Strategy as a ‘Project’: overcoming dualisms in the strategy debate

This paper is concerned to challenge a selection of the strategy literature on the basis that it tends to follow one or other side of a polarity between a subjective and an objective approach. There is a tendency here for strategy analysis to collapse into subjectivism (e.g. a reification of personalities) or objectivism (e.g. structural determinism) respectively. In seeking to avoid the worst excesses of dualism, we focus on strategy as a project in which numerous stakeholders make demands and serve to condition its development. A notion of strategy as a perennially unfinished project allows us to see how it is in a continuous process of self‐formation and reconstruction. As a project, strategy may appear in different discursive configurations depending on which of the stakeholders (e.g. managers, shareholders, competitors, suppliers, intermediaries, the financial community, consultants, regulators, and customers) a corporation is focused on impressing or placating. For example, managers might embrace a core competence narrative or cost‐cutting practices in order to maintain or enhance stock market ratings in the financial community. At the same time, strategy is invariably focused on securing the support or loyalty of its customers. This may involve heavy resources being directed towards advertising and brand imaging as well as service quality as part of a strategy of constituting the subjectivity of the (actual or prospective) customer. All this takes place within the framework of constraints laid down by regulators that leave corporate decision‐makers limited room for manoeuvre. The paper draws on a limited number of empirical vignettes through which to illustrate our arguments concerning this approach to strategy as a project.