Authoring, de-authoring and authorization: Strategy consultants' texts and their authority

Date: 9 April 2014 Time: 11.00 am

This paper adopts a communication that is constitutive of organization (CCO) lens to examine how strategy consultants' texts claim authority. Six texts constructed during a longitudinal study of strategy consultancy/client inter-relating are investigated to discern how authorization is exercised through and by texts. Two contributions are claimed. First, I show how an external actor-perspective of strategy highlights how the object called 'strategy' is an authorized construct that requires the authoritative hand(s) of internal and external author(s) to emerge. The ubiquitous consultants' report is reframed as a defensive text whose purpose is to present a preferred view of organizational strategy as calm, sequential and ordered. Second, I extend CCO understandings by explicating how the authority necessary for organization to unfold is claimed and assigned through textual authoring, de-authoring and authorization.

About the presenter

Dr Alex Wright is a lecturer in strategic management in the Department of Strategy and Marketing at The Open University Business School, UK. His research interests focus on strategy-as-practice, which views strategizing as a sociolinguistic construction constituted by strategists. He is also involved in research on organizational routines as communicative constructions, communication as constitutive of organization, the social production of organizing spaces, and performativity.

For further information please contact Jim Sheffield,
School of Management Jim.Sheffield@vuw.ac.nz Ph. (04) 463 5085