Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools: the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and Local Strategy Practice?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12144 |
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Author | Colleen E. Mills,Nicolas Arnaud,Céline Legrand,Eric Maton |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 38–57 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12144
Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools:
the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and
Local Strategy Practice?
Nicolas Arnaud, Colleen E. Mills,1C´
eline Legrand and Eric Maton
Audencia School of Management, 8 route de la Joneli`
ere, B.P. 31222, 44312 Nantes Cedex 3, France, and
1Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Universityof Canterbury, Private Bag 4800,
Christchurch, New Zealand
Corresponding author email: nicolasarnaud@audencia.com
While much of the literature on strategy and strategy as practice (SaP) focuses on tra-
ditional strategic tools, technologies and discursive practices of managers, this paper ex-
tends the understanding of strategic change implementation by proposing that mundane
material tools, understood as text, translate global strategic discourse in waysthat make
sense to workers and orchestrate successful global strategy implementation at the local
level. Based on a rich case study within one branch of a national bank, this paper demon-
strates how a middle manager’s materializing practices developedlocal strategy practice
while simultaneously transforming workand producing strategic figures or indicators that
satisfied senior management’sglobal strategic change objectives. The contributions of this
paper are threefold: (i) it advancesthe understanding of the multimodality of materiality
by identifying the influence of three types of mundane tools produced locally by a mid-
dle manager as he performed his sense of the senior managers’ strategic discourse; (ii) it
reveals how these three types of physical texts materialized the manager’s sense of this
discourse, facilitating frontline workers’ engagement and coupling materiality and oral-
ity in a coherent way that allowed workers to embody the company’s global strategy in
their ‘sayings and doings’; and (iii) it highlights the importance of managers’ ability to
materialize a strategic discourse.
Introduction
By arguing that strategy is not merely a prop-
erty of an organization, but rathersomething peo-
ple do in organizations, the strategy-as-practice
(SaP) literature draws attention to the daily prac-
tice of strategy, while proposing a redefinition
of the strategist. The SaP perspective encourages
us also to see those outside senior management
as strategists and calls for greater attention to
micro-level practices (see special issue of British
Journal of Management,26, 2015; Jarzabkowski,
Balogun and Seidl, 2007; Johnson, Melin and
Whittington, 2003). This follows a decade of re-
search addressing what managers do (Balogun
and Johnson, 2004; Floyd et al., 2011), which has
confirmed the central role of middle managers’
sensemaking (Weick, 1995, 1979) and sensegiv-
ing (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991) about strategic
change implementation. However, managers’ oral
activities and discursive skills (Balogun and John-
son, 2004; Rouleau, 2005; Rouleau and Balogun,
2011), rather than the waythey produce and/or use
physical artefacts (Cooren, Fairhurst and Hu¨
et,
2012; Leonardi and Kallinikos, 2012; Orlikowski
and Scott, 2008) and strategic tools (Dameron,
Lˆ
e and LeBaron, 2015; Jarzabkowski, Spee and
Smets, 2013), have been the primary focus. Re-
cently, attention has been paid to materiality and
its entanglement with practice (Dameron, Lˆ
e and
LeBaron, 2015; Leonardi, 2015; Leonardi and
Kallinikos, 2012; Robichaud and Cooren, 2013)
© 2015 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
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Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools 39
and calls have been made to look beyond mate-
riality as scripts and aordances to its role in ac-
complishing practices (Jarzabkowski and Pinch,
2013). Much of this burgeoning literature has fo-
cused on the formulation of strategy during meet-
ings, workshops and strategic episodes at the top
management level (Jarzabkowski, Burkeand Spee,
2015; Paroutis, Franco and Papadopoulos, 2015;
Werle and Seidl, 2015). Consequently, few pa-
pers have investigated how middle managers use
materiality for strategy implementation (for an
exception see Demir, 2015), despite the call to
study the influence of materiality (Leonardi, 2015)
on the achievement of durable strategic change
(Carlile, 2015). There clearly is a need to demon-
strate empirically how local materializing strat-
egy practice is coupled with global strategic dis-
courses and vice versa (Belmondo and Sargis-
Roussel, 2015; Dameron, Lˆ
e and LeBaron, 2015).
With this need in mind, we chose to apply an un-
derstanding of what Taylor and co-workers (Tay-
lor and Van Every, 1993; Taylor and Virgili, 2008)
refer to as physical texts and the associated con-
cept of ‘geosocial environment’ (Mills, 2002) to
capture spatial and social relations (Richardson
and McKenna, 2013) in a study of local strategy
practice during a top-down organizational change
process.
Inspired by both Vaaraand Whittington’s(2012)
invitation and the future avenues for research
on materiality and strategic practice identified by
Dameron, Lˆ
e and LeBaron (2015), this paper
presents a richly nuanced case showing how ma-
teriality is inextricably coupled with the perfor-
mance of new strategic practices, using data from
an intensive field study of a strategic change im-
plementation in a former public-sector organiza-
tion in France. Taking an interpretive stance, the
study examines the material side of a middle man-
ager’s work to show how materiality, the dialectic
relationship between people and the physical and
corporeal aspects of a phenomenon, contributes to
successful strategy enactment. It shows howa mid-
dle manager’smaterializing practice contributes to
both the implementation and adjustment of the
company executive’s strategic plan. The questions
guiding this research were:
RQ1: How does materiality contribute in prac-
tice to the implementation of a strategic change?
RQ2: What type of materiality is mobilized in
this process?
The analysis contributes to understanding of the
nature, power and organizational importance of a
middle manager’s strategy materializations by ex-
plaining how the material texts that he designed
gave sense to company strategy for his subordi-
nates and structured their strategic performances.
By demonstrating how mundane local texts fos-
ter employees’ support forcompany strategy, while
simultaneously transforming their work and cre-
ating strategic figures or indicators that satisfied
senior management’s strategic change objectives,
our contributions are threefold. First, we advance
understanding of the multimodality of material-
ity by identifying the influence of three types of
mundane texts in change implementation. Second,
we show how these texts materialized the middle
manager’s sense of global strategic discourse, fa-
cilitated frontline workers’ engagement and cou-
pled materiality and orality in a coherent way that
allowed workers to embody the company’s global
strategy in their ‘sayings and doings’. Third, con-
firming that enacted strategy is supported not only
by oral activity and discursive skills, but also by
materials produced by middle managers, we pro-
pose that managers’ ‘materializing skills’ are crit-
ical to successful change implementation. These
contributions constitute a strong response to a
strategy literature that is still highly predisposed
towards the use of traditional strategic tools (e.g.
SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, BCG matrix) (i.e.
Jarrattand Stiles, 2010; Rigby and Bilodeau, 2005;
Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011) by top managers
(Paroutis and Pettigrew, 2007; Paroutis, Franco
and Papadopoulos, 2015), including locally mod-
ified versions of them (e.g. Belmondo and Sargis-
Roussel, 2015) rather than the mundane tools cre-
ated locally as part of everyday strategic practice.
This paper begins by introducingthe concepts of
materiality and texts and linking them to the inter-
related processes of sensemaking and sensegiving
during strategic change. It then describes the case
and the methodology used to examine it. Lastly,
the findings are presented and discussed in terms
of their implications for research and managerial
practice.
Theoretical background
In this section we examine the literature on ma-
teriality, material tools, especially mundane ones,
in relation to the literature on texts, and on
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