Actors’ games and infrapolitical resistance: accounting as a site of tensions in a strategic alliance

The strategy literature has focused primarily on the design and deployment of organizational strategies, while paying far less attention to the tensions and resistance they generate, especially when those strategies depend on an accounting device. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study of an inter-organizational purchasing alliance in the mass-retail sector, this article examines a cumulative, evolving process of resistance led by middle managers. These actors use accounting as a resource for resistance, enabling them to adjust, circumvent, reconfigure, and even neutralize an imposed strategy. We show that resistance takes multiple, combined forms by linking infrapolitics theory and actors' games: (1) contestation and renegotiation of an accounting device; (2) informal coalitions with peripheral actors to circumvent accounting; (3) infrapolitical tactics that render it inoperative. These practices, whether visible or silent, accumulate over time. They erode the performativity of the accounting device: the visibility, coordination, and legitimation functions are gradually undermined, displaced, and reconfigured to serve local interests. Resistance appears not as an anomaly but as an ordinary and constitutive feature of strategic processes, and temporality (kairos) emerges as a key dimension: actors use accounting to shift power relations over time, and it is through this device that strategies are negotiated, contested, and ultimately transformed.