A Communicational Approach to Strategy-Making: Exploring the Constitution of Matters of Concerns

• In Event: As Good as New: Emerging Paradigms/Directions in Organizational Communication

Abstract

This paper develops a communicational approach to strategy and strategy-making as an attempt to bridge the growing bodies of literature on organizational communication and Strategy-as-Practice. Based on a “communicative constitution of organization” approach (CCO), it provides a conceptual framework to define strategy-making as a series of communication episodes where specific matters of concerns are invoked, evoked and negotiated, defining and appropriating value to the organization. More specifically, the paper proposes to focus on fleeting moments of strategy to highlight how collective endeavors are progressively born as effects of the contributions, and therefore do not exist prior to the practices that generate them. Applying this framework to the analysis of a board meeting in a community organization, it shows that favoring a constitutive view of communication allows for a definition of strategy-as-practice that goes beyond human action broadening the analysis to other agents and “web of practices” (Vaara and Whittington, 2012).

Authors

• Nicolas Bencherki, University at Albany - SUNY

• Mathieu Chaput, Lund U

• Francois Cooren, U de Montreal

• Consuelo Vasquez, U of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM)