Abstract

Strategy practice might be considered a technological practice, indeed the most impressive and dominating such arrangement by which human beings have sought to organize their affairs, and yet find themselves being organized by them. We understand the ‘technological’ in its widest sense here: the knowledgeable ordering of thought and action so as to manipulate things and events with certain outcomes in mind; an organizational mission, civic symbol or commercial brand can be considered technological as readily as a machine. By using the technological as a common ground we identify three strategy epochs (techne, technology and technogenesis), each characterized by a growing intensity of organization in which human agency (the instrumental capacity to envisage and bring about effects through thought and action) finds itself increasingly sidelined, and then almost lost. Agency itself is considered as an aspect of such a technological condition, meaning the loss is one of resonance (the idea of a sovereign decision maker is no longer afforded by the wider technological systems to which strategy is integral as a governing process) rather than repression (where the existence of a sovereign decision maker is assumed, and then considered in an increasingly parlous setting). We end by speculating on the role of strategy in both impoverishing the relationship with the world, as well as offering the possibility, from out of this poverty, for more authentic glimpses.