Organizations engage in strategic and internal processes as two interrelated modes of ordering. With an emphasis on flat organizations, this paper introduces a narrative network perspective that builds on organizational routines. Since this perspective lacks a strategic dimension, the purpose of this paper is to expand the narrative network perspective to include value, capability, and social narratives. In the face of new strategic challenges such as alliance formation, our framework undergirds analysis of cross-narrative coherence. We illustrate this empirically by exploring a high-tech firm intending an organizational servitization while simultaneously forming a service alliance with a public customer. The findings concentrate on the three types of narratives, providing insight into the interplay of intra- and interorganizational narrative networks, which provide insight into both forces that influence alliance formation and intra-organizational dynamics. The discussion explores implications for research on narrative networks and strategic organization, such as tension processing and narrative construction.
