Strategy: The Politics and Topology of Reversal

In this paper, prompted by Robert Cooper’s reading of Elias Canetti’s ‘the sting’, we attempt our own reading through Martin Heidegger’s notion of the uncanny. We consider how the sting, as a cyclical process of command and its inevitable reversal, permeates attempts to enforce strategic direction in any organizational setting. We then consider how, at the topological moment of inflection when commands from the old order invert and become the commands of the commandeered, there is an equalising experience of organizational uncanniness in which strategy is no longer the struggle to define a distinct, coherent, well-ordered organizational form, but the struggle to question it.