Contributions published at Organization and Management (David Seidl)

In this paper we examine middle managers’ struggle over their subject position as strategists in the context of participative strategy processes. Based on a longitudinal case study of a company undertaking an Open Strategy process, we show how the wider inclusion of front-line employees in developing new strategy undermines the traditional subject position of middle managers. Based on these findings, we develop a process model depicting the recursive dynamics of middle managers’ struggles to maintain their subject positions in the face of employee participation. With these findings we contribute to the literature on middle managers by advancing our understanding of the implications of employee participation for middle managers’ subject position as strategists and their different ways of reclaiming their subject position. We also contribute to the literature on Open Strategy by revealing the implications for traditional strategy actors as well as by explaining the processual dynamics of participation over time.

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The role structure of a top management team (TMT)—the roles of TMT members and the relationships among those roles—has important implications for how TMT members work together as a group in directing an organization and shaping its strategy. Although the importance of TMT role structure has long been noted, it has received scant attention until recently when upper-echelons scholars started examining its formation and influence. To stimulate a concerted effort in studying TMT role structure, we develop a framework elaborating its main themes, draw out key contributions from extant research (see the SMS Collection), and outline promising future directions. In particular, we highlight important dynamics of how formal and informal structures complement or compete with each other in the strategic leadership of an organization.

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In this chapter, we present the various theories that have influenced or even defined the three schools of CCO thinking for the past 30 years. Regarding the four-flows model, proposed by Robert McPhee and Pamela Zaug, we describe the key role Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory has played since its inception. Regarding the roots of the system of self-referential communication systems proposed by Niklas Luhmann, we highlight the role of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Maturana and Varela’s theory of self-referential systems and George Spencer-Brown’s observation theory. Finally, the theoretical roots of the Montreal school, initiated by James R. Taylor’s text/conversation model, are introduced through the presentation of some key authors’ works, namely pragmatists such as John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, but also John Langshaw Austin, Harold Garfinkel, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Bruno Latour. Beyond their differences, we also insist on what unifies the theoretical foundations of these three respective schools of thought.

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