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This paper aims to illustrate the role of management devices in enacting strategy and strategic decisions, resulting in the development of a Shared Service Centre (SSC) in a Danish municipality. It shows how devices interact in defending, rejecting and reframing strategy, leading to the closure of the SSC to pave the way for new strategic ideas.

It uses a longitudinal case-based approach, which draws on actor-network theory, particularly Callon’s (1998) notions of framing and overflowing. These notions help describe strategic events and processes by highlighting the active role of non-human entities, such as management devices, in enacting and reformulating strategy.

Different devices have become key actants in shaping and formulating the new strategy in the municipality and the strategic decision to construct an SSC. However, different devices mobilise different localities that protest, reject and participate in the closure of the SSC through a reframing strategy.

The study is subject to the general limitations of case-based research. Thus, the propositions should be further investigated to elaborate the performative role of management devices.

The findings facilitate a deeper understanding of factors triggering strategic development in the public sector. Also, it identifies aspects leading to failures by investigating how different devices allow local actors to stay connected and affect the SSC’s creation.

This study is the first to use a performative method to highlight the temporary and local nature of enacting strategic decisions to construct an SSC in the public sector.

What effect does strategic frame adaptation have on movement continuation and popularity? Using a comprehensive online dataset from three North American cities, we show how SlutWalk’s continuous strategic adaptation of frames in response to criticisms and changing political and social climates has influenced its popularity over the past three years. SlutWalk’s initial “Shame-Blame” and “Slut Celebration” frames conveyed powerful messages that catalyzed protests and generated outrage mostly from young feminists during its formative phase. However, meanings of the term “slut” varied widely across racial, cultural, and generational contexts, causing the “Slut Celebration” frame to be problematic for some micro-cohorts of feminists and leading to a decline in protest participation after initial enthusiasm waned. The campaign responded to the criticisms by minimizing the use of the word “slut” and emphasizing the more transnationally resonant “Shame-Blame” and “Pro-sex, Pro-consent frames,” resulting in increased participation and continued prominence of the SlutWalk across North America.

This paper explores how performance-management systems are understood and framed through the use of rhetoric and language within universities, where not-for-profit, charitable goals are (or should be) central. It addresses the issues of: how strategic rhetorical frames are used by university actors; and how these relate to actors' primary frames and reactions to performance-management practices. The study focuses on the case of UK universities, taking into consideration both old and newer institutions.

This study adopts a case-study approach, relying on 28 interviews with key-academic actors involved in the design and implementation of university performance-management systems in four UK universities.

The research highlights the important effect of primary frames over the strategic frames that are mobilised to achieve desired outcomes or individual advantage. In Business disciplines, the consistency between actors' primary frames and managerial and performance-management tools introduced into universities makes such disciplines a fertile ground for these practices to be embraced. This is not the case with Natural Sciences.

While framing a new practice consistently with existing/prevailing primary frames may be a winning strategy in the short term, in the long term, those tasked with introducing new practices should consider that the prevalence of a certain view of the world has the potential to hamper innovation and learning.

The paper contributes to advance our understanding of the interaction between individual primary and strategic frames, as well as academic staff's reactions and interpretations of performance-management practices in universities as knowledge-intensive, not-for-profit organisations.

The purpose of the paper is to justify the research programme and describe the conclusions.

This paper is a summary of the aims and results of the research published in two special issues of Journal of Management Development. It argues that there are three fundamental issues that must be examined in order to resolve the conundrums of business strategy: the semantics; the structures; and the epistemology and ontology of the subject. To achieve this aim, four papers (Part 1) cover the literature that allows for a research aim to be developed. In the subsequent papers (Part 2), strategic thinking is reframed. An inductive frame is created to develop a model to help small business principals understand the need to think strategically about their business. The proposition that better strategy can be generated if answers are found to quality questions, rather than quality solutions found for poorly posed questions, is examined. A deductive frame of fundamental questions is created based on this concept and finally a reflective frame, which is “critically anti‐management”, provides the mechanism for the inductive and deductive frames to be applied to small business. The methodology is presented by French in “Action research for practising managers” in this issue and this paper is the summary of the research.

A research aim is developed: to examine critically the theory of business strategy and reframe strategic thinking in order to develop and test a viable small business strategic process. Thus, strategic thinking is (critically) reframed and emergence explored beyond the (modernist and postmodernist) “box” of traditional strategic management.

Small business principals have access to an integrated system of strategic frames that have been developed and tested using action research. Consequently the small business principal can be confident that the strategic process has both academic and practitioner credibility.

Parker suggests that little work has been done in the field of strategy in any non‐modernist paradigm. The author believes that this may be one of the early comprehensive studies in this field to utilise both critical theory, in the form of critical management studies, and to apply this epistemology to firms that are considered to be complex self‐adapting systems. The consequence is that there is now a theoretical answer to the problems of both Mintzberg, because there is now a mechanism for emergence, and of Hamel, because there is no longer a gap in the strategy discipline, we have a mechanism for strategy creation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how organizations can strategically frame their legitimate perspective on a specific issue in order to gain salience and public support in a social media context.

By means of framing theory and a critical perspective on strategic discourse in hypermodal spaces, the study examines in detail the discursive strategies and framing processes employed by a non-profit organization that faces local and global contestation of its corporate operations.

Through a critical discourse analysis of the organization’s 385 Facebook posts during two periods of time, the results not only show how the corporate perspective is strategically framed and legitimized, but also challenged and consequently adapted in this hypermodal issue sub-arena. In addition to legitimizing the organizational perspective by providing evidence-based facts and external expert views as reliable and neutral sources, and echoing supporters’ voices and actions as further endorsements, the organization also strategically manages the Facebook dialogue by delegitimizing counterarguments.

This study contributes to the corporate communication field by revealing how framing can be materialized in specific discursive strategies aimed to legitimize and delegitimize. It shows how such strategies are interrelated in hypermodal clusters in ways that sustain the organizational discourse, and can evolve across time and within the same actor’s strategy. Methodologically, this study expands the research toolkit by introducing hypermodality in exploring framing and strategic organizational discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the concept of framing in the field of risk governance and risk management research.

A five-constituent approach to framing – cognitive, strategic, action, emotional and institutional framing – is applied to contrastively analyze the multifaceted character of the two concepts of risk governance and risk management.

This paper analyzes the multifaceted utilization of risk governance framing and the conscious demarcation between risk governance and risk management. Risk governance framing strengthens the proactive control of strategic risks with regard to business model adaptation to changing risk landscapes. The verbal imagery of risk governance already sets the agenda for the sustainability-oriented as well as value-oriented steering of the risks of a business model. Following the analysis of the different framing areas, propositions are presented.

Although framing is applied in various academic disciplines, there is limited research relating to corporate risks. While risk governance provides companies with a concept to ensure the sustainability of their business models in the complex risk landscape, the related framing brings the appropriate interpretation and the deliberate tone into focus.

Between 1985 and 2000, the six largest US pharmaceutical firms entered a very active period of partnerships with other pharmaceutical firms to expand their knowledge of biotechnology-based research and development (R&D) frameworks and to bolster the growth of their drug portfolios. The purpose of this study is to examine the annual reports published by these companies for evidence of strategic framing of these partnerships.

A content analysis method was most appropriate for this study, as it allows for analysis of a large amount of information and accurate analysis over time. Ninety-six annual reports from the six major US pharmaceutical firms (Abbott, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson and Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer) were coded. The final codebook included 18 categories derived from framing theory. After collection, the data were uploaded to SPSS for statistical analysis.

Results indicate that mention of partnerships grew considerably in depth and length over time, but companies did not consistently employ frames to describe why or how they engaged in external partnerships.

This is the first study to assess mentions of pharmaceutical firms' external efforts to build their R&D programs and drug portfolios, from the intersecting perspectives of framing theory and the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, to illustrate how changes were communicated to shareholders during a dynamic period of change within the industry.

The quest to explain how incumbents respond to changes in their industry is affirming the role that managerial cognition plays in those decisions. Recent empirical evidence suggests that anticipating the nature and timing of industry changes could increase the likelihood that the organization develops an effective response. Mounting evidence suggests also that such ability to anticipate and respond may depend on decision-makers’ prevailing and emerging cognitive frames. This raises a number of questions about the nature of those cognitive frames and how they impact the decision making processes and ultimately organizational response. In this paper we report the findings from three case studies of how established incumbents respond to changes to their industries brought about by the emergence of the Internet.

This paper examines the framing of digital transformation. The research questions are specified as follows: what are the different types of framing strategies in response to digital transformation? How do the strategies differ across organizations? Theoretically, the authors draw on the framing perspective to emphasize the use of linguistic frames in shaping innovation and change processes. Empirically, the authors choose to study the Taiwanese sectors, including publicly governed entities, traditional private business or technology-based ventures.

The authors’ approach combines topic modeling and qualitative analysis. Using data collected from newspaper and magazine articles, the authors employ topic modeling to generate a set of distinctive framings that Taiwanese actors typically adopt to motivate and justify their digital move. The authors also conduct personal interviews to qualitatively complement the authors’ topic modeling analysis and to identify the rationale behind the linguistic framings and the strategic differences brought about by the various organizations.

The authors identify five topics that the Taiwanese actors commonly used in the framing of digital transformation. These topics or frames are labeled as cross-domain coordination, market demand, intelligent technology, global trend and competition and digital innovation. The practical use of the framings is contingent on organizational characteristics. Furthermore, the authors show how the framings can be classified as either positive framing (e.g. winning the next war) or negative framing (e.g. innovate or die), generally applicable to organizations around the world struggling to cope with digital disruption.

The authors’ study has two research implications. First, the authors extend the appreciation of the digital transformation from the usual concern with technological and business model innovations to linguistic or framing practices. Second, the authors enrich the framing analysis by emphasizing a practice or contingency perspective based on sector difference. The findings are subject to the limitations of the choice of only established and reputable media outlets, the diatextual reading and filtering of useful articles for topic modeling analysis and the use of world frequency to account for frame significance.

The authors shift actors' attention from improving technical efficiency to acquiring linguistic resources in the pursuit of digitalization. For example, framing the digital transformation in terms of creating a market orientation calls for not only real consumer power but also strategic discursive competence that enables the move to change. The findings also point out that practitioners can enlarge the scope of their agency rather than being trapped in the habituated routine of practices. Despite social embeddedness, organizations are more often widely connected and built enough to call for more of the cognitive frames to appeal to heterogeneous stakeholders.

The authors study contributes to the literature by developing a linguistic or socio-cognitive view of digital transformation strategy that is capable of expanding organizational attention toward change and innovation. The authors explore menus of strategic frames employed by actors in response to digital transformation. We also address the application of a machine-learning tool such as topic modeling to explore the socio-cognitive dimensions of digital transformation. Furthermore, the analysis leads us to identify the outcomes or effects – either positive or negative – that move beyond the particular Taiwanese case to explain the framing of digital transformation in general.

In today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, organizations deal with fragmented publics in contested public spheres. At the core, public opinion is not so much divided by issues per se but by deeply rooted moral concerns. Hence, while normative perspectives on morality prevail in strategic communication research, understanding the moral motives of stakeholders and publics from a descriptive standpoint becomes vital. In this light, the present conceptual paper discusses the implications of moral foundations theory (MFT), as an influential evolutionary-anthropological approach to morality, for strategic communication research and practice.

Adopting micro-, meso- and macro-perspectives, MFT's potential contribution to strategic communication research is explored regarding three foci: (1) moral framing, (2) narratives and (3) public discourse dynamics.

The paper concludes that frames and more complex narratives in strategic communication allude to MFT's five foundations – care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity – in diverse ways and are given different readings by stakeholders and publics. Building on MFT, novel empirical tools are available to access and understand the complex web of moral meaning infused in public discourses.

For the first time, MFT is discussed systematically and in detail in the context of strategic communication research. The theory contributes to deepening the understanding of the conditions, e.g. for issues management and strategic mobilization. On broader view, this paper adds to the discussion on evolutionary perspectives in strategic communication research.