Simmel's strangers as strategic warriors
Channel: IASC COMMONS
Date: 2020-07-29

Simmel's strangers as strategic warriors: understanding hegemonic influence on sustainability practitioners in sub-Saharan Africa. 

by Marion Onguka, University of Portsmouth, UK

Consultants have featured in strategy literature, with debates covering their role in strategy praxis with a focus on their facilitation of advanced discourse (Morton, Wilson & Cooke, 2016). Strategy as practice approach in particular posits a particular paucity in the role of extra-organizational actors in advancing novel strategic techniques. Brès and Gond (2014), identify how this particular group of authors conceptualize and formulate tools that are transitive in nature in that they can disseminate practices to different frameworks. According to Ajmal, Nordström and Helo, (2009), consultants embody the true essence of praxis as knowledge architects. With the advent of globalization, sustainable development is more popular than ever, enabling the upswing of CSR consultants (Gond & Brès, 2020). This cements the need to understand CSR consultants and their mediatory capabilities. However, a study by Skouloudis and Evangelinos (2014) revealed that managers could not relate CSR with competitive gains, which necessitates a need for sustainability consultants to act as strategic champions. The philosophical “Simmelian stranger” who “comes today and stays tomorrow (Mclemore, 1970) is used to understand the relationship between consultants and their clients. Strangers are socially mobile and share only general commonalities with the inhabitants. Due to the stranger not being an insider, he is viewed as being objective due to a lack of allegiances and therefore acts as a mediator (Harter, 2019). As organizations attempt to achieve optimum performance, the process cannot be divorced from organizational politics (Shaw, 2020). The concept of hegemony comes into play when the prevailing groups enact their power in legislature (policies), habits and norms (Fairclough, 2006). A critical discourse analysis lens can reveal the exclusion and silencing of different issues (Luke, 1995) or the emphasis on the “otherness” of particular persons, turning them into what researchers of Simmel’s work term the “marginal man” (Marotta, 2012)