How stories make strategy: top management and middle managers' storytelling performances

Whose stories generate strategy within organizations? This question is answered by examining archival and interview data from CementCo over a period of 5 years. The data revealed that strategic change is performed through the interplay between alignment and accordance of top management persuasive and middle managers’ self-persuasive storytelling. The study unravels temporal structuring practices used to conjure up strategic change as plausible, necessary, inescapable, and desirable. This advances our understanding of how storytelling may perform strategic change. Our findings help managers to understand how strategic change takes place, not only through top-down storytelling practices by top management, but also attempts at self- persuasion by middle managers who are instrumental to implementing strategic change. These self-persuasion practices performed by middle managers are not linear, straightforward processes, but occur through struggles, tensions, and attempts to justify change. This paper addresses the assumed power asymmetry that top management can realize change by simply providing stories that are persuasive.