The Discursive Construction of Strategists' Subjectivities: Towards a Paradox Lens on Strategy

Until recently, the field of strategy has neglected the question of what it means to be a strategist. Based on an analysis of 68 interviews with strategy practitioners, our results highlight four main tensions that emerge from strategists' discourses on strategizing work: the social tension, the cognitive tension, the focus tension, and the time tension. This tension-based representation of strategy enables us to differentiate between three forms of strategists' subjectivities, i.e. the ways by which strategists discursively cope with tensions as a means of constituting their identity and legitimacy: the mythicizing subjectivity, the concretizing subjectivity, and the dialogizing subjectivity. Such results shed light on what a strategist is, suggesting that strategizing can be conceptualized as the art of balancing tensions and that multiple strategists' subjectivities within a paradox lens on strategy may in fact co-exist.