Does formal strategic planning matter? An analysis of strategic management and perceived usefulness in Norwegian municipalities
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | Åge Johnsen |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852319867128 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Does formal strategic
planning matter? An
analysis of strategic
management and
perceived usefulness in
Norwegian municipalities
A
˚ge Johnsen
Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Abstract
This article assesses whether municipal managers perceive strategic planning as most
useful when integrated into mandatory area or financial-planning processes or con-
ducted in processes with separate strategic planning documents. Despite being widely
adopted in practice and being extensively debated in scholarly discourse for decades,
current research has little empirical grounding for providing advice for policymakers
and public managers on such common design choices. Multiple regression analysis of
128 Norwegian municipalities shows that using a voluntary separate strategic planning
document was related to top management’s perceived usefulness of strategic planning.
Integrating strategic planning into other management processes was also related to the
perceived usefulness of strategic planning. Unexpectedly, using mandatory planning
documents (such as four-year financial plans and long-term area plans) as the main
strategic planning documents, formality and stakeholder involvement in the planning
processes were not related to the perceived usefulness of strategic planning.
Points for practitioners
Planning, and in particular formal strategic planning, is often criticized both by scholars
and practitioners as being useless when the environments are uncertain and turbulent,
and for draining the organizations’ resources from other important management tasks.
Corresponding author:
A
˚ge Johnsen, Oslo Business School, Faculty of Social Sciences, Oslo Metropolitan University, PO. Box 4,
St Olavs plass, NO-0130 Oslo, Norway.
Email: aage.johnsen@oslomet.no
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2021, Vol. 87(2) 380–398
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852319867128
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
This article shows that many municipalities voluntarily produced separate strategic
planning documents and that municipal top management found these plans more
useful than using mandatory financial plans or area plans as their main strategic planning
documents.
Keywords
impact, implementation, involvement, New Public Management, planning, regional and
local government, strategy as practice, top management
Introduction
Public sector organizations have a long tradition with formal planning. In the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s, however, planning met headwinds in academic discourse
(Lindblom, 1959; Mintzberg, 1994; Van Gunsteren, 1976). Nevertheless, planning
in the guise of strategic planning or strategic management regained popularity, for
example, being one of the core administrative doctrines in the New Public
Management (NPM) reforms from 1979 onwards (Hood, 1991). Since the 1980s,
strategic planning has been widely adopted, either by regulation or voluntarily, in
public sector organizations in many countries at both the central and local gov-
ernment level (Bryson, 2011; Ervin, 1992; Ferlie and Ongaro, 2015; Johanson,
2019; Joyce, 2017; Moore, 1995; Mulgan, 2009; Proeller, 2007). The practices
and the impact of strategic planning and management in the public as well as in
the private sector have nevertheless been contested (Goldsmith, 1997; Mintzberg,
1994; Nylehn, 1996).
Despite being extensively debated in scholarly discourse for decades and widely
adopted in practice, for example, in North American (Elbanna et al., 2016; Poister
and Streib, 2005) and European local governments (Andrews et al., 2012; George
et al., 2018; Hansen, 2011; Johnsen, 2016), there are still many common assump-
tions about strategic planning in public policy and administration that need to be
addressed more fully in empirical research. Some such assumptions are that: stra-
tegic planning is more useful in certain and stable environments than in uncertain
and unstable environments; using mandatory planning documents is more useful
than utilizing separate, voluntarily produced strategic planning documents; and
more formal strategic planning is more useful than less formal strategic planning.
Therefore, more studies on the design and effects of strategic planning in public
administration are important for both research and practice. Subsequently,
research on the effectiveness of strategic planning in the public sector, and in
particular outside the Anglo-American context, is still warranted.
Taking on this challenge, this article’s aim is to contribute to both public admin-
istration theory and practice by providing relevant evidence for policymakers and
practitioners on the impact of strategic planning for public sector organizations.
Johnsen 381
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