Becoming a strategist: The roles of strategy discourse and ontological security in managerial identity work
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What is the managerial identity work involved in becoming a “strategist”? Building on a rich, longitudinal set of interviews, we uncover three tactics through which managers mobilize the strategist identity. The self-measurement tactic uses strategy discourse as a normative measuring stick for evaluating the individual as a manager. The self-construction tactic uses strategy discourse as a blueprint for realizing career aspirations. The final self-actualization tactic uses strategy discourse as an emotional basis for crafting meaning into work. We find that strategy discourse can play both disciplinary and emancipatory roles, influenced by managers’ sense of ontological security. The article highlights the importance of social-psychological processes in strategist identity work and discusses implications for the contemporary opening up of strategy and for other similarly loosely structured occupational groups.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it