Strategy making by hybrid organizations: The case of the port authority

Due to dynamic competition, the gain of autonomy through port devolution and the resulting evolution towards accountability in diverse fields of performance, port authorities (PAs) evolve from landlords that are strongly embedded in the public domain to more autonomous acting organizations with stronger requirement for ‘business like’ performance. This evolution implies a stronger need for proper strategic analysis and subsequent strategy formulation, evaluation and implementation. Based on the main current strategic challenges that PAs face, we defineand position the PA as an organization combining both public and private values and analyze the validity of the lenses of different theoretical perspectives from strategy and public management research for its strategic analysis. We argue that the strategic challenges’ PAs face in their current operating environment, also reflect the evolution in strategic management thinking, whereby more actor-related attributes are added to the various research frameworks, loosening the traditional strict conditions of profit maximization, rationality and transparency and whereby more integrated concepts like co-evolution and network theory gain importance. We also conclude that PAs as shared value organizations are interesting domains for academic research based in the strategy domain, as to strengthen the analytical base that is available for research into the strategy of organizations.