Textual objects and strategizing: the influence of documents as active objects on strategic recursiveness

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the role of documents as influential objects in strategizing, especially in terms of how they influence strategic recursiveness. We do not restrict our study to explicitly strategy-related documents (e.g. strategic plans and vision or mission statements), but include all documents that generally address a company's long-term direction. By applying the notions of authoritative text and epistemic and technical objects, we argue that documents contribute to strategic recursiveness by legitimating certain courses of action, as well as delimiting future action and possibilities of strategic change, including for their original authors. Over time, this effect becomes self-enhancing as the text at hand is reproduced in new documents and thereby further diffused within and outside the organization. We thereby contribute both to current understandings of strategic recursiveness and to literature addressing sociomateriality and strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategizing
• strategy-as-practice
• strategic change
• recursiveness
• sociomateriality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Mikael Lundgren is a Senior Lecturer in Business Administration (Organization) at Linnaeus University, Sweden. His main research interests are within strategy, organization, leadership, and qualitative methodology.

Martin Blom is a Senior Lecturer in Business Administration (Strategic Management) at Lund University, Sweden. He is a researcher within the areas of strategy, leadership, and corporate governance and has published books, book chapters, and journal articles within all these fields.

Notes

1 We however refrain from explicitly positioning our study as ‘discourse analysis’ (Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), since our interest primarily concerns the level of meaning as opposed to the level of talk and language use or the level of practice. For sure, talk, text, language use and what Alvesson and Kärreman (2000) describe as locally situated discourse are very much in the centre of our empirical attention. The label discourse analysis, however, comes with far-reaching expectations, assumptions and implications – for instance – of a system that structures social reality in a way that (usually) transcends single organizations, as well as an explicit focus on the language level per se (not the level of meaning as is the focus in this study). Even though we concur that discourse theory is a highly valuable perspective (and has been explicitly utilized in several other studies of strategy and documents, e.g. Vaara et al., 2010), we have chosen not to follow this path in this particular study.