When the discourse of strategy meets the discourse of spirituality : A study of the recontextualization of strategy discourse in a Church organization

Abstract

A well-established body of research in organizational studies shows how business-oriented strategy discourse has spread to different organizations and to society at large. Drawing insights from this research, we in this paper study how strategy discourse intertwines with the spiritual and religious discourse in a specific case of a Finnish Church organization. The interdiscursive analysis focuses on the Church’s formal strategy text, employees’ written reflections regarding the implementation of the strategy, and one-on-one leadership conversations where the manager-employee dyads discussed these texts. Thus, the data set makes a rare case of an intertextual chain of text and talk through which strategy discourse was recontextualized from the field of strategic management to a religious realm. Our analysis specifically highlights how both the organization of textual practices and the conversational practices — and their orchestration — contribute to the transfer and transformation, i.e., recontextualization of strategy discourse.