Strategic management in the public sector has become quite popular in practice and several studies have shown that it has an impact on organizational performance. However, we still know little of how strategic management unfolds in practice. Overall, our message is that there are specific challenges that appear when applying strategic management in a public sector context that need to be handled to enhance the possibility of succeeding with strategy work. We present these challenges in terms of four tensions emerging in strategy work: planned versus emergent strategies, legitimacy versus practicality, administrative management versus innovative approach, and accessibility versus security. Based on these identified tensions, we suggest four propositions that not only have implications for further research, but also practical implications.

In public sector organizations, strategies and management accounting are often developed with the ambition of providing a combination of long-term objectives and short-term evaluations. This combination is sometimes labelled Strategic Management Accounting (SMA). The purpose of this chapter is to enhance our knowledge about SMA in the public sector context. We do this through a qualitative study of the Swedish Public Employment Service, which in 2020 launched a new strategic direction to manage changes in the agency's environment, along with a balance scorecard (BSC). The research question for this case was: How is the BSC used by a public sector agency as an SMA tool? Our results show that the agency's operational managers and controllers use the BSC as an SMA tool to create active management and control, while at the same time being reactive with a short-term focus. We address these results in relation to an idea of flexibilization, more specifically the desire to become a flexible agency that can change and adapt to short-term changes.

This study reports on an attempt to remove management accounting’s calculative practices at the operational level of a Swedish Public Agency. Using a Habermasian perspective, the study shows how the agency has attempted to replace the previous accounting practice, which involved target setting, performance management and measurement with a new leadership philosophy, and accounting practices that aim at generalizing the individual’s private interest toward organizational interests. The result is interpreted as an attempt to make the individual responsible for the welfare of the collective in which, in its absence, the kind of validity that accounting’s calculative practices enable is very much present as a longing to soothe the anxiety and uncertainty brought about by the responsibility to lead oneself.

This article focus on the conditions and reasons why organisational members articulate support for a newly introduced outcome-focused performance measurement and management system (PMS) in a public sector context. It does so through an analysis of the introduction of a performance measurement and management system named “Delivery Qualities” in a Swedish central government. The PMS was introduced by the Swedish government as a solution to societal critic, which initiated a process of handling and processing PMS in the case organisation. We argue that the reasons why members of the case organisation embraced the outcome-focused PMS are because it was not existing PMS. In the case, it is suggested that the outcome-focused PMS was, in essence,providing a more suitable link to ideas and ambition in the organisation.

The chapter takes a discourse approach drawing upon governmentality and the concepts of programme and technology. It focuses on how a programmatic initiative – a strategy for implementing entrepreneurship in schools – is made operable in practice by means of a technology: a competence development initiative. The results illustrate the process of how entrepreneurship gets translated into a new discourse based on an entrepreneurial approach, which takes on a broader perspective including life-long learning, co-operation with the society and democratic values, thus stretching the programme beyond its initial intentions. Moreover, the entrepreneurial approach could bring unintended consequences, which the discourse so far has tended to marginalize or even exclude. The chapter questios what is often taken for granted when it comes to entrepreneurship in schools, the tenet that wwhat is good for business is good for education and society at large’.

This papers concerns strategic management accounting (SMA) in public sector agencies. The paper focuses on the challenges of strategy formation in the public sector through an analysis of the strategizing effects of the management accounting techniques in relation to the public-sector context. The paper answers calls for studies on the strategizing effects of costing practices in the public sector in relation to other public-sector goals. The paper broadens the scope beyond cost and efficiency aspects and includes other management accounting aspects that include the role of the government and mass media in the strategy formation of a public-sector organization. The paper suggests that to understand SMA in the public sector, involves a contextual understanding of the governance system in which SMA is situated. This context includes formal governance bodies such as the government as well as other external actors such as mass media. These actors are important to bring into the analysis because their actions toward public sector agencies in many ways influence the choice of management accounting tools whose strategizing effects constitute of strategy.

Strategic management (SM) is now prominent on the agenda of public administration scholars and practitioners e.g. in Swedish Central Agencies, and is said to become increasingly relevant in public organizations due to new public management (NPM) changes. Some scholars even suggests that the models of SM takes us beoynd NPM towards something new where the SM becomes the core of the organization. SM has so far mainly been studied in a context of the private sector, and the main concern in public sector research on SM has been on how to translate the concepts of growth and profitability into a public sector context. There is however a lack of studies investigating how public organizations actually apply SM in practice. Calls have been made for exploration of SM approaches within contemporary public services organizations but also more exploration of the limitations of these models. We have studied the implementation of a SM-model in the Swedish Transport Administration, a central government agency. The empirical material is based on document studies and interviews with 85 top- , middle- and lower-level managers, strategists and other employees. SM is supposed to lead to e.g. decentralization, a long term holistic perspective and strategic thinking. However, our results indicate when public sector do their interpretation of how to use SM-models they tend to become quite centralized, fixated on short-term measurements and focused on operative matters. One explanation for this seems to be that SM is translated into a NPM discourse, altering the initial intentions with SM. This suggests that NPM becomes an important contextual aspect to consider when SM-models are implemented in the public sector.   

Denna förstudie behandlar strategier och strategigenomförande i Trafikverket. Genom att ta avstamp i visionen har vi följt det strategiska arbetet i Trafikverket med fokus på analys av pågående strategiskt arbete i verksamheten och litteraturstudier inom områdena strategi ioffentlig verksamhet, strategisk ledning och styrning samt strategiskt entreprenörskap.

Förstudien ligger inom ramen för FoI-portföljen ”Trafikverket – en modern myndighet”. I Trafikverkets strategidokument beskrivs en modern myndighet bl.a. i termer av en intern kultur som stimulerar lyhördhet, nyskapande, kreativitet, innovation och kontinuerlig utveckling för att möta framtida krav från omvärlden i utvecklingen av nya produkter och effektiva tjänster. I korthet kan det konstateras att Trafikverket står inför utmaningen att styra sin verksamhet mot strategiska mål och resultatuppfyllelse, och att samtidigt stödja organisationens medlemmar att utveckla vad som inom managementforskning har kommit att beskrivas som en entreprenöriell anda.

Det övergripande syftet med förstudien är att ge en första förståelse av potentiella möjligheter och hinder kopplade till det strategiska arbetet med att utveckla Trafikverket mot en ”modern myndighet”. Därmed ska studien ge ökade kunskaper om strategibegreppet inom statliga myndigheter och hur strategier formas och implementeras inom myndigheter samt potentiella konsekvenser. Hur externa styrsignaler (uppifrån och från sidan) och restriktioner påverkar förutsättningarna för formulering och implementering av interna strategier belyses särskilt.

Därigenom kan utmaningar och var eventuella krockar uppstår mellan strategi och styrning

identifieras. Genom att svara på den första frågeställningen kring vilka möjligheter och hinder som kan identifieras vid formulering, implementering och uppföljning av strategier i utvecklingen mot en modern myndighet kan vi konstatera att Trafikverket i stor utsträckning arbetar efter vad som inom forskning definieras som processer inom strategisk ledning och styrning. Den strategiska riktningen kan ses som ett sätt att respondera mot den ökade graden av effektivitets- och förändringstryck från uppdragsgivares (regeringen) och kunders(medborgare och näringsliv) behov och önskemål. Det finns dock flera indikatorer som visar att den strategiska processen i Trafikverket kan förbättras, speciellt rörande implementering men också när det gäller delar av uppföljningen. För en summering av potentiella hinder och möjligheter i Trafikverkets strategiska arbete se tabell 3 på sidorna 70-71.

Den andra frågeställningen har inkluderat att svara på hur mål- och resultatstyrning fungerar som styrfilosofi i relation till entreprenöriella särdrag. Här pekar förstudien på att det kan finnas vissa utmaningar med att skapa en balans mellan å ena sidan de entreprenöriella särdrag som önskas i Trafikverket och å andra sidan att styra mot mål och resultatuppfyllelse i det strategiska arbetet. För en summering av hur mål- och resultatstyrning potentiellt kan hindra och möjliggöra entreprenöriella särdrag i Trafikverket se tabell 4 på sida 79.

Utifrån resultaten i förstudien lyfter vi också fram tre potentiella områden för fortsatt forskning inom myndigheten med fokus på: 1) strategier inom Trafikverket, 2) potentiella befruktningar eller krockar mellan befintliga styrformer och nya, samt 3) den strategiska styrningens gränser och genomslagskraft externt.