A Micro-ethnographic Approach to Strategic Communication

The purpose of this paper is to further develop our understanding of how micro-ethnographic methodologies may assist us in gaining a deeper understanding of the field of strategic communication. The paper uses empirical, micro-ethnographic data in form of video recordings of strategy meetings to investigate strategic communication through the prism of ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA). By focusing on incidents of metaphor use in strategy meetings, the purpose is to show the importance of acknowledging the communicative micro-practices related to strategy work. In the context of strategic communication, we understand strategy as not only limited to processes of analyzing and reacting to external contingencies (i.e. first-order strategies), but also to involve conscious attempts on the part of management to influence and shape its own organizational reality (i.e. second-order strategies) (Christensen et al., 2008). Strategy can be defined as the “situated, socially accomplished activity, while strategizing comprises those actions, interactions and negotiations of multiple actors and the situated practices that they draw upon in accomplishing that activity” (Jarzabkowski, Balogun, & Seidl, 2007, pp. 7-8). Strategy work is thus connected with particular types of practices, such as strategy meetings (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008) and strategy workshops (Prashantham, Bourque, Floyd, & Johnson, 2010, Seidl, MacIntosh & MacLean, 2006, Schwarz, 2009), which can be understood as focal points for the strategic activities of organizational members (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008). One recommendation for analyzing strategic communication as a situated, socially accomplished activity is to focus on managers and their communicative activities and practices in relation to strategy dissemination (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008). Recently, a number of calls for micro-ethnographic approaches to organizations in general and strategy in specific (Gylfe et al., 2015, LeBaron, 2008, LeBaron et al., 2018) highlighted the importance of acknowledging practice and process research as interactional accomplishments that can be captured by means of novel methodologies including video observations and multimodal conversation analytical methods. These calls are of relevance for the current paper, as much of the literature on strategic communication seldomly clearly addresses, who actually communicates by means of these strategic communicators, and what is meant by “strategic” in the so-called strategic communication activities. These studies adopt a relatively static image of strategic communication, which largely neglects the micro-level processes through which strategic communication is actually accomplished. Consequently, insights into how individual managers on a micro-level in practice enter a conversation, make a statement, prepare a document, or deliver a presentation with a preset goal, a strategic intent, in mind” (Dulek and Campbell, 2015: 124) is still rather limited. From a practice perspective the current paper suggests that the introduction of a micro-ethnographic perspective could successfully shed light on the relational, action-driven, micro-oriented and generative elements of strategic communication, and hence gives us a more enlightened understanding of the content of the black box called strategic communication. Hence, the paper addresses the methodological implications of an ethnomethodological perspective on strategic communication by matching the ontological stance of social constructivism with a video-ethnographic, multimodal conversation analysis, thereby documenting the locally situated nature of strategic communication as a relational and interactional process. We will do so by means of exemplary authentic video data from an organization-wide strategy meeting, where we illustrate how to make use of a micro-ethnographic approach to study the relationship between institutionalized strategic management and the real-life strategic communication processes, thus advancing our understanding of the role of texts and discourses in the actual practice of strategic communication in an organizational context of strategic change processes.