The Construction of A Strategic Issue: Issue Selling as A Narrative Process

Lionel Garreau (), Romain Vacquier and Stéphanie Dameron
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Lionel Garreau: DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Romain Vacquier: DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Stéphanie Dameron: DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: For the past 30 years, the issue-selling movement has uncovered the vast repertoire of actions by which ‘sellers' persuade a decision-maker that an issue is strategic. While these works have a rational and teleological conception of this phenomenon, implying that the strategic scope of the issue is given ex ante, other research in strategy shows that such scope is a social and discursive construction based on inter-actions between various actors. This article proposes a model of issue selling as an emergent narrative process. Based on a qualitative survey of 42 middle managers, using semistructured interviews, we show this process starts with a phase of incremental elaboration, in which the seller informally shares narrative fragments with a network of actors, followed by a phase of interpretation, in which the seller formally presents his or her narrative to a decision-maker, coherently articulating previously collected narrative fragments. We also show that the passage between these two phases is allowed by what we call the ‘strategic construction' of the narrative. These results help to show that issue selling is a less solitary and rational process than previous work suggests.

Keywords: Issue selling; Narratives; Strategic processes; Middle management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
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Published in M@n@gement, 2024, 27 (1), pp.19-37. ⟨10.37725/mgmt.2024.5778⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04652693

DOI: 10.37725/mgmt.2024.5778

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