Government revival and public sector employees' agency

In the Public management debate on a post/beyond New Public Management phase, there has been a stream of research on public sector employees. Our paper investigates the role of public sector employees in the actual "government revival". Strategy as Practice appears as a particularly relevant framework to analyze how the study of the micro activity of public sector employees can enlighten our understanding of the making of the public policy strategy making. Our research question is: how do practitioners, middle managers but also employees without a managerial role, individually and as groups, contribute to strategy-making of public policies? On the basis of an in-depth case study in a public administration in charge of the implementation of environmental public policies, we argue that not only middle managers' agency is crucial to strategy-making but also that of employees. We also propose a complementary understanding of strategic agency as regulated and organized by the group through "areas of discussion". On this basis, we suggest that the way public sector employees operate in a context of government revival might be key to the reconfiguration of public action, and thus to the reconceptualization of public services.