Studying Strategy Development in Government Organizations ntegrating Strategic Management and Theories of Social Practices(2006年公共管理国际会议论文).doc

Studying Strategy Development in Government Organizations: Integrating Strategic Management and Theories of Social Practices Michael Barzelay Professor of Public Management London School of Economics and Political Science, UK M.Barzelay@lse.ac.uk Abstract How should scholarship about public management deal with the subject of strategy? How should new insights about strategy in public management be discovered? How should academic work in public management about strategy relate to the landscape of scholarship about strategic management and organization studies? These questions animate this paper. In other words, this paper is meta-theoretical rather than offering a substantive discussion of strategy development in government. Key words Strategy, Development, Government, Organizations, Integrating Strategic Management The general answer I offer to this series of questions is the following. Public management scholars should collectively develop a clinical science of organizational practices for the public sector. Strategy development should be a major topic of this clinical science. In this linguistic context, strategy development is considered as a universally relevant function that needs to be carried out in appropriately situated ways on particular occasions in particular places. Scholarship should be useful to actors when they come to assess and design locally situated strategy development practices. It’s useful when scholarship discusses how the strategy development function should be conceived as well as identifying sources of difficulty in accomplishing this function, so conceived, in governmental settings. What can be studied empirically are organizational practices. Organizational practices are scenarios for strategy development activity. Scholarship should offer a causal understanding of strategy development scenarios. Comparative case studies are appropriate to this task, provided that the dynamics of scenarios are explained using suitable theoretical