Ambition in popular business practitioner-oriented discourse: What the heck are we talking about?

The term ambition and its derivatives, such as ambitions, ambitious, and unambitious, constitute a commonly used set of signifiers in business practitioner-oriented discourse. Despite this wide currency, researchers have yet to interrogate the concept of ambition and explore the various ways that it figures in business discourse. In this article, we take an interpretive, grounded theory approach to bring to light the intricate meanings and workings of ambition in three top-ranked practitioner-oriented business journals from 2010 to 2019. Our findings reveal that ambition is positioned within four different constellations of meaning. We identify and outline the salient features of these four constellations to show how ambition is understood in different communicative contexts and connected with varying regimes of managerial prescription. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for management learning in particular and management and organization studies in general.