ABSTRACT
Over the decades since the 1970s and the 1980s, the discipline of strategic management has undergone significant expansion and is now a well-known staple of MBA courses. It also underpins much management consulting strategy activity (where some governments are as much an important customer as private firms, Saint Martin, 2004). Whilst influential variants of strategic management displaying strong roots in industrial
economics (Porter, 2004) made it be seen as more suited to private firms than supposedly distinct public agencies (Allison, 1983), we consider this view now to be dated, as argued in the Introduction, given both the blurring of traditional boundaries between the public and the private sectors and because of the proliferation of novel models of strategic management, not all of which assume the presence of firms and of competitive markets. Mintzberg et al. (2009) provide a lucid overview of various schools of strategic man-
agement, as does Pettigrew et al.’s Handbook (2006). Our objective is to build on this prior fine work by shifting the analysis towards the specific field of contemporary public services organizations (including also not-for-profit and ‘third sector’ organizations, now taking an important role in delivering publicly funded services) which was not a major focus in these earlier texts. This and the next chapter will provide a broad overview of different schools of strategic management – organized in the rough chronological order by which they emerged – and discuss their specific implications for public and not-forprofit organizations (a summative Table 3.1 at the end of the next chapter provides an overview of the schools and their main traits). In this chapter, we introduce and discus some well-established schools: strategic planning, design, strategic positioning, and the cultural schools, highlighting key texts and authors. The next chapter will consider more recent schools which have emerged as important. Due to reasons of space, we only examine what we see as the most relevant schools for current public and not-for-profit organizations, and do not cover all those reviewed by Pettigrew et al. (2006) or Mintzberg et al. (2009). One general question to bear in mind as the various schools are presented is whether
they analyze the content of strategy, the process of strategy making, or both themes. A major divide in strategy studies is in fact between studies focused on content (on what contents of the strategy may lead to superior organizational performance), usually having an overall normative thrust, and studies focused on process formation (on how organizations’ strategies form over time), often having an overall interpretive or explanatory thrust. We side with those advocating the perspective of overcoming the process-content dichotomy in the strategy literature and bridging the two (Chakravarthy and White, 2006; Grant, 2010; Johnson et al., 2003; Pettigrew et al., 2002; Sminia, 2009), and this book attempts to cover both dimensions in as much an integrated fashion as possible, though we are
conscious this is a tall task (the two realms draw on distinct theoretical branches, use different languages, conceptual tools and techniques of analysis).
