The Grand Challenge of Corporate Control: Opening strategy to the normative pressures of networked professionals

Abstract

We propose that the pre-eminent ‘grand challenge’ for organization theorists today is the societal control of powerful corporations. This grand challenge is the more urgent because of the contemporary inadequacies of markets, hierarchies and regulations as instruments of control. We argue for the potential role of ‘open strategy’ in mobilizing normative controls over big business. We develop a distinction between the managed and unmanaged practices of open strategy. Both can help expose corporations to normative pressures, but we highlight the unmanaged open practices of collective subpolitics and individualist whistleblowing. Especially when mobilized by globally networked professionals, these unmanaged practices can subject corporations to normative pressures where markets, hierarchies and regulations fail. We propose two broad research themes relevant to the effectiveness of managed and unmanaged practices of strategic openness: on the one hand, there are material issues to do with labour markets, organizing and technologies; on the other hand, there are discursive questions of authenticity, capability and identity.