| Summary: | Organisational strategy is a commonly used term and apparently easily understood. This may have led academics to generally overlook research into its meaning in favour of prescribing or describing its formation. In the latter these endeavours have been less than successful. This may be rooted in an insufficient understanding of the phenomenon; for when prominent writers attempt to define strategy they conclude after much elaboration that it is an elusive concept. This inquiry unravels the elusiveness of strategy by conducting an empirical investigation into managers' experience of the phenomenon. The research is interpretive, reflexive and critical; it draws upon the symbolic interactionism view of meaning using grounded theory. Empirical data is generated from interviewing a theoretical sample of managers from an organisation and triangulated with archival data and the literature. Strategy is revealed as a purposeful process of thought and action in motion involving complex social and psychological interactions. It can be described as navigational translations subsuming the themes of gazing, envisioning, interconnecting, interrelating, translating, navigating and power driving. Fluid intervening conditions form mutually impacting relationships with these themes which enhance or constrain their processes and outcomes. The credibility and dependability of the navigational translation concept are demonstrated; its transferability to different organisations is tentatively established, pointing to its potential as a highly abstract explanation of strategy. Specific variations are discerned between different settings, indicating that every navigational translation is unique to the context in which it occurs. Its high abstractedness and specificity prevent its construability as a 'strong framework'; rather it provides a 'weak explanation' of the phenomenon.
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