Public sector renewal and the strategification of cities

This project studies the implications of the increasing prevalence of the practice of strategy in cities - their “strategification”. Cities are the context where we face many of today’s most urgent problems, relating to societal and economic development as well as the quality of people’s lives. To understand how the competitive, rationalist perspective of strategy changes our local governments, this project focuses on the enactment of these strategies, and situate them in the broader context of political change.

This project contributes to the theory of strategy as practice. Building on 11 years and 11 000 pages of observational data into the strategy work of three Finnish cities, the project 1) elucidates the adaptation of competing societal governance paradigms in city strategy, 2) explores city strategy as a language game and a gamelike practice, and 3) studies the use of the city strategy in the relational webs into which contemporary service delivery is organized.