Digital Puppet-Mastery: Power Practices of Strategists in Digital Strategy Workshops

Digital communication technologies (DCT) have important implications for power relations in strategy work. Despite the pervasiveness of these technologies, the power effects of strategic practices performed in digital settings remain underexplored. Drawing on data from a nine-month ethnographic single-case study of digital strategy meetings and workshops, including interviews with strategists during and after the observation period, we investigate how strategists used DCT. Our findings reveal how strategists enacted the DCT for three purposes: (i) to construct the reality of the digital workshop setting, (ii) to exploit and (iii) to bypass this setting, ultimately resulting in staging effects of rationalization of workshop interactions and the reinforcement of existing power structures. Our process model of strategy and power in digital workshops contributes an understanding of power effects of DCT in strategy work to the strategy-as-practice (SAP) literature.

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Digital Puppet-Mastery: Power Practices of Strategists in Digital Strategy Workshops