Strategy Discussions and Dialogicality: Multi-Voicedness and the We-Mode of Action in Management Board Meetings

The goal of this article is to explore multi-voicedness in the context of public research institutes by using actual strategy discussions as data. Based on the tradition of dialogism, we conceptualize strategy meetings as multi-voiced organizational discourses, which are formed of different interacting and developing voices. Methodologically, the purpose of our article is to extend the three-step method on the multi-voicedness of the self to the group context formed by many interacting and even opposite voices. This analysis aims to identify how the members of strategy meetings use we-mode positioning while discussing strategy issues as well as the main thematic topics of strategy talk. Three different strategy discourses were identified: (a) we-as-public-research-institution, (b) we-as-users-of-performance-indicators, and (c) we-as-part-of-organizational-communication-and-public-relations. Our study aims to contribute to the methodological discussion on dialogical research regarding the adaptation of the previously developed three-step method by analyzing multi-voicedness in management board meetings.