ABSTRACT
The amount of research investigating strategic management in the public sector is very small compared with that devoted to the private sector. This chapter concentrates on research inspired by writers, Igor Ansoff, Michael Porter, Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Quinn and Henry Mintzberg, on strategic management in the private sector. The chapter also discusses Miles and Snow's strategic typology. Ansoff wrote one of the first systematic treatments of strategic decision-making for private sector firms. Porter was the towering figure in the strategic management writing of the 1980s. Porter's ideas became the mainstay of business policy courses in the 1980s and then, later, strategic management courses on MBAs. Miles and Snow went beyond simply characterizing types of strategy and set out associated aspects of organizational arrangements. Mintzberg characterized Miles and Snow as offering a configurational theory of strategic management, meaning that each type of strategy had a pattern in relation to a set of variables.
