Adapting Global Administrative Reforms to Local Contexts within Developing Countries: Insights into the Blue Ocean Strategy

Abstract

As a subfield of Public Administration that is primarily concerned with improving performance within state institutions, administrative reform fails to fulfill its goals in developing countries due to the ethnocentricity of ready-made and replicable global strategies. Administrative reforms as top-down models of development marginalize local implementers who neither understand nor support the full adoption of the assigned models. Drawing on the significance of an all-inclusive synergy among local stakeholders for successful change, this study introduces the Blue Ocean strategy as an innovative managerial approach reflecting the temporal and spatial particularities of developing countries’ operational contexts. This study builds a conceptual framework for reforming public and non-profit sectors in developing countries in light of the guidelines of the Blue Ocean strategy as the expression of local stakeholders’ goal of improving organizational performance in compliance with existing opportunities and challenges. In doing so, it examines how the managers and employees of an Egyptian non-profit organization have benefited from the Blue Ocean strategy in improving their NGO’s performance through the adoption of effective strategic planning that restructured human resources functions and boosted employees’ productivity. The author conducted seven open-ended and semi-structured expert interviews with a selection of the NGO’s working staff and two managers in order to depict how the Blue Ocean strategy has enabled them to formulate and implement human resources strategic management as a customized administrative reform conforming to contextual exigencies.