The Strategy-As-Action perspective as a model to analyse government's strategies

In this paper, we expect to contribute to answer to the last question of the PSG XI's call-for-papers focusing on a theoretical approach usually considered as irrelevant in public management (McNabb and Lee, 2021): the Strategy-As-Action (Grimm et al., 2006) perspective, more usually known as Competitive dynamics (Chen and Miller, 2012; 2015; Smith et al., 2001). Although this theoretical approach holds potential to improve our understanding of the concrete strategies implemented by public organisations to cope with an increasingly hostile and turbulent environment, it has, to the best of our knowledge, never been used in the field of public management. In this context, this paper aims to contribute to future research on strategic management in government by proposing an analytical model that, focusing on the interactions between the organisation under study and its stakeholders, captures the determinants and consequences of these interactions, as well as the strategic behaviour and repertoire of strategic actions of the organisation analysed, the whole in order to increase the performance of the organisation. The full paper will be organised as follows. In the first section, we take stock of the literature on the Strategy-As-Action perspective. This stream makes the concrete actions of organisations its basic unit of analysis (Smith et al., 2001) and integrates at once the external (Porter, 1980), internal (Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993) and cognitive (Marcel et al., 2011) factors that affect these actions. These (inter)actions, which are embedded in a dialogue between the organisation and its stakeholders, describe relationships of various natures: cooperative, coopetitive or rivalrous (Chen and Miller, 2015; Eymas and Bensebaa, 2021). Finally, action set analysis allows us to characterise the strategic behaviour of an organisation and to study its strategic repertoire in order to improve its performance (Smith et al., 2001). Based on these theoretical foundations, section two examines prior research on strategy of public organisations. This is a field in which strategic planning plays a major role, particularly because it links the strong legal constraints on public organisations with their operational activities (Bryson, 2015) and is positively correlated with performance (George et al., 2019). Moreover, classical strategic management theories are relatively unused in public context due to the significant differences between the private and public sectors (Joyce, 2022). Integrating the two research streams, we develop in a third section an analytical model to analyse government's strategies and make propositions We make proposals on the links between strategic actions, repertoire of actions and behaviour on the one hand and the performance of the public organisation on the other.