Strategy as Discourse in a Global Retailer: A Supplement to Rationalist and Interpretive Accounts

Abstract

The paper contributes to a developing interest in discourse in management and organization studies. Strategizing activity is studied as an example of organizing conceived as a discursive practice. Material drawn from an intensive case study of 'StitchCo', a global retailing and manufacturing company, is deployed to analyse how strategy activity was articulated, mobilized and enacted; and, in particular, to explore how accounting practices became discursively imbued with strategic significance in ways that contributed to what the strategy discourse contrived to invoke and prescribe. Grounded in a Foucauldian power/knowledge framework, this approach is seen to offer an innovative and challenging supplement to established analyses of (strategic) management.