Deleuze and the deterritorialization of strategy

Mainstream ideas of strategy are aimed at gaining and maintaining power. In contrast, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is directed against the concentration of corporate and state power and capitalist forms of exploitation. Their writings provide us with valuable concepts for understanding the workings of strategy and exploring creative ways through which strategy can be re-evaluated and subverted. This paper develops three of Deleuze and Guattari's main concepts for understanding the strategic movements within contemporary capitalism: i) nomadic strategy, ii) deterritorialization, and iii) the occupation of smooth space. It then uses these concepts to explain the rise of new strategies in the domains of the news media, the music industry and the Occupy movement, which attempt to subvert corporate forms of exploitation. This radically challenges existing processual notions of strategy that have an underlying conservative bias, as well as other popular conceptions of strategy like Porter's management of “barriers to entry”.