Retiring the Golden Hammer: Identifying Situational Practices for Public Strategy Implementation

Abstract

While scholars and practitioners increasingly embrace contingent approaches to public strategic management, they have done so tepidly. In an increasingly perilous and turbulent governing environment, both groups must move past time-honored tools and concepts and embrace the complexity inherent to the strategy implementation process. In response, this article proposes a contingent, micro-organizational process model of public strategy implementation based on Whittington’s (2017) framework of strategy as a practice and a process. Through regression analysis of 205 strategic initiatives from 43 U.S. municipalities, the study concludes that the relationships between implementation practices and proximate outcomes do indeed vary over time and across context, offering a specific list of recommended practices tailored to the intersections of implementation phase and initiative type. Public strategy implementation scholars can best aid practitioners by rejecting strategic reductivism and embracing micro-organizational implementation activity surrounding a strategic initiative, in all of its temporal and contextual splendor.