Fantasies of strategy: Žižek, discourse and enjoyment

This paper draws on the work of Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to explore the ideological fantasies of strategy. Specifically, the paper argues that the academic field of strategy-as-practice (SAP) quilts a set of organizational activities and practices around the master-signifier of 'strategy'. This means that SAP theory circles around a void that its proponents seek to fill through an endless search for the objet petit a, the paradoxical object-cause of desire. The paper demonstrates this by showing how the SAP literature conceptualizes the practice of strategy in a circular and self-referential way, i.e. as an effect that respectively posits its own cause. The illusion is that the practice of strategy appears to be present from the very beginning in the SAP literature, when it has been constituted post factum. Ultimately, the paper seeks traverse the fantasy of strategy and reveal the surplus-enjoyment at the heart of SAP theory. The paper concludes by exploring alternative ways of understanding the practice of strategy from the perspective of the transgressive 'act' (passage à l'acte).