NPM? No Thanks—We Want Bureaucracy!

Abstract

Abstract This chapter includes an analysis how three major Swedish cities manage their strategy and control during transformative and complex capacity challenges. In particular, it extends our knowledge and contributes to NPM research concerning why and how local governments chose to adopt certain strategies and control actions to manage external pressure from a growing population. This is accomplished by investigating strategy and control actions taken by three major cities in Sweden: Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. Both politics and officials need to address these capacity challenges to fulfil their service delivery obligations connected to their public mission. The situation stresses the importance to revise, and if necessary, change existing strategies and management techniques to ensure that the local government organisation adopts and aligns the capacity challenges effectively and stay legitimate. Whether this has been the case during the last decades of NPM reforms can be discussed. What kind of NPM reforms are prioritised in a situation of transformative and complex capacity challenges? Is it possible to discern a special focus on these reforms, or radical shifts in chosen strategies and management techniques? By using the framework of Miles and Snow (1978/2003) one main conclusion is that the capacity challenges are met by a Defender approach and bureaucratic control through more formalised planning and centralisation. This can be interpreted as the cities holding on to the old way of administrative thinking during a situation of transformative and complex capacity challenges, something that contrasts with what Miles and Snow (1978/2003) advocates.