Enmeshing,Aggregating,and Reappropriating: Other-Than-Discursive Materialities in Fluid Social Movement Strategizing

Materiality in Strategy as Practice

The interdisciplinary field of strategy research spans many years and cannot be exhaustively reviewed here. Instead, we focus on a subfield that has paid considerable attention to materiality in strategy—SaP. Stated simply, SaP research concerns the day-to-day “doing of strategy” (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009, p. 69). Early SaP-aligned research centered on narrative (Fenton & Langley, 2011), metaphors (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008), and other forms of discourse in strategizing. However, responding to the swell of discourse studies, some claimed researchers “marginalized materiality” (Whittington, 2015, p. S13) and scholarship “needs to go beyond discourse” (Vaara & Whittington, 2012, p. 316). Thus, a material turn prompted investigations of software and technologies, spreadsheets, graphs, and maps (Jarzabkowski et al., 2013), sensegiving through visuals (van den Broek & Gander, 2024), company products (Myllykoski & Rantakari, 2023), or frameworks as tools (e.g., SWOT analysis; Jarzabkowski & Kaplan, 2015). One stream of research examined “direct use of material objects” (Myllykoski & Rantakari, 2023, p. 2) wherein materialities passively support strategizing when used according to their “implicit practices” (Vaara & Whittington, 2012, p. 288). Another sociomaterial-leaning stream viewed discourse as bound up with artifacts that shape strategy-making (Leonardi, 2015). Whereas extant research addresses earlier calls for a material focus (Vaara & Whittington, 2012; Whittington, 2015), examining SaP literature with a material focus reveals two limitations: A) outsized focus on material artifacts supporting discourse of strategy in a priori strategic settings, B) favoring of “explicitly articulated” (Jarzabkowski et al., 2021, p. 5) strategizing in conventional settings.

For limitation A, scholars have decried the outsized focus on “mass produced” (Whittington, 2015, p. S14) and “obvious artefacts” (Balogun et al., 2014, p. 194) of research on technology, furniture, software, and supplies. These mass-produced (i.e., laptop, chairs) and designed (i.e., architecture) materials support strategic conversations and conveying of meaning about strategic issues. Relatedly, organizational settings, such as “weekly top management meetings” (Liu & Maitlis, 2014, p. 203), are highly conventional. Studies of embodied practices (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008) and the human body are commendable for recognizing the multimodal nature of strategy (Asmuß & Oshima, 2018) and moving beyond designed ‘stuff,’ yet many focus on gestures, gaze, eye contact (Jarzabkowski et al., 2015; Pälli, 2018), displayed emotions (Liu & Maitlis, 2014) and other ways the body may emphasize the discourse of strategy. In other words, although the body is not designed or built, the focus remains on how the body accentuates communicating and enhancing meaning, often in a priori strategic settings. Although strategizing occurs alongside artefacts, objects, and generic ‘stuff’, we know less about these other-than-discursive materialities in strategizing.

For limitation B, much research examines conventional organizations with structural elements (e.g., leaders, members, roles, clear authority) that support strategic conversations (e.g., strategy workshops, meetings). As Jarzabkowski et al. (2021) critique, considerable attention focuses on “those strategies that have been explicitly articulated [emphasis original], usually by top managers” (p. 5) to the neglect of day-to-day doings. In other words, a focus on “particular types” (Balogun et al., 2014, p. 186) of spatial arrangements (e.g., tables, boardrooms), participants (e.g., executives), and “material aids” (p. 186) means current theorizing overlooks the informal not explicitly articulated forms of strategizing in fluid organizing. We turn to examine a developing field of research capable of addressing these shortcomings.

The Nexus of SaP and CCO

Emerging research seeks to integrate CCO and strategy, mostly drawing upon Montreal School CCO (Aggerholm et al., 2012; Archambault-Janvier et al., 2024; Bencherki et al., 2021; Cooren et al., 2015; Nathues et al., 2023; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011; Vásquez et al., 2018). Spee (2022) notes that CCO (for overview see Basque et al., 2022) and SaP form a “powerful alliance” and have “complementarity in terms of onto-epistemological considerations” (p. 343) by rejecting entitative views of both organization and strategy and ascribing to relational ontology assumptions (Kuhn et al., 2017). Whether speaking of strategy or organization, both “essentially consist [emphasis original] of processes of communication” (Cooren et al., 2015, p. 366).

Cooren et al. (2015) specify that viewing strategy through a CCO lens means starting from communication (i.e. not merely the transmission of individual perceptions of strategy), broadly defining communication to account for sociomateriality, and acknowledging the multimodal nature of communicating beyond writing and speaking to include nonhumans. From a CCO/SaP lens, strategy-making is defined as “communication episodes in which specific matters of concerns lend their weights to various courses of action” (p. 376). For instance, empirical work using the “metaconversation” concept (Robichaud et al., 2004) starts from communication in showing how people in dispersed conversations speak from hierarchical positions, job functions (e.g. sales, design), or geographic divisions (Mantere & Vaara, 2008) to collectively constitute and orient to a shared strategic trajectory. Spee and Jarzabkowski (2011) reveal how, through a series of strategic planning meetings, recursive cycles of talk generated a shared understanding (or text in CCO parlance) that gradually took on authority as a strategic plan. Vásquez et al. (2018) and Bencherki et al. (2021) show how “matters of concern” are expressed through talk and begin to materialize into strategy. As concerns are negotiated, transported through texts, and recognized as legitimate, they become “matters of authority” (Vásquez et al., 2018) and specific discursive moves may “crystallize a course of action” (Bencherki et al., 2021, p. 627) thus materializing some issues as strategic. While prior research shows the communicative emergence of strategy, it primarily examines explicit discussions of strategy and centers on discursively oriented materialities (e.g., grant proposal, documents). Consequently, the role of other-than-discursive materialities in informal strategizing remains under-theorized.

The relational view of materiality touted by CCO scholars (Kuhn et al., 2017) offers a theoretical way to address the omission of other-than-discursive materialities in informal strategizing because it moves beyond mere use of meaning-centric materialities. In relationality viewpoints (Kuhn et al., 2017) agency is distributed, hybrid, and shared among a variety of entities. The bifurcation of a social and material world is rejected along with subject-centered explanations of organizing. Neither humans nor materials are the absolute origins of action. What is material is what matters, or “makes a difference” (Cooren et al., 2015, p. 369) in a situation, which can include physical made of atoms materialities (e.g., objects, nature) or more fleeting feelings, emotions, and desires. Cooren (2010, 2015) offers the metaphor of ventriloquism to explain how we make others, whether people (i.e., a coworker), “textual agents” (Cooren, 2004; i.e., contracts, bylaws, press releases) or other materialities (i.e., objects, values, principles) say or do things but those things also animate us. For example, a manager could invoke a corporate policy, budget constraints, or principles of fairness, to deny a request for additional compensation. The manager gives voice to the corporation, policy, budget, and principles, but at the same time those things also ventriloquize the manager by “dictat[ing] how people should proceed in a given situation” (Cooren, 2015, p. 479). Aligning with relationality, ventriloquism decenters humans from analysis and considers agency as having no absolute origin by instead encouraging exploration on all the things and beings making a difference in constituting situations, organizations, and realities. Some recent work has applied ventriloquism to strategy. For instance, Nathues et al. (2023) draw upon a ventriloqual lens to show how many different voices of people, teams, and organizations, are woven together or excluded in strategy-making processes, ultimately conceptualizing strategy as a relational assemblage.

Although CCO viewpoints recognize agentic contributions of the other-than-human and “more-than-material” (Kuhn, 2024, p. 32), Cooren et al.’s (2015) encouragement for a broad definition of communication and emphasis on non-human communication have not received as much attention in the emerging SaP/CCO literature. Prior ventriloqual work is a move toward relationality but still focuses on “strategy debates’ interactional dynamics” (Nathues et al., 2023, p. 705), that is, strategic discourse. Consequently, many studies are vulnerable to Cooren et al.’s (2015) caution to not “overemphasize the role of practitioners” or reductively define communication as a “linguistic resource for strategy making” (p. 367) restricted to humans. Relatedly, Spee (2022) notes a bias toward formalized strategizing “may portray a rather lopsided view” (p. 347) and claims there is “ample scope to extend the adoption of CCO beyond the realm of formalized strategy-making” (p. 347)—a call we aim to fulfill in this work. Kuhn (2024) puts a fine point on the need to relationally consider a wide variety of strategic influences stating, “forces well beyond the control of the strategic manager participate in the very constitution [emphasis original] of the firm” (p. 5).

To put simply the theoretical innovation on offer, a relational view of materiality can expand theorizing to capture everything that “makes a difference” (Cooren et al., 2015) in strategizing. Rather than focusing solely on how people talk about strategy or how they use tools to convince others of strategic directions, relationality affords theorizing agentic contributions of a diverse array of other-than-human and other-than-discursive materialities. In short, the full potential of relationally considering diverse materialities in strategizing has yet to be realized in SaP research. Collectively, research is needed on how other-than-discursive materialities express agency and “make a difference” (Cooren et al., 2015) in the informal, not explicitly articulated, strategizing of fluid social arrangements. Therefore, we pursue the following question:

RQ: How are diverse other-than-discursive materialities implicated in the informal strategizing of fluid social collectives?

Research Context

Because social movements (SM) are “profoundly hybrid” (Ganesh, 2015, p. 484) and often “deliberately eschew formal organizations” (Soule, 2013, p. 108) they are a fitting setting to investigate other-than-discursive materialities in informal strategizing. For example, scholarship on alternative (Ferrell, 2014; Shanahan, 2023) and radical organizing reveals non-hierarchical decision making, leaderlessness (Fotaki & Foroughi, 2022), and “anti-leadership” (Sutherland et al., 2014) are common in SMs. Activists carry out ‘actions’ and ‘mobilizations’ including anything from legal protest (e.g., a march, picketing) or nonviolent civil disobedience (e.g., sit-ins) to destructive actions (e.g., vandalism). Destructive protest actions can lead to repression via direct policing, surveillance, infiltration, propaganda, harassing arrests, creation of extraordinary laws (e.g., curfew, banning of clothing), and stigmatization (Boykoff, 2007). Ganesh (2015) considers movements hybrid because they organize across space and time through chat applications, digital networks, and various social media. However, digital coordination is susceptible to repression and infiltration, prompting studies on visibility management through encryption, obfuscating or concealing activities (Albu, 2023), and the digital tools for contending with decentralization (Poon, 2024) or promoting democratic decision making (Shanahan, 2023). As Albu (2023) reveals, communicative efforts to resist data monitoring and repression can “both empower and undermine” (p. 662) activists’ efforts. Thus, fluidity, ambiguity, and precarity often accompany SM organizing, calling into question whether movements can be considered organizations. For example, Dobusch and Schoeneborn’s (2015) study of the highly fluid “anonymous” hacker collective advances the idea that, rather than organization versus non-organization, fluid collectives can be understood as achieving degrees of “organizationality” based on attaining shared decision making, identity, and actorhood through carefully prepared speech acts.

Field Site

In 2021 the DAF/SCC SM emerged to resist construction of a 90-million-dollar police training facility on one of Atlanta, Georgia, USA’s few remaining forests. The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, or Cop City, would sit on 85 acres of land in a forest surrounded by majority Black and lower-income neighborhoods. Activists viewed the project as environmentally damaging, furthering police militarization, wasting taxpayer funds, initiated without transparency or legitimate community input, and tone-deaf considering Atlanta’s importance in protests calling for police reform. Movement tactics included legal actions (e.g., call-in campaigns, street marches, posting flyers), but also “direct action” (Graeber, 2009). Drawing upon a history of labor movements, anarchist thought, and civil rights movements, Graeber (2009) defines direct action as attempting to create change through direct collective intervention rather than through voting, lobbying, or other appeals to existing governments or authorities. Direct action tactics of DAF/SCC included occupying ‘tree sits’ and camps within the forest, blockades, graffiti, and sabotage of police and construction equipment.

DAF/SCC represents a fitting case for this investigation as the movement is both highly fluid and has experienced stifling repression limiting official organizing. For example, after several skirmishes between police and forest occupiers, a multi-agency task force raided the forest in December of 2022, arresting five activists and charging them with domestic terrorism—a tactic repeated several more times. Despite repression, activists launched a referendum campaign to put Cop City on Atlanta’s election ballot, provided 17 hours of oppositional comment at city hall, and held many rallies, music festivals, food distributions, art events, lawsuits, injunctions, and picketing. Local and federal law enforcement increasingly investigated the movement, using Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (commonly called RICO) statutes to raid homes of activists suspected of affiliation with destructive protest. Activists have received simple ‘pedestrian in roadway’ or more severe ‘criminal trespassing,’ ‘racketeering,’ ‘money laundering,’ and at least 61 ‘domestic terrorism’ charges. Many interviewees and online communiques emphasize the movement’s fluidity, autonomy, and disavowal of organization. Image 1 from the DAF Instagram describes the movement as “an autonomous movement, not an organization” whereas Ana, an interviewee of this study, characterizes the movement as:

The definition of this movement is that we are disorganized. So, in that, people are throwing rocks at protests, in that people are carrying signs that say fuck the police. They are doing those things, not because one person or even a group of people agreed that that was the correct strategy, but because every single person that’s here is brought here by whatever is their personal agenda and what is in their heart.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Image 1.

Defend Atlanta Forest Instagram

Ana emphasized that no strategy was centrally agreed upon and individuals have autonomy to participate as they see fit. Thus, DAF/SCC is fitting for this study given the fluidity and repression characterizing the movement.

Data Collection

Intrigued by news stories about “forest defenders,” the first author began following the movement in October 2022 by attending a speaking tour presented by an activist. Shortly thereafter, the first author began following prominent social media accounts associated with the movement. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained after conversing with university legal and the human subjects research office for guidance on collecting data while protecting privacy of participants who may be involved in illegal actions ¹ . Thereafter, the second author joined by participating in legal and public movement events, recording fieldnotes, and establishing contacts for later interviews. Eventually, movement participants added us to Signal threads, an encrypted messenger application containing almost 400 anonymous users meant to share information about upcoming movement events. To complement in-person observation, we used a “netnographic” (Kozinets, 2010) approach to monitor blogs, alternative news outlets, and the Signal thread to stay abreast of developments. Netnography moves beyond ‘scraping’ of ‘big data,’ or simple content analysis, by immersing the researcher in an online community to understand its cultures and customs. In further support of the theory-case fit of DAF/SCC, through monitoring the Signal thread we observed several conversations present, what prior empirical work may have termed “matters of concern” (Archambault-Janvier et al., 2024; Bencherki et al., 2021; Vásquez et al., 2018) be shut down. For instance, Image 2 shows an anonymous poster voicing concern about a prior action be admonished by others, ultimately deleting the post—an action we repeatedly observed.OPEN IN VIEWER

In both in-person and netnographic aspects of the study our role as researchers was akin to “play participant” (Tracy, 2013, p. 109) in that, while sympathizing with some movement goals, we maintained distance from full engagement to allow more reflexivity in the research process and avoid any legal troubles. We also collected printed materials, leaflets, and zines distributed at protests or events associated with the movement (see Table 1).

The first author initially recruited participants near the forest encampments. However, in January 2023 while conducting an interview in a neighborhood adjoining the forest, another surprise raid occurred wherein an officer was shot and activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán killed. The shooting propelled the movement into the national spotlight, yet it was deemed too legally and physically risky to continue recruiting near the forest, so we began recruiting interviewees at events and through social media outlets. In-person recruitment helped in contacting activists who preferred to remain anonymous or to locate people living near the proposed training site. Publicly involved activists were invited through social media to complete in-person interviews. In this article, ‘activist’ denotes anyone participating in movement events, ‘resident’ refers to neighbors who oppose the site but do not engage in protests, and, adopting Bencherki and Snack’s (2016) “contributorship” notion, ‘contributor’ denotes people aligned with an organization involved in the movement (e.g., an environmental nonprofit; see Table 2) but not official members of the movement.

Audio recorded interviews were conducted in a private or semi-private location of the interviewees’ choosing. We followed a semi-structured interview guide but remained flexible allowing the conversation to venture to aspects of the movement the interviewees desired to talk about. In total, we conducted 34 hours of on-the-ground observation at events and collected more than 20 hours of audio-recorded interviews with 27 study participants.

Data Analysis

Data analysis was iterative and ongoing rather than separate stages. For instance, the first author collected five interviews in their first trip to Atlanta. The second author joined the project after the initial research trip. After transcription, we conducted broad open coding labeling topics within the data. The analysis followed an abductive logic (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013) “driven by an interplay of doubt and belief, which, in turn, fuels the imaginative act of creating new knowledge” (p. 81). Whereas our initial interest was broadly on how the SM organizes, embracing “preunderstanding” (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2022; Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013) means we were not complete blank slates devoid of existing theory knowledge. Thus, as we reviewed fieldnotes, online discourse, and interviews, we kept tentative “analytic reflections” (Tracy, 2013) about possible theoretical connections. We open coded newly collected data between trips, and then independently open-coded all transcripts again, revisiting previously coded interviews and refining earlier broad codes. For example, an early broad code of tactics/strategies was further specified with a granular code of symbolic (referring to primarily symbolic actions), whereas, through abductively consulting prior literature on social movements, other excerpts were differentiated with the direct action code. We then discussed aspects of theoretical interest emerging from independent coding sessions and compared codes with one another looking for overlapping ideas.

Abduction entails remaining open to being “surprised” (Mantere & Ketokivi, 2013) by the data, particularly when it does not fit existing explanations. During joint coding and data collection, we were intrigued to find a lack of explicitly agreed upon strategy among the collective and consulted literature on fluid organizing and strategy. As Alvesson and Sandberg (2022) detail, “bringing our pre-understanding into a dialogical conversation with data and theory [emphasis original]” can lead to “development of more original, complete or rethought knowledge of the phenomenon” (p. 401). As we reviewed the intersections of data, pre-understanding, and theory, we noticed collective accomplishments were intimately tied with actions, doings, and materiality, yet much of the materiality involved in strategizing was not discourse-centric. Consulting the literature on relationality, CCO, and SaP, with particular attention given to materiality, we returned to the data selectively coding for how materiality “makes a difference” (Cooren et al., 2015) in organizing. In tune with SaP’s focus on actions, and the relational view of materiality as de-centering the human from analysis, we coded for what people did with and among various materialities in pursuing strategy. Abductively cycling between reading extant relationality scholarship and coding, we examined ways to group those action codes into thematic categories of the agentic effects of those actions. This process resulted in our main findings on the relational configurations of enmeshing, aggregating, and reappropriating materialities in strategizing. See Table 3 for data exemplars and example codes. We selected quotes for the findings section based on two criteria. First, excerpts needed enough length to be analytically interesting yet also concise enough to fit space constraints of the article. Second, quotes demonstrating the widest range of materialities and clearest examples of enmeshing, aggregating, and reappropriating were selected.

Direct Material Actions as Strategy

At the beginning of the SCC/DAF speaking tour, an activist described efforts to stop Cop City as decentralized and welcoming of individual autonomous efforts claiming, “anyone is encouraged to take any action at any time.” Foxtail also highlighted decentralization and autonomy stating, “what has given the movement a lot of strength and flexibility is folks feeling empowered to kind of create their own initiatives and move forward with that without having to go through some kind of formalized approval process.” Jess clarified, “we’re not beholden to shared principles and strategies” and went on to stress that accepting a wide variety of tactics, as opposed to a singular unified strategy, is the strategy of the movement. The common “action,” “initiative,” and tactic these interviewees allude to is direct action, a method common to prior SMs (Graeber, 2009), where activists exercise agency through civil disobedience, sit ins, strikes and in some cases arson, sabotage, and property destruction. As Marcos recalled, “there was a vehicle that somehow caught on fire in the parking lot … I have no information about that either. I just know that things happen” whereas Layton claimed, “people are just kind of self-directed, doing whatever they feel like is right” further emphasizing the embrace of direct autonomous action among the movement.

In reviewing the various types of data for this study, it became apparent that those direct actions and practices contributing to strategy of the collective are inextricably linked with materialities. More specifically, we theorize that diverse materialities, beyond just technological tools, visual aids, or materialities supporting strategic discourse, are enmeshed, aggregated, and reappropriated all underneath a direct-action strategic focus. Although presented as separate sections, the relational approach to materiality adopted in this study means no example of materiality is purely one of these themes, nor do we intend to bifurcate humans and other-than-humans into strictly separate categories. Enmeshing, aggregating, and reappropriating each defined with examples in Table 3, and at the beginning of their respective sections, should be considered more as overlapping relational configurations of human and other-than-human agencies rather than standalone concepts. A direct action may be enmeshed with reappropriated and aggregated materialities. Further, each term embraces a diverse view of other-than-discursive materialities ranging from naturally occurring (e.g., trees, water) to human-designed (e.g., rope, tire).