ABSTRACT
Since its introduction in the late 1970s, New Public Management (NPM) has taken the public sector by storm and has become the dominant paradigm within the sector. In essence, NPM is a set of assumptions and value statements about how public-sector organizations should be designed, organized and managed (Diefenbach 2009). Pivotal within this movement is the adoption of putative market and private-sector business practices by public organizations with the aim of improving their effectiveness and realizing their goal of value maximization (Goldfinch and Wallis 2010). One of these practices, which has been widely adopted by public organizations at all levels of government, is the concept of strategic management (Bryson, Berry, and Yang 2010), and instruments associated with strategic management (e.g., strategic planning, scenario planning, mission and vision statements) rapidly became almost omnipresent (Rigby and Bilodeau 2013).
