This study applies a strategy-as-practice lens to the everyday practices of public managers, examining their responses to tame and wicked problems and exploring how those practices are enabled or constrained by dominant logics and prevailing structures.
The concept of ‘wicked problems’ has matured in the public policy field over the past forty years, but the field of strategic public management is taking longer to grapple with its implications. Building on Rittel and Webber’s (1973) seminal work, scholars have recently sought to define wicked problems for the twenty-first century: they are unstructured, cross-cutting, overlapping and relentless (Weber and Khademian, 2008), intractable, politically and socially constructed (Newman and Head, 2014) characterised by complexity, disputation and discontinuity (Head and Alford, 2015; Roberts, 2000). As such, wicked problems pose a direct challenge to traditional strategic management by breaching both organisational boundaries and the hegemony of rational-scientific managerialism, demanding that attention be paid to values and emotions too.
In the literature, wicked problems are often placed on the opposite end of a spectrum to tame problems, which are characterised as solvable via management techniques. For public managers are expectations that they tackle wicked problems however come in addition to expectations of managerial competence. Public managers are encouraged to be adaptive - to adopt different practices contingent on the characteristics of the challenge faced (Wise, 2006; Pedersen and Hartley, 2008; Grint, 2005; Heifetz, 1994). But do public managers in fact adapt their strategy practices in response to the nature of a problem? How?
This study examines the situated, contingent strategy practices of public managers in the United Arab Emirates through semi-structured interviews with 30 to 40 senior government managers (department heads and above). Analysis will focus on public managers’ role interpretations, problem framing and the mapping of problems-as-framed to strategy practices. Then, factors influencing these will be discussed, with particular attention paid to dominant logics and prevailing structures. The study affords multiple contributions to knowledge. In particular, it offers insight into important strategising activities in government that occur outside formal strategy processes, and does so within the unique context of UAE government.
References:
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