In our paper we try to understand strategic management (SM) at the Swedish Public Employment Services (SPES), one of the largest tax-funded central agencies in Sweden. The agency has been struggling to strategically manage not only contradictory goals and wicked problems due to rapid changes in political governance, but also a rapidly growing unemployment in society due to the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 epidemic.  

We have studied SPES between 2015-2021 and treated it as a case using qualitative methods of document studies, observations and 180 interviews with e.g. board members, managers and employees at SPES as well as politicians and union representants. 

To understand how SPES “do” SM we have used Moore’s (1995) strategic triangle as an analytical framework. Recently, an increasing number of scholars have taken an interest in SM from a public value approach (see e.g. Bracci et al., 2019; Bryson et al., 2014a; 2014b; 2015; 2017; Hartley et al., 2017; Mintrom and Luetjens, 2017). The three nodes of the strategic triangle framework – the authorising environment, public value creation and operational capacity – recognise that there are key issues affecting most, if not all, public sector organisations (Alford and Greve, 2017). However, as several researchers has noted there is a lack of empirical research on the subject of SM and public value (see e.g. Bracci et al., 2019; Bryson et al., 2017b; Hartley et al., 2017; Höglund et al, 2021), as well as on how people “do” SM in practice (se e.g. George and Desmidt, 2014; Höglund et al., 2018a; Höglund and Mårtensson, 2019). Our paper is an attempt to contribute to this call by addressing the following RQ: How do public organizations “do” SM during extraordinary times?

The findings suggest that SM tend to fall short in extraordinary times as COVID19, due to ad hoc management that focuses on short term goals that most of the times do not align with previous stated strategic goals and/or the creation of long-term public value. This suggests it becomes important to further study the consequences of an ad hoc management style in relation to SM and public value, especially during extra ordinary times. Our findings also show how the authorizing environment in terms of media and political governance of SPES limited the agency’s operational capacity to act strategically. In conclusion to this we suggest that several studies need to include media and political governance when they study SM in public organizations.