TY - JOUR
T1 - The point of no return
T2 - Ritual performance and strategy making in project organizations
AU - van den Ende, Leonore
AU - van Marrewijk, Alfons
PY - 2018/6/1
Y1 - 2018/6/1
N2 - Organization scholars call for a more critical approach to the field of Strategy-as-Practice. Particularly, more interpretive and micro-level analyses of strategy from a performative perspective are endorsed. This paper addresses this call with an ethnographic study of rituals that mark kick-offs, launches, milestones, and deliveries in project organizations. Using a performative approach, the aim is to investigate how rituals are sociomaterially orchestrated and the implications this has for strategy making. To collect data, fieldwork was conducted during eight ritual events in four infrastructure projects in the Netherlands, and 46 in-depth interviews were held with ritual participants. Our study reveals the often overlooked strategic role of rituals in terms of (1) engaging an audience, (2) legitimizing project plans, and (3) catalyzing transitions via a ‘point of no return’. The contribution of this paper is a performative analysis of rituals offering insight into the understudied aesthetic, corporeal, and material nature of strategizing.
AB - Organization scholars call for a more critical approach to the field of Strategy-as-Practice. Particularly, more interpretive and micro-level analyses of strategy from a performative perspective are endorsed. This paper addresses this call with an ethnographic study of rituals that mark kick-offs, launches, milestones, and deliveries in project organizations. Using a performative approach, the aim is to investigate how rituals are sociomaterially orchestrated and the implications this has for strategy making. To collect data, fieldwork was conducted during eight ritual events in four infrastructure projects in the Netherlands, and 46 in-depth interviews were held with ritual participants. Our study reveals the often overlooked strategic role of rituals in terms of (1) engaging an audience, (2) legitimizing project plans, and (3) catalyzing transitions via a ‘point of no return’. The contribution of this paper is a performative analysis of rituals offering insight into the understudied aesthetic, corporeal, and material nature of strategizing.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85048737155&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.lrp.2017.02.006
DO - 10.1016/j.lrp.2017.02.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048737155
SN - 0024-6301
VL - 51
SP - 451
EP - 462
JO - Long Range Planning
JF - Long Range Planning
IS - 3
ER -