Maintaining Strategic Ambiguity for Protection: Struggles over Opacity, Equivocality, and Absurdity around the Sicilian Mafia
通过研究1963至2018年间西西里黑手党与国家的斗争，揭示组织如何通过不透明、歧义和荒谬三种模糊性来维持战略模糊性以抵御公众审视，对研究秘密组织和模糊性管理的学者有参考价值。
In spite of an increasing interest in ambiguity, our knowledge of how organizations maintain strategic ambiguity to protect themselves from public scrutiny is still in its infancy. Through an in-depth historical study of the Sicilian Mafia between 1963 and 2018, we develop a model of strategic ambiguity maintenance. We focus on three struggles between the Mafia and state representatives, and show how these struggles centered on different types of ambiguity: ambiguity as opacity, equivocality, and absurdity. We elaborate on the strategies enacted by the Mafia and the responses by state representatives and their implications for ambiguity over time. The main contribution of our paper is that it advances understanding of the maintenance of strategic ambiguity by organizations that need to protect themselves from public scrutiny. More specifically, it enriches our knowledge of the key process dynamics, the types of struggles, and the discursive and nondiscursive strategies employed in the process. Our analysis also extends research on clandestine organizations and illuminates the relationship between (strategic) ambiguity and secrecy.