Policy Making and Administration in State Agencies: Strategic Management Approaches

Abstract

The concept of strategy has been employed by business policy and management researchers for more than two decades. ' Common usage of the term captures a variety of images, including adaptation, learning, evolution, and coalignment.I 2 In this extensive literature, strategic management is seen to encompass strategic planning, direction setting for the organization as a whole, and the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of specific organizational strategies.3 Organizational strategies reflect the actual pattern of choices and actions made in guiding the organization through time. Although the strategy literature has largely focused on business organizations, public agencies also engage in strategic management, as reflected in a variety of policy-making and administrative activities. Agencies regularly engage in cycles of planning and goal setting, adopt and implement new policies, develop new programs or change the relative emphasis within a portfolio of programs, reorganize their internal structure, alter their service delivery systems, and seek new sources of funding and external support. Building on evidence of important differences as well as similarities between public and private organizations,4 scholars have begun to develop a literature specifically concerned with the distinctive nature and characteristics of strategy and strategic management in public organizations.5 This paper extends that emerging literature by reporting the results of field studies of strategic management in four Ohio agencies and providing a preliminary classification of public organization strategies.