Opening up strategy making: the role of body-talk interactions in enabling participation

Practice-based management research has led to a greater appreciation of the interplay of discursive, bodily, and material resources in strategy making. Although this work hints at the key role of such an interplay for including or excluding different voices in increasingly open strategy contexts, it has not yet examined how these elements combine to shape the important issue of participation in strategy making. We conduct a video ethnography of interactions between internal managers and consumers (as consultants) over a series of workshops to develop the go-to-market strategy of E-Bank, a digital provider of financial services. Our findings extend prior research by highlighting how the body influences the way strategic issues develop, showing how these interactions continuously created contested participatory dynamics in strategy making.