From Utterances to Official Strategy – Strategizing as a Discursive-Material Process

In this paper we focus on how matters of concern emerge in the first place and how those may develop into official strategy in polyphonic strategy-making. Empirically, we use visual fiction to study strategy emergence in the TV series Borgen. Conceptually, we draw from Bakhtin’s work to track the emergence, recognition, and development of strategy utterances in Borgen to examine how some strategy utterances become part of official strategy, while others get rejected. Our findings present chains of strategy utterances regarding two strategic issues in Borgen and reveal material-discursive dynamics that were associated with those strategy utterances that eventually became part of official strategy. We contribute to prior research by showing how some strategy utterances became recognized, and eventually developed as part of official strategy, while others do not. Last, in these ways our study addresses the question of strategy emergence.