Abstract
Our core argument is that the entrepreneurial school of thought in strategic management as conceptualized by Mintzberg and colleagues holds explanatory value for advancing knowledge about the behavior of public sector organizations, as it does for private firms, albeit with important qualifications when applied to public services: chiefly, the temporal limitation in post for the office-holder of a public organization. After describing our methods, we present qualitative data from a longitudinal case study of strategy making in an European Union (EU) agency, the European Aviation Safety Agency, which has become a key actor globally in civil aviation. Our interpretation of the case suggests the additional usefulness of the entrepreneurial school of strategy, suitably adapted for public agency settings, as an explanatory prism to enlarge the repertoire of conceptual tools for the study of public agencies. Our broader argument is that the field of strategic management may provide theoretical resources for the study of public agencies, provided its theoretical lenses are properly selected and adapted.
Highlights
Our core argument is that the “entrepreneurial school of thought in strategic management” as conceptualized by Mintzberg and colleagues (1998, 2009, chapter 5) holds explanatory value for advancing knowledge about the behavior of public services organizations, alongside its widely recognized explanatory power for commercial organizations in competitive markets
We elaborate on how statutory limit to the term of office in the public sector qualifies the ways in which the entrepreneurial school of thought in strategic management can be applied to public organizations
This way, a theoretical prism from the disciplinary field of strategic management can be brought into the field of public management and added to the repertoire of conceptual tools utilized in public administration and management to study public agencies, like those drawn from political science (e.g., Carpenter’s study of the forging of agency autonomy, Carpenter, 2001; Downs’ inside bureaucracy, Downs, 1967; Peters’ politics of bureaucracy, Peters, 2018) or public choice (e.g., Dunleavy’s bureaushaping model, Dunleavy, 1991)
Summary
Our core argument is that the “entrepreneurial school of thought in strategic management” as conceptualized by Mintzberg and colleagues (1998, 2009, chapter 5) holds explanatory value for advancing knowledge about the behavior of public services organizations, alongside its widely recognized explanatory power for commercial organizations in competitive markets. We elaborate on how statutory limit to the term of office in the public sector (a feature of most public posts, at least in liberal-democratic regimes) qualifies the ways in which the entrepreneurial school of thought in strategic management can be applied to public organizations. This way, a theoretical prism from the disciplinary field of strategic management can be brought into the field of public management and added to the repertoire of conceptual tools utilized in public administration and management to study public agencies, like those drawn from political science (e.g., Carpenter’s study of the forging of agency autonomy, Carpenter, 2001; Downs’ inside bureaucracy, Downs, 1967; Peters’ politics of bureaucracy, Peters, 2018) or public choice (e.g., Dunleavy’s bureaushaping model, Dunleavy, 1991). Strategic management is in our view an underutilized theoretical source within public
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