ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on strategizing the firm. It also focuses on the managerial discourses on strategy emanating from management consultants. The chapter deals with how a certain set of managerial models, especially 'portfolio planning models', brought about a new conception of a 'strategic terrain' – a competitive terrain in which the firm and its sub-units need to be strategically positioned to maximize corporate cash flow and return on investment. It discusses how a new stream of calculative rationalities and technologies came into being to cognize, communicate, and dominate in this strategic site. The chapter explains the biopolitics of Porterian strategy discourses: how Porterian discourses reconstructed competitiveness as a biopolitical problem and the particular set of epistemological politics involved in this reconstruction. General Electric's Portfolio Planning Model, offers a further purification and extension of mapping the strategic terrain.
