Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Corporate strategy, organizations, and subjectivity
T2 - a critique
AU - Knights, David
AU - Morgan, Glenn
PY - 1991/4
Y1 - 1991/4
N2 - This paper attempts to develop a new approach to the study of corporate strategy. It draws on the methodology of Michel Foucault to suggest that corporate strategy can be seen as a discourse, which has its own specific conditions of possibility. These are traced historically to various exercises of power within the conduct of war and the development of business organizations. Strategy is located as an emergent set of practices, which has distinctive power effects on organizations and subjectivity. Analyses of strategy cannot be reduced either to rationalist accounts of markets and environments nor interpretive understandings of actors' frames of reference. The emergence and reproduction of 'strategy' as an essential element in managerial discourse needs to be located in specific changes in organizations and managerial subjectivity, because it is a mechanism of power that transforms individuals into particular kinds of subjects who secure a sense of well-being through participation in strategic practices. Conflict over 'strategy' is therefore more than just a question of career politics and market competition. It touches on the very sense of what it is to be human as well as having effects that readily legitimize prevailing relations of inequality and privilege in contemporary organizations and institutions.
AB - This paper attempts to develop a new approach to the study of corporate strategy. It draws on the methodology of Michel Foucault to suggest that corporate strategy can be seen as a discourse, which has its own specific conditions of possibility. These are traced historically to various exercises of power within the conduct of war and the development of business organizations. Strategy is located as an emergent set of practices, which has distinctive power effects on organizations and subjectivity. Analyses of strategy cannot be reduced either to rationalist accounts of markets and environments nor interpretive understandings of actors' frames of reference. The emergence and reproduction of 'strategy' as an essential element in managerial discourse needs to be located in specific changes in organizations and managerial subjectivity, because it is a mechanism of power that transforms individuals into particular kinds of subjects who secure a sense of well-being through participation in strategic practices. Conflict over 'strategy' is therefore more than just a question of career politics and market competition. It touches on the very sense of what it is to be human as well as having effects that readily legitimize prevailing relations of inequality and privilege in contemporary organizations and institutions.
KW - Strategy
KW - Subjectivity
KW - Foucault
KW - Organization
U2 - 10.1177/017084069101200205
DO - 10.1177/017084069101200205
M3 - Journal article
VL - 12
SP - 251
EP - 273
JO - Organization Studies
JF - Organization Studies
SN - 0170-8406
IS - 2
ER -