The literature on participation to strategy processes examined the influence of middle managers but gave little importance to the influence of occupations. This is despite the fact that the literature on occupations underlines the influence of the latter on organizations. The paper examines this gap by considering the extreme case of a marginalized occupation: scientists in a large high technology French firm. It relies on a case study where after three R&D projects, scientists successfully convinced managers to give up on their aim to enter the automobile market. The paper shows how scientists do so by disrupting the beliefs of managers about the relevance of the expertise network that evaluates projects; by using the rhetoric of what they appointed as new stakeholders of the research agenda to defend their own goals; and by manipulating categories in a way that convinces managers that failure is due to the belonging of the partners to the automobile market, and not because of other possible reasons. Implications are examined for the strategy process literature and the literature on occupations.
