It frequently occurs that organisations deviate from their original policies when carrying them out, because of, for example, new information and insights, demands of stakeholders or problems arisen during further implementation. Based on case studies at four housing associations in the Netherlands, this paper will deal with the difficulties on daily decisions that are made during the implementation process. The paper will present a conceptual model in which the relation between embedding and deviation is shown. Then the paper will go into a number of measures that can be taken by housing association to assure that policies are embedded. After that, the paper will shift focus to deviations of policy. I will present a conceptual model that makes housing associations more conscious of their actions and helps them to balance between embedding and deviation.

Due to a change in regulations in the 1990s, Dutch housing associations have become much more independent from government policies. As a result they have to formulate their own strategic goals on how to deal with their properties. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether Bruno Latour's due process model can be of help to housing associations implementing their strategies. In his Political Ecology, Latour (2004) has presented the due process model as a model through which new plans or ideas can be realised in society. In the case of housing management, measures from the management strategy should be implemented. Following McMaster, Vidgen & Wastell (1998), I will apply the due process retrospectively. To this end, a case study was conducted at a Dutch housing association.

Due to change in regulations in the mid 1990's Dutch social landlords have become much more independent from government policies. As a result they have to formulate their own strategic goals on how they want to deal with their properties. At the moment not much is known about how these goals are implemented in organisations of social landlords in The Netherlands. In the paper I will explore some theoretical viewpoints derived from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that can help to understand processes of strategy implementation. Actor-Network Theory has been developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. The existence of interaction between humans and non-humans is the central assumption on which it is based. Through interaction networks are built. Strategies begin as rather small networks (e.g. an idea of one of the participants in a meeting). They then try to become bigger and stronger networks. For example by being attached to a specific budget. The more relations there are the stronger the network is. As Actor-Network Theory states, making a reconstruction of the process can shed some more light on the substance of these relations. In the paper I will also give some first results about such a reconstruction of the implementation processes in two cases at a small social housing company in The Netherlands.