Abstract/Summary

This paper is about competitive strategy in the international construction sector. Drawing on the ‘narrative turn’ in organisation studies, it emphasises the temporal and discursively constructed nature of competitive strategy. Competitive strategy narratives are seen to provide a means of understanding the formation and enactment of strategy. The empirical analysis focuses on the narrative infrastructure as produced by the Turkish Contractors Association (TCA). The findings highlight the multi-actor and multi-level processes of strategy making. They further illustrate the way in which narrative building blocks that are continuously mobilized as part of the on-going progress of strategizing on the sectorial level. The nuances of the identified narrative building blocks are seen to reflect the complexity and diversity across individual accounts of strategy making.