Abstract
Research at the nexus of strategy as practice and the communicative constitution of organizing indicates strategizing is a formalized process occurring alongside materialities supporting discourse in conventional organizations. Yet, strategizing is also accomplished informally in fluid organizational settings alongside diverse materialities that have little to do with discourse. Drawing upon a relationality analytical lens, we investigate how diverse other-than-discursive materialities are implicated in the strategizing process of a fluid social collective. After analyzing interview, observation, and encrypted online discourse data from a fluid social movement aimed at preventing the construction of a police training center, we find that materially enmeshed, aggregated, and reappropriated direct actions come to ‘speak’ for strategic directions of the collective. The study augments theory by moving past explicitly articulated discursively formulated strategies—often reliant upon conventional settings and human-designed materialities—to provide sharper theorizing on agentic contributions of diverse, other-than-discursive materialities in strategizing.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
