Communicating, Interacting and Strategizing: Exploring the Situatedness of Strategy-Making

Abstract

While a growing body of work has established that strategy is communicatively constituted through talk, writing, narratives, documents, material artifacts and multimodal interactions, this literature remains dispersed across disciplinary traditions and publication outlets. This special issue transcends such boundaries and brings together contributions that foreground the communicative and interactional accomplishment of strategizing, to demonstrate what is gained when researchers attend to how people collectively define, negotiate and enact strategic concerns in situated contexts. Articles in the special issue examine strategizing across a diverse range of settings, including entrepreneurial ventures, social movements, digital collaboration platforms, organizational restructuring processes and political organizing. They show how strategic action emerges through situated communicative practices and engage with key concerns in organization studies, including authority, materiality and entrepreneurship. Attending to the situatedness of communication enriches Strategy-as-Practice research and related traditions, opening new avenues for investigating strategizing in increasingly mediated, fluid and pluralistic organizational environments.