Embodying and Materializing Strategic Change through Live Presentations

This paper seeks to develop the idea that researchers using a socio-material lens to examine strategy making should take the body into account. Strategy tools cannot be produced, diffused and appropriated without being embodied. Yet, the body as an animate artefact has not been taken seriously in the strategy-as-practice field. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a strategic change in the healthcare environment, we examine “PowerPoint presentations” of a cultural change initiative to different audiences. The paper shows how through these “PowerPoint presentations,” the main promoter of the change (1) materializes the strategic change by embodying different subject positions (2) while simultaneously positioning different physically present audience groups as protagonists in the strategic change. The paper ends by discussing how the embodiment of these subject positions materializes the change, creating strategic effects and space for making sense of the intended change, and it proposes the notion of “strat...