Contrast, in the public sector the relationship between regulation and strategy content is likely to be central rather than peripheral.

PREVIOUS CLASSIFICATIONS OF STRATEGY CONTENT IN

PUBLIC-SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS

A small literature on organizational strategies in public-service organizations has evolved since the early 1980s. Wortman’s comment that this ‘‘truly is virginal territory for the strategic management researcher’’ (1979, 353) may no longer be accurate, but the map remains small and sketchy. Moreover, most of the literature is concerned with strategy processes in public organizations (e.g., Hickson et al. 1986; Ring 1988; Ring and Perry 1985). This emphasis may reflect an assumption that processes of strategy formulation and implementation count rather than the actual content of strategies. We reject this view and believe that strategic stance and actions are at least as important as strategy processes and, indeed, may be more so. Organizations may have ‘‘perfect’’ processes of strategy formulation and implementation but still have a perfectly useless strategy that fails to deliver desired outcomes. These arguments assume that strategic management makes a difference to performance and that organizational success and failure are not simply the product of ‘‘random selection’’ (Kaufman 1985). Support for the view that ‘‘management matters’’ in the public sector is provided by recent research on Texas school districts (Meier and O’Toole 2001, 2002).

In this section we summarize and critically review the four existing models of strategy content in public organizations. We argue that each one is narrow or flawed in its conceptualization of organizational strategy.

Stevens and McGowan (1983) develop a typology of strategic responses to fiscal stress in ninety U.S. local governments. Their approach is largely inductive—managers and mayors were asked to identify whether they were using any of twenty-five strategies that were then grouped into six generic approaches through factor analysis. These were ‘‘seek external revenue,’’ ‘‘compromise existing authority and financial position’’ (e.g., by defaulting on debt), ‘‘increase internal revenue,’’ ‘‘seek additional state aid and authority,’’ ‘‘state pays high-cost items,’’ and ‘‘cut safety and human services.’’ This is an interesting first attempt to classify strategy content in the public sector, but it is deficient in two main ways.

First, the six types of strategy are limited to a specific organizational problem—how to deal with a decline in funding. This may have been typical of public agencies in the 1980s, especially local governments (Mouritzen 1992), but is far from a universal phenomenon. Thus, the typology is potentially relevant only to a specific set of en-vironmental circumstances. Second, even within these circumstances the six types of strategy refer to specific actions rather than a general stance. For example, any of the strategic responses could be used by a prospector, defender, analyzer, or reactor. The typology is, therefore, incomplete because it covers only one of the two dimensions of strategy content that we have identified.

Wechsler and Backoff (1986) derive four types of strategy content from case studies of four public agencies in Ohio. The four categories are ‘‘developmental’’ (similar to a prospector), ‘‘transformational’’ (a mix of prospector and reactor), ‘‘protective’’ (similar to a defender), and ‘‘political’’ (which refers to strategy processes rather than content). These four ‘‘grand strategies’’ are based on different combinations of the following eight variables:

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 878