Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, 5th Edition

CHAPTER FOURClarifying Organizational Mandates and Mission

Three outstanding attitudes—obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, and the illusion of invulnerable status—are persistent aspects of folly.

—Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly

This chapter covers Steps 2 and 3 of the Strategy Change Cycle, identifying mandates and clarifying mission and values. Together, mandates, mission, and values indicate broadly the public value the organization will create and provide the social justification and legitimacy on which the organization's existence depends.

Public and nonprofit organizations are externally justified. This means that they are chartered by the state to pursue certain public purposes (Rainey, 2014) and their legitimacy is conferred by the broader society (Suddaby, Bitektine, & Haack, 2017). These organizations must find ways to show that their operations do indeed create public value or they risk losing the social justification for their existence, their legitimacy, and any tax-exempt status they have.

Democratic governments can create public value through a number of overlapping activities, some of which are more appropriate to one level or type of government than another (Bozeman & Johnson, 2015; Bryson, Crosby & Bloomberg, 2015a, 2015b; Moore, 2013; Weimer & Vining, 2010). These activities include:

• Providing a constitutional framework of laws and supporting the rule of law—not least by the government itself ...