European Management Review (2004) 1, 43–48

& 2004 EURAM Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 1740-4754/04 $25.00 palgrave-journals.com/emr

Rethinking strategy: contemporary perspectives and debates Mahmoud Ezzamel1, Hugh Willmott2 1

Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK; Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, UK

2

Correspondence: H Willmot, Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1AG, UK. Tel:/Fax: þ 44 1223 339633 E-mail: [email protected] Received: 15 January 2004; Revised: 22 January 2004; Accepted: 25 January 2004 Published online: 5 March 2004

Abstract This paper seeks to clarify and illustrate the distinctive contribution of Foucauldian discursive analysis to the study of strategy. We distinguish it from other forms of analysis before applying it to interpret a fragment of empirical material drawn from a longitudinal study of a global retailing company. In conclusion, the paradox of undertaking discursive analysis is discussed. European Management Review (2004) 1, 43–48, advance online publication, 5 March 2004 doi:10.1057/palgrave.emr.1500009 Keywords: discourse; Foucault; paradox; reflexivity

Introduction ne of the most instructive attempts to link the fields of organization studies and strategy comes in the recent work of Knights and Morgan (1991) [who argue that] the very language, symbols and exchanges around the subject of strategy have important outcomes. Strategy is a mechanism of power (Whipp, 1999). How is sense to be made of ‘strategy’; and how do conceptions of ‘strategy’ make sense of us? Such questions are unfamiliar and puzzling to most students of ‘strategy’. Nonetheless they are being posed by analysts who urge a more reflexive understanding of what passes for knowledge of strategy, contending that ‘it is worth examining a little more closely how the discourse [of strategy] is formulated, how resources and cultural meanings are drawn into its service and what are its effects’ (Knights and Morgan, 1991). ‘Strategy’ or ‘strategic management’ is conventionally studied as a distinctive field of activity that exists independently of efforts to specify its features and/or prescribe for its perfection. In contrast, discursive analysis attends to the presence and significance of discourse in the identification and realization of ‘strategy’. Discursive analysis, we argue in this paper, provides a theoretical lens that is sufficiently distinctive to justify its differentiation from more established ways of thinking about strategy. From the standpoint of Foucauldian discourse analysis, lay and academic analyses of strategy are not regarded as offering alternative – such as ‘classical’, ‘evolutionary’, ‘processual’ and ‘systemic’ (Whittington,

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1993) – ‘ways of seeing’ a particular domain of activity. Rather, each such perspective on strategy is understood to be ‘embedded in social practices that reproduce the ‘way of seeing’ as the ‘truth’ of the discourse’ (Knights and Morgan, 1991). When adopting a discursive approach, ‘strategy’ is converted from ‘a descriptive label’ deemed to comprise a distinctive domain of researchable objects (e.g. ‘strategies’, ‘environments’ and ‘competences’) ‘out there’ in the world, to a discourse that is actively engaged in construing and constituting what strategy analysis commonsensically appears or aspires to capture or reflect: ‘strategy as a discourse is intimately involved in constituting the intentions and actions from which it is thought to be derived. Strategy, then, is an integral part, and not independent, of the actions or practices that it is frequently drawn upon to explain or justify.’ (Knights and Morgan, 1991) ‘Discursive analysis’ of strategy is responsive – although perhaps not in ways that would be readily recognized or unequivocally welcomed – to the contention that ‘many more theoretical lenses will be needed to explore the range of issues that the strategy field offers’ (Prahalad and Hamel, 1994). In this paper, we seek to clarify and briefly illustrate its distinctive contribution by building upon the pioneering work of Knights and Morgan (1991) and Knights and Vurdubakis (1994) to provide a close reading of Foucault’s conception of the relationship between power, knowledge

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and discursive practices. We then apply this understanding to analyse a fragment of empirical material that is drawn from a longitudinal study of a global retailing company (see Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998, for details). Finally, we reflect upon our main argument, alluding to what we identify as a paradox of doing discourse analysis. Post-rational analysis: a critique The field of strategy has been dominated by rational conceptions of its formulation and implementation, as exemplified in Michael Porter’s thinking, where strategy is conceived as an outcome of a more or less rational calculation about competitive advantage in relation to buyers, suppliers, new entrants, the availability of substitutes as well as industry competitors. As Porter (1979) puts it, ‘the corporate strategist’s goal is to find a position in the industry where his or her company can best defend itself against these forces or can influence them in its favor’. Minimal attention is paid to the institutional context – such as the distinctive cultural values and organizational politics – within and through which decisions are actually made, including the values that bestow legitimacy upon rational models as a key component of top managerial ideology. Instead, the preference is for discerning the key factors or ‘forces’ that must be successfully disclosed and controlled for a successful strategy to be realized. The past decade has seen some movement away from rational formulations of strategy, notably through the work of James Quinn and Henry Mintzberg in North America, and Andrew Pettigrew in Europe. Central to such postrational analysis of strategy is an appreciation of its distinctive contexts and the role of values in the shaping of ‘strategic intent’ (Hamel and Prahalad, 1989), the nurturing of ‘strategic thinking’ (Mintzberg, 1994) and the making of ‘strategic choices’ (Child, 1972), developments that resonate with the growing influence of institutional theory in organization studies: ‘the selection of strategy is primarily by means of management judgment and is likely to be bound up in a process of bargaining within the organization. Solutions are not so much likely to be adopted because they are shown to be better on the basis of some sort of objective yardstick, but because they are acceptable to those who influence the decision or have to implement it.’ (Johnson, 1987: 29) Post-rational analysis directly challenges the coherence and credibility of models that represent strategic management as a logical series of steps that proceed from information gathering, through the rational identification of a strategic position to its systematic implementation. Rational models are criticized for their inadequate appreciation of the social embeddedness of the ‘forces’, including consideration of how the identification and management of such ‘forces’ (Porter, 1979) are subject to the politics of organizational action, entailing the activity of strategic decision-making. Adequate recognition and management of the local values and organizational politics, it is argued, is a necessary feature of strategic decision-making.

Post-rational analysis aspires to show how, in practice, strategic decision-making emerges from local understandings, recipes and routines, and is therefore resistant to, and subversive of, rational calculation and control. Strategy is conceived as endemically a negotiated outcome of competing values and conflicts of interest. Such features include the contextually specific values and processes of bargaining that are conceived to govern the formulation and acceptability of strategic visions and their practical implementation – features of decision-making that are unacknowledged, or treated as sources of ‘noise’ to be eliminated, in rational models of strategy. In this light, Whittington’s (2003) advocacy of a ‘practice perspective’ echoes the concerns of post-rational analysis as it commends a focus upon the practical business of strategizing, but with particular reference to ‘the formal work of strategic and organizational design’ (Whittington, 2003). His concern is to focus upon ‘situated, concrete activity’ (ibid.: 121) in order to discover what strategists actually do as ‘a step to creating practical wisdom’ (ibid.: 121) about the business of doing strategy. However, while the post-rational focus upon process is maintained, its attentiveness to culture and politics tends to be displaced by a preoccupation with the identification of skills, the tools and techniques that are used, and how the products of strategizing are consumed. Even the question of how specialists work together to craft strategies, or indeed become strategists, is abstracted from the examination of culture and politics (ibid.: 122). There is an underlying assumption that practices are ‘shared’ (Whittington and Melin, 2002: 44) rather than contested (see Contu and Willmott, 2003). Methodologically, the practice perspective departs from more established forms of processual analysis is in its skepticism about the reliability of actors’ accounts of their strategizing, as generated through interview responses (see also Dingwall, 1997): ‘While processual studies share the practice perspective’s concern for close observationythe processualists expect much more from actors’ accounts of their own actions.’ (Whittington and Melin, 2002: 46) We have stressed how students of process and practice share an interest in a close-up examination of how strategy is accomplished, as contrasted with the arm’s-length specification of the forces that are conceived in rational analysis to comprise an industry’s structure and to condition strategists’ efforts to establish a favourable position within it. Yet, an objectivist understanding is retained as strategy continues to be conceived as a set of elements of the world ‘out there’ to be captured by analysis – whether these are components of industry structure or constituents of practitioners’ world views. Whittington (2003, emphasis added) counsels that the practice perspective is ‘concerned with finding out what strategists’ and organizers’ jobs really are’. Mintzberg et al (1995: xi, emphasis added) commend a processual approach on the grounds that it provides ‘a sophisticated understanding of exactly what the context is and how

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it functions’. They then use the analogy of engineering and physics to support this view: ‘y.one cannot decide reliably what should be done in a system as complicated as a contemporary organization without a genuine understanding of how that organization really works. In engineering, no student ever questions having to learn physics, or in medicine, having to learn anatomy. Imagine an engineering student’s hand shooting up in a physics class, ‘Listen, sir, it’s fine telling us how the atom works. But what we really want to know is how the atom should work!’. Why should a management student’s similar demand in the realm of strategy or structure be considered any more appropriate?’ (ibid., first and second emphases added) The point is well made that much rational analysis of strategy is governed by a normative compulsion to prescribe. The appeal to an example drawn from the natural sciences to lend authority to post-rational analysis is, however, unconvincing. Leaving aside the questionable choice of this particular example – since how atoms behave, as waves or particles, is conceived in quantum mechanics to depend upon how atoms are perceived/theorized – the problem is that the argument pays no attention to, and possibly denies, the interrelationship of the subjects and objects of knowledge. It is assumed that the world ‘out there’ is entirely separate from, and uninfluenced by, how this world is understood or theorized by imperfect and partial perspectives developed by researchers.1 The problem with the ambition to achieve ‘a genuine understanding of how [an] organization really works’ is that the reality of the object (e.g. ‘organization’ or ‘strategy’) is necessarily conditioned by the language used to articulate the preoccupations and perspectives of the subject (e.g. researcher): the use of language to describe the world is inescapably divisive, partial and incomplete. ‘Old’ (e.g. rational) and ‘new’ (e.g. processual and practice) conceptions of strategy share the presumption of being able to know what the world is ‘really like’ in advance, and independently of the generation of the knowledge to which the designation ‘genuine’ is (unreflexively) applied. This position assumes that the objects of ‘observation’ – that is, the constituent elements of the social world – are both transparent to, and unchanged by, the theory/methodology that accounts for them, thereby denying that how social theories are interpreted, evaluated and appropriated, arguably, influences the ‘realness’ of the world that the theories purport to describe and explain. Discursive analysis Discursive analysis is distinguished by its departure from a commonsense, dualistic conception of the language–reality relationship in which language is conceived to reflect or capture reality. Foucault (1982) articulates this departure when he argues that discourse, such as that which is concerned with strategy, ‘is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language (langue)’. Nor, he argues, should language be treated as a group of ‘signs (signifying elements referring to contents and representations) but as practices that systematically form

the objects of which they speak’ (ibid.: 49). To treat discourse as merely a sign that designates things is, Foucault contends, to disregard or neutralize its constitutive force. This neutralization occurs in both rational and processual models of strategy where their contribution to defining the phenomena that they aspire to study is disregarded. Foucault’s work invites us to explore an alternative approach in which the focus is upon ‘a group of rules’ or a ‘grid of intelligibility’ characteristic of particular discursive practices that operates to identify and order objects in particular ways. Such rules, which ‘are immanent in a practice and define it in its specificity’ (ibid.: 46), define ‘not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of vocabulary, but the ordering of objects’ (ibid.: 49). Accordingly, the analytical focus is upon the truth effects of language in ordering the world in particular ways. Instead of understanding the language that comprises the field of strategy – such as ‘firms’ and ‘markets’ – as more or less accurate (and thus impartial) descriptions of an external social reality, such terms are understood to constitute the world in a particular, partisan, politically charged way: their use exerts truth effects insofar as they become widespread and institutionalized. Accordingly, the Foucauldian focus does not seek to specify what the practices (e.g. of strategizing) are but, rather, upon how the ‘group of rules’ comprising a discourse operates to constitute social practices, spawns their identification as ‘strategy’, and renders them intelligible in particular ways – notably, through the privileging of power–knowledge frameworks, such as Porter’s ‘five basic forces’, that become hegemonic. In the following section, we first interpret a fragment of empirical data to illustrate the argument of the previous sections. In doing so, we recognize that we are simultaneously appealing to a regime of truth – in the guise of strategy talk – that we aspire to scrutinize. We also acknowledge that our interpretations of the extract are constructed from our knowledge of other empirical data, including interviewees’ accounts and company documents, that enacts our ‘strategizing’ about how to deliver our argument to an imagined audience. We appreciate how the identification of relevant data, as well as our own account of its significance, is inflected by a strategy discourse with which they engage in strategizing, and which enables them to present accounts of their strategizing activity. Analysing strategy discourse Consider the following statement by StitchCo’s Chief Executive: ‘I have had a unique opportunity to carry the company forward into the Nineties. It is a privilege to participate in this driving, entrepreneurial and creative environment and with so many people that have also been part of its history and development.’ (press coverage) In this section, we first offer a possible understanding of this statement before reflecting upon alternative interpretations of its significance. The statement, we suggest, is illustrative of the kinds of discursive practices that comprise the micro–(re)production of ‘strategy’. ‘Strategy’ is simultaneously absent and present. There is no direct reference to

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‘strategy’, yet the CEO can be heard to invoke notions of strategy. We interpret his statement, reported in the press a few months after his appointment, as illustrative of how ‘strategy work’ is accomplished – in this case, by deploying the media to disseminate a view of the company for employees, customers, shareholders and others that characterizes it as ‘driving, entrepreneurial and creative’. We take the production of this account to exemplify the mundane, social practice of (managerial) communication through which relations of power – between the CEO and his audience – operate to disseminate and promote a particular kind of knowledge, and membership, of the company. In this process, distinct subjects – notably, the CEO as occupier of the chief (and ‘unique’) executive position and objects, such as ‘the company’, its ‘history’ and ‘environment’ – are recurrently constituted, reproduced and transformed. To the extent that such claims are accepted and normalized, they operate to (re)produce discourses of strategy and strategic management; they also act to forge a ‘regime of truth’, to use Foucault’s phrase, that operates to discipline the thought and conduct of those who identify with its call. The statement alludes, we suggest, to the strategic management of StitchCo, both in its reference to moving ‘forward’, and in its association of this movement with a ‘driving, entrepreneurial and creative environment’. Such discursive practices (of strategizing) act to position the activity and identity of employees within a process of ‘carrying the company forward’ and ‘developing’ it and within which the CEO ascribes to himself a key, and perhaps sovereign, role. The use of the term ‘environment’ is ambiguous: it construes an operating context that is ‘driving’, in the sense that the market disciplines those who fail to respond effectively to its changing demands; it also signals an aspiration and demand that StitchCo employees are themselves driving, entrepreneurial and creative. The strategy favoured by the CEO, we contend, seeks to harness entrepreneurship and creativity in ways that would build upon, rather than replace, a distinctive account of the history and development of the company. This is just one reading of the CEO’s statement. This statement may, of course, be interpreted in other ways. It could be read as a celebration of the implementation of a rationalist conception of strategy in which strategy is conceived to foster an ‘entrepreneurial and creative’ corporate culture capable of exploiting opportunities and parrying risks. Or, to draw upon our broader knowledge of the company, it could be heard to affirm an espoused strategy of ‘product differentiation’ combined with ‘focus’ (Porter, 1979) that was expected to revitalize the unique selling point ascribed to StitchCo merchandise. Alternatively, the CEO’s statement could be interpreted as articulating a processual conception of strategy in which he is engaged in negotiating and promoting a particular vision based upon his ‘recipe knowledge’ of how to restore the fortunes of an ailing company. In such a reading, the opportunity of press coverage is interpreted as a way of disseminating a particular vision of strategy in which its dynamic (‘carry forward’, ‘driving’) meaning, and means of implementation, is given emphasis. From a Foucauldian standpoint, however, whatever reading becomes dominant or ‘taken for granted’ evidences the play of power relations (e.g. by privileging particular

discursive practices) rather than approximating what strategy ‘is’. In this light, communications do not simply explain or justify the intentions or actions of managers to whom the task of formulating and implementing strategy is assigned. They also exert truth effects insofar as they operate to constitute employee intentions and actions that they are generally assumed to describe. The discourse can be read to signal an expectation or requirement that employees, the CEO included, will be assessed within, and will examine their own performance against a corporate and business ‘environment’ that is represented as ‘driving, entrepreneurial and creative’. The implication is that employees who are construed as not demonstrating their commitment to, and delivery of, this discipline will no longer have the ‘opportunity’ to ‘participate’. In this regard, the CEO is himself tied to, and disciplined (i.e. both constrained and enabled) by, a strategy discourse that he disseminates, and with which he and his appointees within StitchCo are strongly identified by the non-executive directors, major shareholders and media pundits, as well as its employees. The CEO’s repeated and amplified articulations of the strategy fuelled the expectations of staff and investors that he would exemplify, demonstrate and deliver what it means to be ‘driving, entrepreneurial and creative’. Despite the power invested in such a knowledge of strategy, it should not be assumed that strategy discourse directly determines or unequivocally constrains either the actions of the CEO or other StitchCo employees. Other discourses and options are available that render such strategy discourse more or less credible and appealing. Investment in other discourses and associated identifications (e.g. family or career goals) can result in considerable scepticism, resistance or dramaturgical compliance with respect to proposed and enacted strategic change. At StitchCo, the terrain on which the new strategy discourse was propagated and distributed had previously hosted social relations and subjectivities to which the new CEO, an outsider, contrived to make selective appeals – for example, by acknowledging the impressive history of the company. Conclusions Discourses appeal to a context whose contours they invoke and reproduce. When interpreting the brief extract taken from some press coverage of StitchCo, the reader unfamiliar with the company is obliged to invoke a context – for example, a broad understanding of what businesses are and what CEOs do. As Fairclough and Wodak (1997, cited in Hardy et al., 2000) contend, ‘Discourse is not produced without context and cannot be understood without taking context into considerationyDiscourses are always connected to other discourses that were produced earlier, as well as those which are produced synchronically and subsequently.’ It is to ‘context’ that we have necessarily appealed in constructing our interpretation of the CEO’s statement. That said, it is a mistake, from the standpoint of Foucauldian discourse analysis at least, to assume that ‘context’ and its interpreters can be independently or dualistically identified. This is where discourse analysis departs radically from the realist ontologies favoured by rationalist, processual and, indeed, certain forms of

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discourse analysis. Both context and discourse are understood to be continuously (re)identified through discursive practices. Knowledge of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ undergoes construction and transformation in the discursive practicalities of its everyday use. This, to be clear, is not to deny the reality of what is discursively identified as ‘history’, ‘context’, ‘structure’, ‘agency’, etc. but, rather, to recognize how it is through discursive practices that we identify reality and, in doing so, effect its reproduction and transformation. The analytical gauntlet thrown down by Foucauldian discourse analysis is to acknowledge and investigate the power/knowledge relations that are productive of particular ways of accounting for complex processes. It is not simply that discourse is contextually interpreted. Rather, it is indexical in the sense that discourses are rendered meaningful by connecting their claims to the discursively constituted contexts of their articulation. The CEO’s statement is placed in the context of what is (discursively) constituted, for example, as the history of StitchCo and the position of its CEO. No discourse is capable of providing a closure in reflecting upon, or seeking to capture, StitchCo’s past. Each possible history is identified through discursive work that is open to contest from alternative histories that it excludes or marginalizes. Discourse analysis exemplifies and stimulates an awareness of how the identification and privileging of particular historical, or contextual, conditions is necessarily the product of contingent, discursively produced ways of depicting the emergence of organizational (e.g. strategizing) practices. The concern of discursive analysis is to better appreciate how, as forms of power–knowledge, strategy talk and texts are actively involved in the constitution of what, for example, rational and processual models contrive to prescribe or describe. In exploring a form of analysis that is more directly attentive to, and guided by, the reflexive quality of social relations, there is no aspiration to offer a substitute or corrective for rational or processual approaches to strategy. It is accepted that rational and processual analyses proceed from different assumptions, and that they each make distinctive contributions to the theory and practice of strategy. Their accounts of strategy are credible and valuable within their own terms of reference. For us, the shortcomings of rational and processual analysis reside in a lack of reflexivity (and humility) about claims to rationalize strategy or accurately reflect its processes and also in its disregard for its own truth effects, and not in the failure to embrace the discursive approach commended here. While the incorporation of greater reflexivity within rational and processual analysis would operate to qualify its objectivism – whether in respect of industry structures or ‘managers’ meanings – there would remain pragmatic or expedient reasons for minimizing consideration of their discursive production and political effects. Analysis of ‘strategy’ as discourse is attentive to how the discourse of ‘strategy’ renders the world, including its experts and adopters, meaningful and tractable in particular ways. ‘Strategists’, as Knights and Morgan (1991) have noted, ‘do not reflect upon the truth and disciplinary effects of their discourse’. In contrast to other accounts of strategy, it is not assumed that the ‘object’ of interest exists

independently of its analysis. This approach, we acknowledge, is neither self-evidently valuable nor easily undertaken. This is not least because, in order to discuss any topic (e.g. strategy), it is necessary to treat the topic as if our knowledge of it exists independently of the discursive practices that identify and explore it as a topic. In addition, the truth effects of established strategic discourse, which find their echo in rational and processual models of strategy, are particularly powerful. These effects make it ‘exceedingly difficult for us to disengage ourselves from such a view’ (Knights and Morgan, 1991). Nonetheless, following the lead given by Knights and Morgan, we believe that by striving to do so, it is possible to open up and extend new ways of knowing strategy. Notes 1 Likewise, Pettigrew (1987 emphasis added) commends postrational analysis for its capacity to provide ‘a view of process combining political and cultural elements that evidently has real power in explaining continuity and change’. Mintzberg et al. (1995: xi) declare that, in contrast to orthodox conceptions of strategic management, their theoretical position ‘tries to explain the world as it is rather than as someone thinks it is supposed to be’.

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