Effecting strategic change:The work of strategic champions in shaping narrative infrastructure

Organisations are under pressure to expand the boundaries of strategic management to better account for socio-ecological dependencies, and to shape the principles that guide decision-making accordingly. Prior research on strategic change focusses on the role of leadership to sensegive, and the response of organisational members. Within a strategy-asnarrative perspective, narrative infrastructure has been identified as a valuable but underexplored theory to explain how narrative guides the decisions and actions of organisational members and how leaders use narrative infrastructure to sensegive strategic change to the organisation. Yet, we know less on how narrative infrastructure is shifted, and the work of others than leaders to do this. I undertake a grounded study of how strategic champions (individuals working to influence strategic issues) support leadership in initiating and adopting a shift in narrative infrastructure. My analysis reveals that strategic champions undertake six different stages of narrative work: prompting, enrolling, underpinning, reinforcing, reconstituting and revisiting. Across these stages, strategic champions draw on discursive competences to sensegive the new master story to both leaders, and the organisation more broadly. I make two contributions to the research conversation on narrative within strategy-aspractice. First, I extend the metaphor of narrative infrastructure as a set of rails that guide decision-making, and present a more fulsome picture of narrative infrastructure as a rail network - made up of several master stories which may have different, and at times competing, organisational or institutional logics underpinning them. Second, I identify the work of strategic champions to support leadership in prompting, initiating and revisiting a shift in the narrative infrastructure of an organisation, and demonstrate how they build master story legitimacy, understanding and ownership. My thesis also lends insights to practice, identifying the tactics employed and competences to be developed by strategic champions undertaking to expand the boundaries of strategic management and shift the principles that guide decision-making in their organisations.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Research of GSB

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Schulschenk, Jess

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Hamann, Ralph
• Bertels, Stephanie

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/27829

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/27829