‘It Sends a Cold Shiver down my Spine’: Ghostly Interruptions to Strategy Implementation
结合弗洛伊德的诡异概念与文化地理学、社会学理论，分析丹麦地方政府中层管理者在战略研讨会上的对话，揭示战略执行中出现的令人不安的幽灵式干扰时刻。
This paper offers new theoretical and empirical understanding of interruptions to strategy implementation by drawing attention to their ghostly nature. The paper proposes a theoretical framework for thinking about the ghostly by combining Freud’s concept of the uncanny with theorizing in cultural geography on collapses of linear time as well as with Avery Gordon’s sociological work on ghostly matters. Empirically, the paper examines the ghostly nature of strategy interruptions through a detailed analysis of conversations between middle managers at a strategy seminar in a Danish local government. I portray the uncanny moments where the familiar account of organizational purposes is not so self-evident anymore, but all of a sudden appears rather disturbing. I show how middle managers envision other, darker futures and express the feeling that something else, something different from before, must be done, although they cannot say exactly what. Going beyond previous accounts of strategy interruption, for example as deliberate resistance by middle managers, the paper contributes with new insight into the moments where the neat ordering of organizational realities performed by corporate strategies breaks down and middle managers come into contact with the broader social and political stakes of their work.