Constructing The Citizen (or What They Don’t Tell You About Strategy Work)

Abstract

Preface: Researcher Positionality and Organisational Setting

This paper is drawn from my 2025 Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA), a professional doctorate oriented to workplace problems and contribution to professional practice. Although I had left the City Council where I had been employed before I began my research, I treated my subjectivity as an ‘at home’ ethnographer (Alvesson, 2009). This reflected my knowledge of the organisation and pre-existing relationships.

I used the organisational setting to explore the discourses in city strategy work and how they constructed citizen subjectivities. Although the research was not therefore a conventional ‘case study’, nor was it concerned with organisational or individual ‘rights or wrongs’, there was a higher than average level of sensitivity due to an ongoing organisational review. I therefore agreed to anonymise the city. As cities are themselves discourses, choosing not to reveal the city’s identity helped achieve focus and avoid unecessary distraction.

My empirical material comprised strategy-related documents from the city in question and texts from interviews with senior managers which I analysed using discourse analytical tools and techniques. The methods take as read that the researcher’s assumptions and expectations are entangled with the analysis.