Strategy’s Negotiability, Reasonability, and Comprehensibility: A Case Study of How Central Strategists Legitimize and Realize Strategies Without Formal Authority

This article presents results of an embedded comparative case study about central strategists realizing strategies in a large nonprofit organization characterized by decentralized and inverse structures. Inverse structures lead to a paradoxical situation in which strategists of a nonprofit’s central office have to make deliberate decisions about resource allocation while having no authority over the implementation of strategic decisions. Legitimation is a crucial element in the creation and realization of new strategies. The authors thus ask the question: How do strategists achieve the legitimation and realization of strategies without formal authority? The findings show that, in all of the observed four strategies—also in the process of formalization—strategists of the central office built on emergent strategies that they supported in their legitimation by three steps: Strategists supported the strategy’s negotiability (pragmatic legitimation), continued supporting its reasonability (moral legitimation), and finally its comprehensibility (cognitive legitimation).