Strategy as a language game. The prize for the most interesting strategy read this week...

Goes to David Seidl, whose paper "General Strategy Concepts and the Ecology of Strategy Discourses: A Systemic-Discursive Perspective", published in a recent Organization Studies (28/2) breaks new ground on the path opened by authors who have explored strategic management as a discourse (e.g., Knights & Morgan, 1991; as well as Whittington et al's paper "Taking strategy seriously" in the Journal of Management Inquiry).

In the paper, David explores how strategy concepts are transformed in their adoption across organizations. Marrying the notion of language games from Wittgenstein's late period with Luhmann's notion of organizations as systems, David argues that "no transfer of strategy concepts across different discourses is possible. Instead, every single strategy discourse can merely construct its own discourse-specific concepts. Different discourses, however, draw on the same strategy labels, which leads to ‘productive misunderstandings’".

I am reminded by Peirce's distinction between types and tokens in semiotics. The complex sign "dynamic capability" is a token, which the theoreticians of have taken to mean a specific set of characteristics, to be encountered across a set of organizations: a type. David has managed to convince me that indeed, we often mistakenly equate type with token, as we take it for granted that academics and practitioners mean the same thing when they use concept tokens like "strategy", "implementation", "industry" and so on. Instead of being "transferred", conceptual content is recreated in each instance where it is adopted in a new language game.

I also think the notion of "productive misunderstanding" is highly valuable. As we note contradictions in the rules of using different concepts across language games, new meaning is constructed, which enriches the language games.

However, where I have more difficulty is accepting that organizations can be viewed as single language games, or indeed, that we have a non-problematic way of drawing the border where one language game ends and another begins. This is a point made by Michael Mauws and Nelson Phillips in the paper "Understanding language games" (Organization Science, 6/3). They criticize the notion that practitioners and academics play according to different language games. Instead, we should see both discourses embedded in a network of interconnected language games.

There is a practical example, which illustrates the notion that organizations are not singular language games with respect to their strategy concepts. In his well-known paper "Strategy Creation in the Periphery: Inductive Versus Deductive Strategy Making" (Journal of Management Studies, 40/1), Patrick Regnér shows that strategy work is radically different between organizational centers and peripheries. He writes:

"The findings show a twofold character of strategy creation, including fundamental different strategy activities in the periphery and centre, reflecting their diverse location and social embeddedness. Strategy making in the periphery was inductive, including externally oriented and exploratory strategy activities like trial and error, informal noticing, experiments and the use of heuristics. In contrast, strategy making in the centre was more deductive involving an industry and exploitation focus, and activities like planning, analysis, formal intelligence and the use of standard routines."

Indeed, according to my experience, strategy is composed of radical different discourses within organizations. It would appear that the most natural way to approach the concept of language game is a heuristic instrument, where we abstract a certain social context, to make sense of the rules of its language game and the "form of life" that this language game belongs to. However, the way we conduct this abstraction, e. g., "organization X's strategy language game", "the strategy language game within organization X's periphery", "the language game within organization X's top management team" is essentially contestable. Language games are intertwined and interconnected, and language games where strategy tokens are used are no exception.

Images of summer past

As it appears I will probably never manage to write a full reconstruction of the summer past, I will share some pictures. These pictures were taken during a family holiday at a rented cottage in Savitaipale, by the lakeside.

It was a time well spent with the family. I was also reading scifi and searching for the perfect mechanical watch in various books and catalogues.