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IntroductionSince the late-1970s NPM reforms have increasingly spread throughout the European public sectors. The logic underneath these reform efforts was based on the belief that the public sector works better when public administrative bodies are oriented toward outputs, rather than being focused on processes. A growing body of empirical literature have criticized the organizational practices introduced with these reforms because of: (1) their inappropriate likening of the public sector to the private one (DeLeon and Denhardt, 2000; Hefetz and Warner, 2004; McCabe and Vinzant, 1999; Rocha and De Araujo, 2007) and (2) the fact that NPM models have led to positive outcomes such as gains in effectiveness and efficiency but also to negative outcomes such as losses of equity, citizenship, and accountability (Boyne, 1998; Kettl, 1993; Morgan and England, 1988; Romzek, 2000).
A stream of the literature (Olvera and Avellaneda 2017) has focused on the Performance Management Systems (PMSs) which, riding the wave on NPM reforms, have spread in many countries, across various policy areas and at every level of government. However, Radin (2006) suggests that PMSs performance values conflict with the democratic values of a country because their evaluation criteria rely on simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions that do not correspond to the dynamic reality of public organizations.
Olvera and Avellaneda (2017) explain that PMSs are expected to improve the performance of government actions. But – as the authors point out - this expectation is based on a rational perspective of organizational performance, according to which organizational effectiveness has to do with the achievement of organizational goals through design and management (Rainey, 2014). The key rationalist assumption underpinning these systems is that PMSs can help improve
performance by providing public managers with proper information about the level of goal achievement, so they can use this information to determine a strategy that would help accomplish their goals. Provided with this information, managers may opt for continuing, modifying, or terminating any organizational process or feature in order to improve performance. Strategy, goals, structure, resource allocation, and human resource reallocation are some of the organizational features that managers may target.
However, already in the 1970s, behavioral scholars (e.g. Mintzberg 1979) criticized rationalism as a basis for strategy-making as, in the real world, strategy is rarely the result of one-off planned decisions. It is rather the outcome of a process shaped by conflicting interests, politics and organizational culture. They thus defined strategy as a ‘pattern in a stream of decisions’ in contrast with the earlier view of ‘strategy as planning’ (Miller and Friesen 1982, Mintzberg and Waters 1985). Their seminal works shifted the research focus from the strategy content (formulation of planned goals and performance measurement) to the strategy process. In their language, a process is a sequence of events that lead to an outcome (Peterson 1998, Sminia 2009) and has to be studied in its organizational, societal and political context (Pettigrew 1985, 1987, Van de Ven et al. 1999).
In a similar vein, the most recent Strategy as Practice school has suggested that strategic decisions are not simply taken at the top of organizations and implemented down through hierarchies; rather, they are influenced by many intra- and extra-organizational members whose behaviors shape the process that gives rise to the strategy. From this perspective, March and Sutton (1997) have highlighted the heuristic dangers and limitations of studies which explain organizational performance in terms of unitary measures and by assuming causally related explanatory variables. Johnson et al. (2007) concur and argue that
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it makes little sense to explain performance of organizations as wholes if we do not understand well the components of performance. They rather suggest looking at performance in conjunction with people behavior, the way they interact and enact institutional and organizational practices. They thus acknowledge that strategy is rarely the result of one-off planned decisions, but rather is the outcome of complex processes characterized by a plurality of levels of analysis, actors and dependent variables. Therefore, they suggest that it might be difficult to understand such an organizational complexity through singular theoretical lenses. We may need to employ multiple theoretical lenses. The lack of new research approaches integrating multiple theoretical traditions situates the study of strategy in a vacuum. From a theoretical standpoint, this proposal addresses this lacuna and explores the possibility of developing an interdisciplinary analytical framework enabling researchers to integrate multiple theoretical traditions to understand strategy.
There exist few examples of research initiatives (Allison 1971; Addicott and Ferlie 2007) utilising multiple theories to study decision-making and strategic change. In this regard, Pichault (2013) stresses the need for integrated multidimensional models allowing researchers to mobilise multiple theories and grasp the multifaceted nature of strategic change. He considers that the contextualist research tradition developed by Pettigrew (1987) is well-suited to this end: “Contextualism is not an explanatory approach strictly speaking: rather, it proposes a general analytical framework which different approaches may fit into. It places the emphasis on three key concepts and their interrelations: content, context and process” (Pichault 2013: 68).
Interpreting strategic change: the contextualist framework of analysis As pointed out by Pettigrew and Whipp (1991), when researchers apply the contextualist framework to study strategic change, their analysis must distinguish
between three dimensions of change: content, process and context. The content refers to what is changed as expressed in terms of objectives, purpose and goals of change. The process refers to how change is implemented, whereas the context refers to the internal and external environment where change is implemented. Pettigrew and Whipp (1991) emphasize the continuous interplay between these dimensions and hold that change is an iterative and cumulative process. Therefore, in Part 2 of this PhD dissertation, we adopt three different theoretical lenses to interpret the different levels of content-context-process interactions (Figure P2I.1).
Figure P2I.1 – Theoretical design of Part 2 of the PhD dissertation
We use the lens of Foucault’s theory of power to study the context-process relationship. As suggested by Berdayes (2002), the Foucauldian theory provides useful insights into the nature of managerial power by shedding light on those inter- and intra-organisational ties which constrain individual and collective behaviour in organisations. For Michel Foucault power is never conceived as monolithic or autonomous, but rather is a matter of superficially stable structures emerging on the basis of constantly shifting relations underneath, caused by an