Discursive Opportunities and Strategy-Making in Social Organizations: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Due to scarce resources, social organizations are characterized by a high need to collaborate in order to achieve their social goals. Compared to for-profit organizations, their value-based approach in strategizing links closely to their identity, which makes collaboration a challenging task. Drawing on Fairclough’s orders of discourse, we develop a conceptual framework that explains how social organizations find coherence or contradiction in their strategy-identity-narratives which results in interorganizational strategizing or, alternatively, in identity differentiation. We explore strategy formation as a discursive event that occurs when a discursive opportunity arises. We contribute to theory in strategy as practice by showing that for social organizations, strategy is co-constituted with identity, and to theory on entrepreneurial opportunities by introducing discursive opportunities to the field.