Public sector organizations are under pressure to adopt private sector tools to sustain legitimacy despite uncertainty about the compatibility of the techniques with this context. We explore the consequences of the misfit between the theories underlying two widely adopted managerial techniques (strategic planning and quality management) and the pluralistic power structure and values of public hospitals. We identify four scenarios of adaptation and use qualitative data to examine their empirical prevalence. We suggest that when the compatibility gap is large, there is greater likelihood that formalized techniques will be captured by and integrated into existing organizational dynamics (corruption of the technique) than that the technique will change these dynamics in a way consistent with its objectives (transformation of the organization). We examine the implications of our observations for understanding the role of managerial techniques in organizational change.
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