Professor of Management and Strategy

What type of strategist-subject do strategic practices fabricate? Following Michel Foucault (1969; 1975) and Gilles Deleuze’s Postcript on the societies of control (1990a; 1990b), strategic practices are considered both as a heterogeneous set of discursive practices (with their associated system and practices of legibility, cf. Knights and Morgan 1991) and practices of visibility. Genealogical analyses of these strategic practices reveal:- On the one hand, the system and practices of visibility induced by strategic practices create the strategist-subject as an obscure object, a secret that must be revealed and objectified;- On the other, the discourse that support strategic practices define a system of legibility that gravitates around the intentions of the strategist-subject, thus creating him/her as a subject who desires- an entrepreneur of self. Together, the practices of visibility and legibility that define strategic discipline fabricate a “subject ” who must be capable of revealing his desires to others; desires that we can specify, qualify and calculate. In this sense, the subject-strategist is clearly less of an individual than an object. This analysis of the subject-strategist as an “obsure object of desire ” may help us to better understand certain of the paradoxical aspects that strategic practices seem to induce