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Strategy as Organizing: Discursive Approaches (21 - 23 March 2012)

Faculty
Guest Professor Martin Kornberger, Adjunct Professor Eero Vaara and Associate Professor Anne Reff Pedersen, all from the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School
Course Coordinator
Associate Professor Anne Reff Pedersen
Prerequisite/progression of the course
Participants on this course should be researching in the broad areas of strategy, strategizing or the wider social sciences (especially: sociology, organization theory or communication theory ). They should be interested in researching questions concerning the process of strategies in organizations broadly conceived, using predominantly qualitative forms of methodology.
Participants should read all course material before the beginning of the course, and will be expected to submit a short written assignment (1 page) that outlines elements of their own research project (research question/hypothesis/theoretical interests/methodological intent) in relation to the literature used on the course. Deadline for the assignment is 1 March 2012.
It is a precondition for receiving the course certificate that the student attends the whole course.
Aim of the course
The purpose of this course is twofold: to study the discursive and performative perspectives on strategizing and to thereby better understand the relations between strategizing and organizing. The PhD course will cover the analysis of metaphors, discursive frames, narratives, language games and their performative effects. It will also reflect on the societal implications of strategizing and organizing: both are understood as socio-political practices that impact individual identities, institutional arrangements and social order. All this helps to foster a transdisciplinary understanding of strategy as a specific form of organizing, creating intended and unintended effects. More specifically, the objectives of the course are to:
  • Help to better understand strategizing as a social phenomenon and its organizational effects.
  • Offer an overview of research methods that can be used to analyze the discursive practices of strategizing and their organizing effects
  • Provide constructive feedback for the students’ PhD projects
Course content, structure and teaching
The course is organized into three sub-themes that reflect recent developments in the field of strategy and organization theory. 
  1. Discourses and strategizing: Scholars have started to examine strategy as discourse.  How can we understand strategizing as discursive practice? What are the insights that such an approach can offer? What are the performative effects of strategy as language game?
  2. Strategies and narratives: Narrative performances play a central role in strategizing. Strategy organizes time, but often without reflecting on the different meanings, interpretations and effects of time. How can time and narrative performance be analyzed? How does strategy narrate the future that becomes the reason to act in the present?
  3. Strategy, performativity and power: Recently the performative effects of strategizing have received increasing attention. How can we understand performativity of strategizing? How does strategy exercise power? And how can we critically analyse how it shapes organizations, institutions and society at large?
Each subtheme will be investigated using state-of-the-art literature from strategy and organization theory. Cases of city planning, mergers and acquisitions and innovation will serve as examples in class. During all three days of the course the classes will be taught by Martin Kornberger, Anne Reff Pedersen and Eero Vaara.
Learning Objectives
The students are expected to better understand, discuss and reflect upon the course literature and topics of discussion and gain inspiration for their PhD work. 
Teaching methods
The course is organised as a 3 day learning experience. The pedagogy includes teacher and student-presentations, break-out sessions, “PhD trouble shooting” sessions (a short on-demand session focused on a specific problem or challenge one of the participants encounters in their PhD work which might be relevant to others) and intensive reading of texts.
The course starts on 21 March at 12.30 pm and the remaining days at 9 am. The course days end around 5 pm.
Course literature
-       Vaara, E. (2010) ‘Taking the Linguistic turn seriously: Strategy as multifaceted and interdiscursive phenomenon’, Advances in Strategic Management, 27: 29-50
-       Laine, P.-M. and Vaara, E. Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in an engineering group. Human Relations, 2007, 60(1), 29-58.
-       MacKenzie, D., 2006, An engine, not a camera, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, chapter 1
-       Mantere, S. and Vaara, E. On the problem of participation in strategy: A critical discursive perspective. Organization Science, 2008, 19(2), 341-358.
-       Barry, D. and M. Elmes (1997). "Strategy retold: Toward a narrative view of strategic discourse." The Academy of Management Review 22(2): 429-452.
-       Boje, D., M. Driver, et al. (2005). "Fiction and humor in transforming McDonald’s narrative strategies." Culture and Organization 11(3): 195-208.
-       Pedersen, A. R. (2009). "Moving Away from Chronological Time: Introducing the Shadows of Time and Chronotopes as New Understandings ofNarrative Time'." Organization 16(3): 389
-       Knights, D. and Morgan, G. (1991), ‘Strategic discourse and subjectivity: Towards a critical analysis of corporate. Strategy in Organizations’, Organisation Studies, 12(3): 655-683.
-       Kornberger M. and Clegg, S., 2011, Strategy as Performative Practice: The Case of Sydney 2030, Strategic Organization
-       Kornberger M., and Carter, C, 2010, Manufacturing Competition: How Accounting Practices Shape Strategy Making in Cities, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 23(3): 325-349

Sidst opdateret af Katja Høeg Tingleff 20.03.2012