Appropriating the Words of Strategy in Performance Appraisal Interviews

Abstract

This study examines strategy as situated discourse in performance appraisal interviews. Based on illustrative video-recorded data, our findings show how strategy is appropriated in face-to-face interaction between managers and employees who engage in evoking the pragmatic and functional meanings of strategy concepts and discourse. The study specifically highlights the embodied, intertextual, and material nature of strategy; how people use gestures to make the strategy more concrete and complete; how appropriation is often accompanied by the speaker’s appraising attitude; and how strategic texts are ascribed agency when they are ventriloquized, that is, when life is breathed into them. This analysis extends the literature on strategy discourse in three interrelated ways: (a) by explaining how the constructions inscribed in strategic plans are appropriated, (b) by explicating the methods used by participants in constitution of the power of strategy discourse, and (c) by illustrating how these methods can be studied empirically through video-ethnography.