Strategy discourse is a central resource composed of formal artifacts that can help promote collaboration in organisations. This study explores England's public hospitals’ discourses on collaboration in healthcare. Specifically, we conducted a longitudinal exploratory study examining the strategy discourses reflected in annual reports of fourteen English National Health Service (NHS) hospital trusts across two distinct categories (trusts and foundation trusts (FTs) hospitals) over a nine-year period (2011¬-2020), a total of 112 annual reports. To explore the significance of strategy discourses in conveying a sense of collaborative practices, we employed a combination of topic modelling techniques and semantic similarity analysis. Our findings highlight how strategy discourse has evolved over time to provide shifting meanings of collaboration practices in the sector. Interestingly, the strategic discourse is different across NHS hospital trusts’ institutional profiles that convey different institutional logics. This work advances the literature on the strategic use of discourses in the public sector and provides useful insights for practice by showing the relevance of strategic narratives in promoting collaborative work in the healthcare setting.
