Materializing Strategy at the Interface Between Managers and Frontline Staff

• In Event: Organizational Change Communication: Materializing the Immaterial

Abstract

Strategic management has traditionally been conceived as a formal planning and implementation process or as an emergent phenomena (Mintzberg, 2006; Whittington, 2001), not as practices constituted by material objects such as texts (Latour, 1987). This paper presents findings from a study of a middle manager’s material interventions during a global organizational change strategy that was designed to reduce operational costs and increase efficiency in a large French financial organization. It shows how three types of textual tools (operating texts, timing texts, and geographic design) created by the middle manager operated as sensegiving (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991) tools that materialized for the workers the middle manager’s reframing of the global strategy and allowed them to enactment his alternative strategic intent. The “closing account document”, “the opening banking account table”, and “strips of tasks” acted as material facilitators, translating the manager’s intent into strategic practice. The paper’s value lies in the way it shows how the discursive and ideological dimensions of organizational change can be materialized during strategic change as texts that do things (Cooren, 2004). In doing so, it highlights the constitutive nature the non-verbal dimensions of an organization and why they need to be treated as an integral part of change communication.

Cooren, F. (2004). Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings, Organization, 11, 373-393.
Gioia, D. and Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation, Strategic Management Journal, 12, 433-448.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mintzberg, H. (2006). The design school: Reconsidering the basic premises of strategic management, Strategic Management Journal, 11, 171-195.
Whittington, R. (2001). What is strategy, and does it matter? London: Routledge.

Authors

• Celine Legrand, Audencia

• Arnaud Nicolas, U de Nantes