Promoting discourse analysis as a linguistic perspective to further explore strategic management issues

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to promote discourse analysis as a valuable theoretical perspective to further examine how communication and other discursive practices may impact strategy‐related outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – The author uses a single case study of a French village in an illustrative way, to show how stakeholders (can) communicate to influence the strategic development of an organization. Findings – A set a propositions is identified as an understanding of why new discourses emerge and institutionalize in a given setting. Research limitations/implications – As the production of texts was used to observe practitioners’ participation in the strategy process, silent forms of participation may have passed unnoticed. Practical implications – Practitioners who aim at influencing the strategy process may be interested in identifying the discursive context (producers of consumers of texts) and in improving their conversational skills. Originality/value – The paper suggests a three‐step process to study the strategy process from a linguistic perspective: identify the producers of texts, examine how the texts are written/told, explain how a set of texts come to dominate a conversation.