Participating By Choice or Command? When Ideals of Stakeholder Engagement Clash With a Prevailing Strategy Discourse

Paradox of Control in Strategy Participation

In traditional strategy discourse, managers are seen as responsible for operational efficiency and therefore having the task of control over the processes and outcomes of people’s activities (Ouchi, 1979). From the perspective of control, engagement comes at a cost: involving stakeholders in strategy-making sets constraints for the strategy process and slows down decision-making (Andersen, 2004; Collier et al., 2004). Managers therefore feel a need to balance the benefits and costs of engagement (Henry et al., 2022) and, therefore, to control participation. As a result, those activities meant to include people in strategy events may become frustrating plays, as individuals’ contributions are superficial, and they do not have a real possibility to influence strategy (Vaara & Whittington, 2012). Instead, the goal might be to make the personnel understand the management’s strategy “correctly” (Balogun & Johnson, 2005), leading to a paradoxical situation where managers command others to participate in the strategy process but retain the right to decide what is the appropriate kind of participation (Eriksson, 1999). Eriksson and Lehtimäki (2001) call this “participation on command”: if people do not participate appropriately, they are not allowed to participate at all.

Here, we approach control in stakeholder engagement through a paradox view. We view control as forming a “bipolar opposite” with openness, autonomy, and freedom entailed in engagement that “persist over time and reflect back to each other and develop into seemingly irrational or absurd situations because their continuity creates situations in which options appear mutually exclusive, making choices among them difficult” (Putnam et al., 2016, p. 72). We adopt a strategy discourse lens to examine the emergence and enactment of this paradox through participants’ subjectivities in relation to the prevailing strategy discourse. From a constitutive view of paradox (Putnam et al., 2016), discourse is seen as a key to understanding the way multiple voices, tensions, and levels give rise to organizational paradoxes. As a result, participants may find themselves in seemingly irrational or absurd situations or facing ironic or irrational outcomes (e.g., when democratic systems come to restrict participation; Johansson & Stohl, 2012; Stohl & Cheney, 2001). Participants then experience and communicate the tensions: “stress, anxiety, discomfort, or tightness in making choices, responding to, and moving forward in organisational situations” (Putnam et al., 2016). Following the definition by Putnam et al. (2016), we understand tensions as feeling states that underlie contradictions and paradoxes and result from frustration or blockage or uncertainty that individuals face in dealing with contradictions and paradoxes (Lewis, 2000; Smith & Lewis, 2011), into which participants then respond in various ways (Wenzel et al., 2019).

Participation as an Issue of Subjectivity: Strategy Discourse Lens

When examining the engagement-control paradox through a strategy discourse lens, control is to be understood in the context of strategic management’s history as a discipline as well as the developed social codes and knowledge (Ezzamel & Willmott, 2008; Knights & Morgan, 1991). Accessing and mastering this knowledge is also a symbol of professionalization and has implications for subjectivity and organizational power relations (Balogun et al., 2014). Strategy as discourse refers to different meanings and interpretations based on a shared history of experiences that have evolved over time into cultural truisms that are not challenged—strategy as the task of top management is one of those. People then use these truisms to explain their actions and justify their identity choices (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2008; Hardy et al., 2000).

Individuals participate in the discourse through subjectivities: categories against which people evaluate themselves and others and, based on the evaluation, position themselves and others as included or excluded in relation to the category (Davies & Harré, 1990). Subjectivity is constructed based on the perceived position in the discourse (subject position) and the related opportunities to act and influence (Davies & Harré, 1990; Edley, 2001). Thus, subjectivity is not a synonym for an individual but refers to a category in the discourse (Knights & Morgan, 1991). Similarly, subjectivity can also be seen as a contextual social identity constructed in the discourse, including people’s “right and opportunities to engage in organizational decision-making, their autonomy as organizational actors, and ultimately their identity as respected and important organizational members” (Laine & Vaara, 2007, p. 36).

From the discourse perspective, control resides in the relationship between individuals and the discourse and can be understood as self-governance. As a result of subjectification, individuals aim to align their behavior according to what is seen as appropriate (Fleming & Spicer, 2014; Rantakari & Vaara, 2016). In the strategy discourse literature, power and control are often seen in a dialectical relationship with resistance (Laine & Vaara, 2007; Mantere & Vaara, 2008; Mumby, 2005; Mumby et al., 2017; Rantakari & Vaara, 2016; Zoller, 2014) and to result in a continuous struggle over preferred understandings of social reality, attempting to marginalize and close off, or voice alternative views (Mumby, 2005).

At the same time, people, and groups of people, are socialized into the discourse, guiding their actions without the participants consciously thinking about how or why they have learned to think or act in a certain way (Edley, 2001; Remes, 2006, p. 289). The discourse guides its subjects to see the world through perspectives defined by the discourse, and the controlling effect of the discourse may even be so strong that those inside the discourse understand the external reality outside the discourse as an illusion that gets defined from within the discourse (Jokinen & Juhila, 1999).

What this means for engagement is that the rights and responsibilities are connected to the way participants interpret their relationship to the discourse that determines the activity that is socially acceptable or unacceptable in a specific context. The strategy discourse may guide organizational actors to see some subjectivities as active (for example, top management as strategy subjects) and some as passive (for example, some groups of workers as strategy objects). These assumptions are offered as the default positions by the strategy discourse for its members.

Thus, from a discourse view on stakeholder engagement, the concept of the strategy participant should be seen as singular and historically contingent, rather than as a universally defined phenomenon. This kind of thinking also opens the potential that it would not be necessary to define the strategy participants as either the designers or the implementers of the strategy. However, from the strategy discourse perspective, the subjectification of the strategy participant is firmly rooted in the exercise of power in the strategy discourse and might be difficult to alter merely by declaring an “open participation.” In the following sections, we study individuals’ participation in strategy-making to understand how prevailing strategy discourse produces assumptions of individuals’ rights and responsibilities to participate in the strategy process and how these power relations give rise to the “engagement-control paradox.”

Research Context

The context of the study is the strategy process of a social and health sector organization of a medium-sized city (here referred to by the pseudonym “Seahaven”) in a Nordic country. With a population of around 210,000 residents, Seahaven’s public services are provided by approximately 11,000 employees, 30% of whom are dedicated to welfare services. The annual budget, totaling nearly 1.3 billion euros, designated over half of these funds (700 million euros) to welfare services, demonstrating the city’s commitment to upholding the Nordic welfare model. This model, grounded in principles of equality and solidarity, ensures equal access to essential social and health care services for all citizens, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

The Nordic welfare model, functional in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, is characterized by a comprehensive, universal, and publicly funded system. High tax rates generate the necessary revenue to support a wide range of services, including health care, education, child care, elderly care, and unemployment benefits. However, the challenges that Seahaven faces include organizing efficient and cost-effective service delivery, adapting to demographic changes, and ensuring long-term financial sustainability, particularly in the face of shifting economic landscapes.

During the study period, Seahaven underwent a merger with smaller municipalities in its vicinity to form a larger entity. Concurrently, a prolonged global economic downturn had severe consequences for the information and communication technology (ICT) sector that had traditionally been important for Seahaven. This resulted in substantial job losses, reduced tax revenues, and an increased need for support services for affected residents. As Seahaven grappled with these challenges, it was confronted with the difficult task of reconciling the increased demand for services with diminished resources.

Against this backdrop, Seahaven’s strategy process provided us with an illuminating setting for examining the tensions between the mission of a democratic system with the requirements of equality and inclusion and decision-making and the financial constraints of an administrative organization. In a democratic city context, politicians are democratically elected to their positions and hold the highest decision-making power in the city organization. While the managers and other organizational actors then implement the decisions made by the city council and board, the managers are also responsible for preparing the decisions and therefore deciding on which issues are to be presented for the decision-makers to be decided in the first place. Moreover, in Seahaven, the strategy process was the responsibility of strategy experts. They were working in the city’s central administration and were responsible for designing and conducting the strategy process, coordination of strategy-making, and documenting the results.

Seahaven’s strategy process was intended to be inclusive, engaging different stakeholders widely. Political decision-makers, directors, and some of the managers were invited to participate in workshops, and the citizens could comment on the strategy through a web site. The same opportunity to comment was also offered to employees. Strategy experts collected the input of different participants and then composed them into the strategy documents. Some middle managers also contributed to the strategic planning by preparing documentation in their area of expertise under a predefined title and scope, for instance. Strategy documentation composed by the strategy experts and approved by the politicians was seen as the main output of the strategy process. When approved, these documents were distributed to the supervisors, who were told to implement the strategy.

Data Collection

The material consists of interviews with politicians, internal strategy experts, senior directors, service directors, administrators, middle managers, team leaders, and employees in the field. We used purposive sampling, meaning that the selection of interviewees was guided by the research problem. The total number of personnel within the social and health care services was 2,700, excluding temporary workers. Of those people who were interviewed, 47 worked in the Seahaven’s social and health care services. Six of them were directors of social and health care services, and they were interviewed first. Second, the managers on the next level in the organizational hierarchy and the strategy experts were sent an invitation for interview, and those who accepted the invitation were interviewed. Other interviewees were selected through systematic sampling based on an alphabetically ordered list of personnel acquired from the city’s human resources department. An invitation to interview was sent to every tenth name on the list. Fifteen percent of the invited people accepted and were interviewed. Finally, five politicians were invited from those committees that guide the service sector in question. These were politicians who had been elected by citizens in the municipal election and, as politicians, were not employed by the city organization, nor were they necessarily experts in this specific field. The interviews were conducted within a period of 5 months, between February and June 2014. After the interviews, it was checked that the interviewees represented the different group of actors in the organization. A total of 54 people were interviewed, yielding 65 hours of interview material. The organizational roles and interviewees are presented in Table 1.

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Table 1.

List of Interviews.

Interviewees by job role	Number of interviews	Percentage of interviews
Politicians (POL)	5	9
Strategy experts (STR)	2	4
Senior directors (DIR)	6	11
Administrators (SLA)	6	11
Service Managers (SEM)	8	15
Service Supervisors (SES)	10	19
Workers and team leaders (EMP)	17	31
TOTAL	54	100

The one-to-one theme interviews were conducted by applying the principles of responsive interviewing (Rubin & Rubin, 2005): each interview took the form of a discussion, the aim of which was to talk about things the interviewee regarded as important in strategy-making and participation. The process and content of the discussion were allowed to adapt to what the interviewee brought to the discussion. Each discussion started with the same warm-up question about the interviewee’s career path and current job role. Next, they typically progressed to themes related to possibilities of having an influence at work, participation in strategy-making, the role of strategy in their own work, and values and leadership.

In addition to the topics above, many interviewees spoke spontaneously about challenges related to their work, of which the most often mentioned were how tired they were of being forced to save money and resources at the customer end, the burden of organizational changes, the lack of support from the organization, and the feelings that the organization did not respect their work and efforts. In such a discussion, we saw the role of the interviewer not as a neutral observer but as a co-producer of direction, content, and meaning. The duration of the interviews ranged from one to two hours. They were recorded and later transcribed, resulting in over 800 pages of written material.

Data Analysis

Guided by the constitutive view of paradox (Putnam et al., 2016), we began the analysis with the preliminary idea of how to better understand the tension control produced in relation to engagement. We adopted an open-ended research design and the idea of iterative analysis (Tracy, 2013). In the first phase, we used discourse analysis to understand and conceptualize how the interviewees talked about strategy and themselves as strategy participants. We identified six types of subjectivities (see Table 2) that the discourse allocated to the participants. We then turned to positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) to analyze the subject positions that the strategy discourse made available for the interviewees and how the interviewees then positioned themselves. In relation to these positions, we also identified factors that either enabled or disabled participation.

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Table 2.

Subject Positions and Subjectivities Identified in the Studied Organization.

Strategy participation mode	Strategy subjectivity	Enabling and hindering factors	Response to expectation	Subject position	Examples of behavior	Example from empirical material
Inclusion	Core influencers	Enablers: Perceived strategy competence; Perceived motivating strategy methods; Position in hierarchy and in strategy discourse (inclusion); Experienced possibilities and willingness to influence. Hinderers: Strategy work not familiar; Alienating strategy language and inefficient methods; Position in hierarchy and strategy discourse (exclusion)	Initiative	Competent participant	Planning, deciding, guidance, monitoring	(1) ‘I am really satisfied with my ability to influence. If you are active, you can influence a lot.’ (POL03) (2) ‘The idea of [well-being clinic] came from employees who started to think. . . I mean, the employee will, in their work, recognise what will work and what will not, and if they are given any freedom at all, creative solutions will be found.’ (SED05)
Admittance as subject	Co-influencers	Enablers: Recognized expertise in some area, appreciation, and utilization. Hinderers: Lack of substance competence, or lack of respect toward it, or ignoring it for another reason.	Obedience	Back-office influencer	Preparation and commenting of documents	(3) ‘. . . these are written by us. . . we have been able to influence them. . . but in the actual strategy-making. . .there were not that many managers at our level involved.’ (DIR03) (4) ‘. . .I have been a part of this preparation machine, when I have been able to write about my own field. . .’ (SLA05)
Admittance as object	Implementers	Enablers: Clear objectives and measures; Precise instructions and frames for operation. Hinderers: Lack of instructions, orders, or necessary decisions.	Obedience	Obedient professional	Obeying orders, implementing plans	(5) ‘I don’t know how the strategy work could be done differently. It is on a high level. Then it is my job to translate the strategy language into the language used in the field and start working. I’m there in the middle. That is how I see it.’ (DIR02)
	Critics	Enablers: Competence is not utilized and/or views not taken into consideration; No authority to act (or speak), achievements belittled or someone else taking credit for them; Tokenism.Hinderers: Utilizing competence; Meaningful objectives; Respect toward accomplishments; Real and satisfactory abilities to act.	Compliance	Frustrated professional	Criticizing of restricting mechanisms and tokenistic practices	(6) ‘. . .we, who have actually studied these things and are facing the customers and know quite a lot about these issues, then we are not listened to. . .’ (EMP09)
Withdrawal	Individualists	Enablers: Goals or values separate from one’s own work that do not correspond to the values of one’s profession.Hinderers: Goals and values that utilize one’s professionalism, support work and are in line with one’s profession.	Resistance	Internally driven professional	Focusing on own work, being driven by own professional values	(7) ‘. . .the personnel in this field feel so much calling for this work and want to do clinical patient work. . . so the idea that we would be guided by. . . an administrative document or guidelines is in contrast with my capability of being able to handle this. . .’ (SLA05)
Exclusion	Resigned	Enablers: Dismissal, objectification.Hinderers: Acknowledgment, respect of competence, listening, support.	Resistance	Disappointed professional	Worrying about how self and others are treated, withdrawal	(8) ‘. . . organisational change has. . .been prepared from the administration level, not bottom-up. . . so it begins to be close to one hundred pages and ready-made, so few employees are willing to say anything in that phase. . .’ (SEM03)

In the second phase, we turned our focus to those enabling/hindering factors and what seemed to lie beneath participation. We paid attention to the division between those positions that accepted the allocated subjectivities and those that did not. Most of those participants who chose to position themselves differently presented criticism toward the process and felt themselves restricted or even excluded. Following the typology presented by Putnam et al. (2016), we then focused on those issues that interviewees brought forward as tensions: what they experienced as “stress, anxiety, discomfort, or tightness in making choices, responding to, and moving forward” (Putnam et al., 2016, p. 69). We then took a closer look at those moments in which these tensions occurred. We noticed that when talking about these moments, interviewees were explaining their responses to the contradicting needs of being engaged in the process and doing as they were told or trying to understand the reasons or justifications for the decisions the politicians or the management had made. We then categorized the described paradoxical situations under four themes: mechanistic process, exclusion, control of participation, and detachment of strategy (see Table 3).

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Table 3.

Paradoxical Situations Arising From the Strategy Process.

Paradoxical situation		Tension	Examples from the data
Mechanistic process	Transparency of the process: participants didn’t understand why the process was executed in the way it was, and it didn’t seem to make sense, as admitted also by the strategy experts.	Many aspects of the strategy work were questioned (why a text provided by an expert changes along the way; why so many workshops; why the commenting rounds are done in a hurry, who needs so many documents) (P, E)	(1) ‘There have been efforts to create an atmosphere of dialogue. But another question is whether the employee gets the feeling that the things [discussed] go anywhere, forward, that is less certain.’ (Service manager, SEM07) (2) ‘How do you notice in practice that a working group somewhere has been thinking about [these issues]? In a memo somewhere, showing that they have met and pondered these. . . People are put to ponder, but then it won’t, or very rarely will be actually implemented.’ (Service manager, SEM08)
	Process for the sake of process: The focus has been on the execution of the process, not the reasons and intended outcomes.	Strategy experts have not had any means to check if the implementation has been done and if the implementation has been successful (S)	(3) Interviewer: ‘Do you currently have information of whether the strategy has actually flowed into the everyday life [of employees]?’ Interviewee: ‘We have not asked that. We know that quite a lot of the teams have dealt with values, and we have actually made some templates with which to go through them. . . But we have not yet checked and obliged [them], so that we would get an overview of which teams have them. So it is on the to-do list.’ (Strategy expert, STR02)
	Lack of ownership	Managers taking no ownership of the strategy process (E)	(4) ‘Even in cases when there would be decision making power on a lower level, due to the management culture, [managers] go behind the upper level. There is no courage to be a leader, that “I, as a lower level manager say to my own people, that I think it is good to do this in this way.” Instead, they say that “because the people on the upper level demand that we do it in this way”’ (Politician, POL03)
ExclusionMethods of inclusion exclude people	Events are organized for stakeholders but on organizers’ terms	It is difficult to arrange time for the strategy work because of operational work (P, E)	(5) ‘The big council seminars were arranged in the middle of the day and some people have not even been able to agree with their employers how to deal with this.’ (Politician, POL02) (6) ‘The project people do not understand when we try to explain why we don’t participate. If we need to come for two days to these, workshops, is this the popular word? Because we cannot attend a workshop for two days. Who will take care of the customers since we are not allowed to take substitutes? If you arranged something for three hours in the afternoon, that we could do. But now they are building their own world there. . .’ (Service manager, SEM04)
	Events are organized for stakeholders but in strategy language. In order to participate, people need to be familiar with the language used.	“Fancy” strategy language does not feel familiar. The concepts, language, and strategy as a word might feel difficult for those who don’t need them as part of their work. (P, E)	(7) ‘Then we are made to sit in some seminar, and you need to operate with the kinds of concepts that you don’t quite even understand.’ (Politician, POL02)
Detachment of strategy from organization	Breakdown of implementation	Strategy feels distant from people’s work (P, E)	(8) ”Strategy has been discussed very little under the name of strategy at the employee level. At the health care centers, doctors and nurses and others who work there, you don’t hear them say “now we got this strategy, let’s take a look at what it is about and let’s talk about it”’ (Senior level administrator, SLA05) (9) ‘. . .certain objectives won’t change in a year or in five years. So why won’t we think about the ways of working, the actual work. We have a lot of this. . . making great plans, but then, taking action, that we have less.’ (Director, DIR02)
	Different realms	Strategy and its implementation are part of the same, relatively coherent system. (E: no, S: yes)	(10) Interviewer: ‘What do you think that the people in the organisation will tell me about strategy?’ Interviewee: ‘That we have developed something abstract somewhere there. But what’s that got to do with us? We should find some other word [to replace “strategy”]. We have also been pondering that what would be the right language to talk about it, to make it more understandable.’ (Strategy expert, STR02) (11) ‘And I don’t really know how the strategy work could be done differently. It is quite at the upper level. And then it is my job to translate the upper-level strategy language into the language of the field and start working. So I’m there in between. That’s how I’ve figured it out.’ (Director, DIR02)
	No dialogue, only top-down communication. The concerns raised by stakeholders are not heard in the process.	Financial planning is done by managers and financial planners; the budget comes to the service foremen as given (E)	(12) ‘. . .we have offered ourselves to participate in the budgeting. But no-one has every asked us how much money we need to run this. No one has ever asked anything.’ (Service supervisor, SES06)
		The completed strategy is communicated top-down for implementation. (P, E, S)	(13) ‘They are [up] there, feels like they are separated [from us] there in the ivory tower. They demand, but then put their hands on their ears and say “I don’t hear this, I don’t hear this,” if we complain about something, and just say that they are also having a hard time.’ (Service manager, SEM08) (14) ‘We have received a lot of training for this, that the communication needs to go bottom-up and top-down, both ways, but this is not happening.’ (Service manager, SEM08)
	Treating participants like children: incapable of focusing on relevant issues or taking responsibility	Thinking on behalf of participants (E)	(15) ‘They [superiors at a higher level in hierarchy] think on behalf of us, that how it [work] could be done in the best way. They thought that the problem is that we are too slow and too lazy and not productive enough.’ (Service manager, SEM02) (16) ‘We used to be more self-organization but now it is not allowed. You are told what you are supposed to do, and if you do something else, it is forbidden. . . . Own creative thinking that is often required in situations with customers, to come up with creative solutions, and you’ll get the feeling that it is not allowed.’ (Employee, EMP07)
	Employees are not seen as capable of deciding on strategic issues, but on the other hand, the responsibility to decide on how to make those issues happen in practice is left to the employees.	Responsibility for decisions made allocated to the employees (E)	(17) ‘Now they say that there is no [money], that this is all we get and if it is not enough, then there’s no other way than to let people go. Which then makes the service even worse. But this is what the council and the board members should understand, and they should also be responsible for their actions and explain to our people the reasons for this.’ (Service manager, SEM02) (18) ‘All the services are not demanded by law, and those are the ones that could be cut. . . . But who wants to be the one who decides on this and lose their political image. There are high stakes involved, but it is wrong to make the basic people make the decisions.’ (Service manager, SEM02) (19) ‘The question ’what do we give up, as there is not enough money for everything’ is a fast way to make a chattering group scatter. Eliminations of scarcity are not the favorite subjects of politicians.’ (Director, DIR05)
	Participants’ own strategy-making taking place at the grassroots level.	The employees have their own measurements and goals arising from the content of their work. (E)	(20) ‘We do have those strategic guidelines, based on “what should be we pay attention to this year.” They come from [the national health institutions], and the metrics are nationwide.’ (Service manager, SEM11)
Control of participation	Allowing only “right” kind of input: the process makes sure the contribution is of the right kind	Input corrected without asking the participants (E)	(21) ‘. . . Then they [texts] are combined, and sometimes the texts that you have written have been changed into something completely different, but then you just need to accept it.’ (Senior level administrator, SLA05)
	Agenda setting is predefined. The issues that participants feel are important and that they wish to discuss are deemed as (a) none of their business and (b) irrelevant.	The strategy text is ready and polished before providing the participants with an opportunity to comment on it. (E)The participants are allowed to comment only the presented agenda, not to bring forward issues of their own. (E)	(22) ‘Of course it’s always OK to have a rough draft of A4 or one sheet, that what are the objectives. But when it starts to be close to one hundred pages and readily polished, I don’t think any employee has the guts to say anything at that point.’ (Service manager, SEM03) (23) ‘. . .we were turned down [by the management], like why are you sticking your nose into this—it’s none of your business. And that these [work division related questions] are not relevant at all at this point. That we need to look at this from the community perspective and not from the organization’s perspective. . . But those were the big questions that we still run into regularly. We were not allowed to discuss those, no guidelines were given, I mean, of the topics that would be clearly management guidelines.’ (Employee, EMP08)
	The process does not accept different kinds of expertise and therefore different kinds of participation.In order to participate in the strategy process, one needs to become a “strategist,” that is, to adopt the language and underlying assumptions of strategy discourse.	People need to participate “correctly,” in the given role (E, P)	(24) ‘If we think about decision-making in general, I see a huge contradiction in becoming selected in the elections due to being a nice neighbor or somebody with one strong interest. And when the elections are over, these same people as the members of the council should suddenly become strategic leaders who see only the big picture, the big lines. . .’ (Politician, POL03) (25) ‘They always say that these things are purely operative management and we, as decision-makers, should not be involved. But I feel that. . . as a representative of the citizens, my job is also. . . to bring forward the messages I receive from employees and citizens, relating to the operative management. So I do bring these issues forward. I have to, because these services have been produced by tax money and they need to withstand this kind of ethical examination.’ (Politician, POL01)

Note. P = politician, E = employee, S = strategy expert.

Based on this understanding of the participants’ differing possibilities of contributing to the process and what kind of absurd outcomes this division produced, we took a closer look into two main categories: the control of participation (resulting in exclusion) and detachment of strategy (resulting in no meaningful outcomes). We compared the experiences of those interviewees who were satisfied with the process and felt like being able to contribute to those interviewees’ descriptions that presented criticism. We noticed that the experiences of these two groups, as reflected in the subject positions, seemed to represent a completely different reality: one focusing on strategy on a conceptual level and the other one struggling with the challenges of everyday work. Based on the allocated subjectivities, a division between these realms was maintained, providing the participants in the conceptual strategy realm the right and duty to control the activities of the participants from the practical strategy realm, who then were left with the options of compliance or withdrawal. Based on the division of subjectivities, the differing responses, and subject positions, we identified three modes of participation available (see Table 2). The division into separate realms and the way the mode of participation was defined by the discourse, provided us with means of theorizing about the “engagement-control paradox” in strategy-making. We describe these findings in the following section.

Control of Participation: Paradoxical Situations and Different Responses

In the studied organization, the legacy of hierarchical strategy tradition was integrated into the strategy discourse. The practices were built on the assumption that strategy is a management-led process, the purpose of which is to plan the future on behalf of the whole organization and to set high-level goals that would then be communicated to the rest of the organization for implementation. These assumptions led to an execution of a strategy process in which people were expected to participate, and when they did so, they found themselves torn between their own expectations and the demands of the discourse. The tension-ridden setting gave rise to different paradoxical situations observed by the interviewees. In these situations, many had accepted the subjectivity of a Critic, and they were found among all organizational positions: people who were admitted to the strategy discourse in a controlled manner and were often dissatisfied with the way things were and how they were progressing. Frustrated professionals would have been especially willing to participate but had poor or no possibility at all to contribute. Thus, they were annoyed and pointed out the cosmetic nature of participatory practices.

Division Between Conceptual Strategy Realm and Practical Strategy Realm: Different Modes of Participation

Engagement Under the “Dome” of Strategy Discourse and Control: Different Modes of Participation

The polyphonic organizational context has been identified as a tension-ridden environment for participation (see Castelló et al., 2013; Castelló & Lopez-Berzosa, 2023; Wenzel et al., 2019; Winkler et al., 2020), where a more nuanced understanding of the role of managerial control is needed (Sachs & Kujala, 2021; Schultz et al., 2013; Vaara & Rantakari, 2024). By placing control in the relationship between participants and the discourse, the strategy discourse view enabled us to theorize different positions and modes of participation co-existing in the process (see Table 4). Our findings depict participation in the organizational context and connected to strategy-making as a complex process that emerges from the subjectification of both the managers and other participants (see Figure 1).

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Table 4.

Modes of Strategy Participation.

	Inclusion	Admittance	Quasi-participation
Basis for participation	Organizational citizenship	Organizational membership	City membership
Justification for participation	Hierarchy: membership in top management with an assumption of influencing	Knowledge or skills needed by strategy with a potential of influencing	Objects of manipulation to generate an illusion of influencing
Participant	Members of the organization	Those given access	Objects of activities
Basis for influence	Hierarchical or organizational role	Has been nominated as a strategy contributor	None
Selection of subjectivity	Expected by the discourse	Imposed by the discourse	Imposed by the discourse
Expectations of participants vs. Participants’ responses to tensions	Initiative/Initiative	Compliance/ObedienceComplianceResistance	Compliance/ResistanceWithdrawal
Unintended outcome of the strategy process	Controlling engagement through the processIllusion of inclusive process	Experiencing paradoxical situationsSurvival strategies	Becoming excludedSurvival strategies

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Figure 1.

Participation by Choice or Participation by Command: Offered and Imposed Modes of Participation.

The prevailing management culture (i.e., how the management has internalized their rights and responsibilities and how activities and outcomes are controlled in the first place) sets the overall condition for the process to take place. People are either admitted or included in the organization’s strategy-making depending on their ability to influence the decision-making concerning the task at hand and their mode of participation. When admitted, their mode of participation is imposed by the strategy discourse. However, they can choose their mode when included: whether they become subjects, active and willful participants or settle on being controlled objects of strategy-making. Part of the choice is that people can also choose not to become engaged, which is something that the strategy discourse tied to the hierarchy does not consider.

Quick and Feldman (2011) make a cogent argument that the conflation of participation and inclusion within terms such as “engagement” may inadvertently lead to a limitation in the evolution of democratic engagement theory and practice. Their analysis, and our research findings, underscore the vital importance of distinguishing different types of engagement based on the capacity of participants to contribute input or co-produce processes, policies, or programs. Our findings show, first, how three modes of participation were present in the process. Here, inclusion was meant to refer to the kind of co-production that Quick and Feldman (2011) discussed; however, in practice, it was possible only for the positions in the conceptual strategy realm, in which the processes, policies, and programs were designed. The others were allocated such subjectivities that allowed either participation through admittance (i.e., they were allowed the access but were expected to provide input “correctly”) or became excluded. A part of the subjectivities was admitted only as objects, representing quasi-participation, as these participants had no possibility for influence. This concerned the operational workforce and citizens, who were merely provided with the opportunity to comment on the strategy text. The basis for this mode can be seen as manipulation, although it could be argued that it was not intentional but imposed by the discourse.

Second, our study also shows how the decision about the mode of engagement was not necessarily intentional (i.e., under managerial control), but also the assumption of the right and responsibility of functional control was allocated to the management by the discourse and, by self-regulation, assumed by the management. While participants in the lower organizational ranks seemed most often to accept the subjectivity allocated to them, subjectivities were also rejected or modified by the individuals based on their evaluation of their subject position in the discourse. Studies on activism and social movements (de Bakker et al., 2008; den Hond & de Bakker, 2007) have shown that the stakeholders may also initiate engagement; however, in our case and in the shadow of the prevailing discourse this was possible only within the practical strategy realm. Our findings therefore resonate with Friesl et al. (2023) study of self-selection in strategy participation in which they draw on structuration theory and model strategy participation as a dynamic interplay with individual choices and rules of participation. Based on the developed process model of individuals’ self-selection in participation, they conclude that it is important to recognize and reflect on the participation rules in order to accomplish genuine “inclusive openness.” Our findings build on and elaborate this notion through the empirical examination of those “rules” and the conditions that prevent the reflection from taking place, locking the “stabilizing trajectory” of participation (Friesl et al., 2023).

Emergence of the Engagement-Control Paradox

While the extant studies have noted the complex relationship between managerial control and stakeholder engagement (Sachs & Kujala, 2021; Schultz et al., 2013), few studies so far have examined the dynamics and conditions that control sets for stakeholder engagement. Another contribution of our study thus arises from the adoption of the constitutive paradox view (Putnam et al., 2016) on stakeholder engagement, allowing us to outline the engagement-control paradox in the context of strategy-making. Building on the notion of “participation by command” (Eriksson & Lehtimäki, 2001), our study elaborates on the contradiction that simultaneous enactment of control and engagement produced. The manifestation of unexpected, even absurd outcomes and the varied reactions of participants served to substantiate the existence of a paradox, as postulated by Smith and Lewis (2011) and Putnam et al. (2016).

Our findings show how the prevailing strategy discourse took over the engagement discourse and infused it with the task of control. The discourse produced different categories for participation, according to which all the participants came to self-regulate themselves. As a result, the engagement efforts such as workshops and commenting rounds became vehicles of control, where the “right” kind of participation was determined by the discourse. In the context of strategy discourse, the mechanistic adoption of the idea of engagement and related discursive practices caused the tensions to surface. The need for engagement affected everyone: the strategy experts, with the need to build the process as a means of controlling people’s participation and outcome and thereby enacting expert control; the managers adopting the role that discourse allocated to them and enacting managerial control; and other stakeholders, causing most of them to feel “inclusion-washed” by quasi-participation.

The discourse divided participants into two separated realms: the conceptual and practical strategy realms, the existence of which people were only vaguely aware of. Rather, the assumption of the active strategists was that by participating, people are automatically part of the conceptual strategy realm. People of the practical realm did not have access to the conceptual realm; and the people of the conceptual realm did not consider the practical realm relevant for strategy-making. Maintaining this separation also maintained the paradox. As in stakeholder engagement literature, the issue of power is largely seen as omitted also in paradox studies (Cunha & Putnam, 2019, p. 100; Wenzel et al., 2019). By juxtaposing engagement with control, our case shows how the issue of power becomes central due to the paradox. While the literature most often maintains the idea of managing (with) paradoxes by finding a balanced compromise, our case shows that due to power, that choice was possible for only the strategy subjects. Strategy objects had only the alternative of accepting the expected position or resigning from the process. However, it was exactly this division that maintained the paradox, and, as Wenzel et al. (2019) notice, paradox is not a controllable “thing” that managers can resolve. Trancending the paradox would first require its acknowledgment and acceptance (Putnam et al., 2016). For example, Henry et al. (2022) found that accentuating boundaries between different actor groups was actually a constructive process that deparadoxified the tensions. In our case, the “dome” of strategy discourse prevented the acknowledgment of the existence of the paradox and worked to maintain the status quo.

In sum, our research offers insights into the study of stakeholder engagement by revealing the power of the paradox lens. It uncovers the latent contradictions that can arise when the engagement discourse interacts with established organizational contexts. It moves the focus from instrumental, technical, or moral aspects of engagement to those mechanisms that underlie engagement efforts and the kind of power relations that they produce (see Dawkins, 2015). By focusing on the intricate power relations and underlying mechanisms of engagement efforts, we offer a nuanced perspective on the “dark side” of stakeholder engagement. By examining engagement efforts through the lenses of discourse and paradox, we can scrutinize the co-existence of the “bright” and “dark” sides of stakeholder engagement.