵抗的可能性。
‘Strategy-as-practice’ (s-a-p) scholars have urged us to attend to the messy realities of strategy so as to increase the relevance of research for practititoners. This article, whilst recognizing the need to focus on what managers do, develops a critique of this literature. It argues that the s-a-p approach (Whittington, Jarzabkowski, Johnson, Balogun) and the earlier ‘Power School’ (Mintzberg, Pettigrew, Pfeffer) share much in common as both present power as the possession of management. This overstates the ability of managers to control others whilst understating the scope for resistance. Second, it asserts that both approaches would benefit from greater sensitivity towards the unequal context through which strategies emerge and that they serve, in part, to reproduce. Third, the article provides an empirical study of strategy in a UK Building Society. It attends to how power is exercised in ambiguous and contradictory ways that both supports and thwarts managerial endeavours. Through considering the uncertainty that results from this, the case reflects on the possibilities for resistance. The central argument is that if we explore practice only from management’s perspective, then we are in danger of not only reinforcing the status quo but also of being irrelevant to practitioners and wider constituents.