Anniina Rantakari's academic dissertation was presented with the assent of The Doctoral Training Committee of Human Sciences, University of Oulu for public defence in the Arina auditorium (TA105), Linnanmaa, on 18 November 2016, at 12 noon
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine how power produces organizational strategy-making. In particular, I follow the theorizations of Michel Foucault and conceptualize power as productive and relational. In my theorization, I adopt the concept of dispositive for a two-fold reason. First, the concept of dispositive enables me to build and integrative theorization for strategy process and practice research that consists of three elements of analysis: power, discourse and subjectivity. Second, dispositive analysis allows me to examine how this framework can be seen as relational and in the continuous state of emerging.
With my thesis I add to poststructural strategy process and practice literature by examining strategy as an organizational dispositive. In my view I define dispositive as an artificial rationality through which relations between power, discourse and subject are intensified into material and social practices. This conceptualization enables me to re-evaluate three underlying assumptions of strategy research: Strategy as rational and intentional planning, defining of a strategist through practices of planning and implementing strategy, and defining organizational practices as strategic practices when they are directly related to the activities of the planning or implementing official strategies. In the empirical part of the thesis I draw in a case study from a Finnish call center. My empirical analysis shows how participation in strategy-making unfolds through power relations, namely practices of organizational control and individual self-actualization. This enables strategy scholars to better understand how strategy realizes through relations of power.
The theoretical framework and the empirical analysis combined enables me to examine three key processes identified in recent strategy process and practice research from a different angle. First, my theorization shows how intensified strategy implementation and striving for coherence can lead to increased conflict and polarization of strategic practices. Second, I show strategy as a future-oriented planning can lead to reproduction of past. Third, I show that resistance can be seen as productive in strategy-making, which leads to also that agency in strategy-making can be defined through practices of resisting.