‘Delivering’ the Strategy: The Engine Room

Abstract

The aim of this chapter will be to continue to develop the themes in Chap. 1 above. The ‘Engine Room’ was the name given to a group of middle managers at one production site who were given the task of managing redundancies and production line closures. The chapter will explore the practices used and the delays and subterfuge of everyday managerial practices to subvert and reconfigure the organisation’s strategic ‘choice’. Again ethnography in an insider account will demonstrate how practices are constructed and deployed as well as how a SasP perspective can be applied by researchers in other organisational settings. In addition, the theme of nonhuman actors will be developed drawing upon Actor-Network Theory themes (Callon, Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of Saint Brieuc bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief (pp. 196–233). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).