Recent research shows that new types of high-skilled administrators, what we in this article label organisational professionals, have amplified their presence in public sector organisations in relation to other types of public sector employees. Our purpose is to analyse how organisational accountability can be seen as a driver behind the expansion of organisational professionals. Intensified political and administrative pressures seem to be driving this process, but there also seems to be internal turfs in which the different parts of the government administration seek to hold each other accountable, a process possibly amplified by professionalising ambitions of the organisational professionals. The article concludes that the bureaucratising effect of accountability demands ought to be highlighted more in critical research of accountability. The study is based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with public sector professionals in Sweden from different policy sectors and government levels.
The aim of this article is to analyse how innovation policy is staged and legitimised through the dramatised social process of an event. The context is taken from an annual event, Skåne Innovation Week, which is arranged by the regional innovation system in Skåne, Sweden. Innovation systems often organise similar events internationally, which appear to play a key role in performing inter-organisational collaboration between actors from the public sector, industry and research, as well as manifesting belief in the globalised imaginaries of innovation systems. Through the analytical lens of the event as a social drama, the article examines how the event – and thus, innovation policy – is represented in commemorative films and website documents through which three meeting practices are identified: mingling and hanging out, scripted meeting models and spatial staging. The article argues that these meeting practices and their performed interactive social forms sustain the vagueness and ambiguity inherent in innovation policy, particularly between stability and change. The event can be viewed as a form of performative government that maintains a political order while simultaneously hailing its practices as transformative.
Många studier har visat på svårigheten att hantera komplexa, gränsöverskridande problem i kortsiktig projektform; likväl fortsätter politikens projektifiering. I denna artikel genomförs en empirisk studie av Malmö stads projektverksamheter i syfte att und ersöka förändrande och stabiliserande effekter av projekt. Ett vidare syfte är att utveckla den statsvetenskapliga förståelsen av den ökade användningen av projekt inom offentlig sektor. Dels genomförs en metastudie byggd på 30 utvärderingar; dels genomförs tre kortare fallstudier. Artikeln visar att projekt sällan implementeras i ordinarie verksamhet, men ofta ger upphov till nya projekt. Detta leder till att projekt blir relativt stabila uppsamlingsplatser för verksamheter, vilket ty dliggörs när särskilda organisationer skapas med syftet att hantera projekt. Denna relativa stabilitet kan förstås utifrån motsättningen mellan olika logiker: en systemlogik (styrd av externa finansiärer) inriktad på det kontinuerliga skapandet av nya projekt; en politisk logik som har behov av att demonstrera utvecklingsinriktad samverkan; samt en organisationslogik som är inriktad på förutsägbarhet, och som därmed tenderar att stöta ifrån sig temporära organisationsformer. En slutsats är att det inte i första hand är projektformen som är problematisk, men att den tenderar att leda till byråkratisering eftersom lokala beslutsfattare inte tar ansvar för utvecklingen.
Over the last couple of decades an increasing use of temporary organizations has been observed in public administration, a development sometimes referred to as projectification. This article explores the political-administrative rationality of projectification by studying the initiation and implementation of a project funding system regarding social investments in a Swedish municipality. In the article it is argued that projectification is driven by the administrative leadership with the aid of devoted civil servants. Projects are also attractive to politicians because of the temporal, forward-looking character of politics itself, i.e. that the time conception of project management and politics is basically similar. The article shows that the critique against projectification in terms of increasing short-termism is somewhat beside the point, since politicians and top managers rather seem interested to introduce more short-termism in public administration. Projectification, however, does not represent a profound organizational change but rather introduces a new mind-set with potential long-term effects.
Opportunities for democracy in cross-border regions? Lessons from the Øresund Region, Regional Studies. This article critically assesses the democratic character of cross-border regions within the European Union. Cross-border cooperation could be an experimental field for the project of making the Union more democratic through transnational partnerships, especially since large parts of cross-border policy formation are done by the local and regional authorities. The article analyses the democratic state of the Øresund Region around the Sound between Sweden and Denmark. The study demonstrates that, rather than bringing spearhead ideas of democratic organization, cross-border cooperation in the Øresund Region tends to perpetuate the problem of citizen participation within the Union. The Øresund project - and comparative evidence suggests the same pattern in other cross-border cooperations within the EU - is characterized by a relatively closed network of public agencies, chaired by a few leading politicians and senior public officials. Their strategies of regional integration emphasize individual consumption instead of public participation, and their formal representative position is unsettled.
Jag argumenterar i detta lätt essäistiska paper för uppfattningen att NPM-reformer inom offentlig förvaltning primärt ska ses som konstruktioner och rekonstruktioner av organisatorisk makt, som dock oftast legitimeras genom hänvisning till olika former av externa processer (t.ex. krav från kunder eller olika styrningsaktörer). Argumentationen utgår från aktuella reformförsök i offentlig förvaltning, såsom kvalitetsstyrning och projektledning inom t.ex. sjukvård och kommunal verksamhet, med illustration från fallstudier av Jönköpings läns landsting, Lunds universitet och Malmö Stad. En konklusion från dessa fallstudier är att reformförsöken handlar om organisationsskapande – att få till stånd en såväl kontrollerbar som självstyrande organisation. Argumentationen kring organisatorisk makt tar sin utgångspunkt i klassisk politisk sociologi, men också i mer aktuell forskning om relationen mellan makt och ”frihet” (uttryckt som självstyrning). Avslutningsvis diskuteras de narcissistiska risker som jag menar att ett alltför självbespeglande organisationsskapande ger upphov till.
This article argues that quality-improvement reforms in health care are political reforms that aim to reconstruct organizational power relations. The argument is based on a case study of how a small women's clinic in Sweden subjected itself to a Total Quality Management-inspired process organization in order to win a quality award. The quality-improvement activities at the clinic seek to establish a centralized, communitarian organization without mediating powers in the form of professional hierarchies. However, they also stimulate professionalization of formerly subjugated groups in the health-care hierarchy. The analytical perspective of governmentality is used to illustrate how distant authorities and the clinic are related according to a new technology of government within health care, one goal of which is an intrusive form of organizational steering. The case study also shows the limitations of this perspective because the reforms trigger other micro-political activities that are seemingly not derived from the technology of government.
This article starts from the neither new, nor original idea that the activity of organising, rather than the content, goals or effects of organisations, is the cornerstone of power and rule in modern society. The aim is to explain why management reforms as such are problematic to implement, but a further aim is also to show that the most important thing about management reforms is maybe not their practical implementation but rather their discursive influence upon the definition of organisations and organising activities (what I call the politics of organisational power). Another important feature of the article is that it employs a bottom up-perspective according to which management reforms are negotiated within organisational constructions of the world, rather than being something imposed from the outside. Through two case studies, the article concludes that efforts at strengthening organisational control through neutralised management techniques lead to oligarchic tendencies. This quite traditional conclusion is supplemented with a conclusion derived from the governmentality perspective: very generalised strategies of steering are effectuated on localised levels without the traditional “implementation” work, but rather through points of discursive definition on the organisational level.
Swedish ICT policy has been characterised by abstract discourses which focus on dramatic transformations due to the coming of the “information society”. But Swedish ICT policy has also been characterised by decisions de-coupled from the discourse, as well as fragile efforts towards implementation. This article analyses the linkage between discursive power and fragmented policy-making in contemporary politics. A Kingdoninspired multiple streams framework is used for analysing the impact of discourses upon policy solutions, since other analytical strategies are too (implicitly) rational. In the case of Swedish ICT policy, it is shown that the visionary discourse of the information society strongly frames problems and solutions, but that the presence of contradictory discourses of steering makes it easier for decision makers to get rid of their own responsibility for practical actions through de-coupling of rhetorical, organisational and decision-making activities. The outcome is a political system where elite discourses mainly contribute to organisational identity-building, and prospects for reconstructed organisational power among policy makers on different steering levels.
Voluntary environmental governance is a widely used policy approach that has been criticized for its lack of effectiveness. This raises fundamental questions about how to design processes that can advance voluntary programmes in a way that makes them more successful. In this paper, we analyse a government-initiated dialogue process to phase out hazardous chemicals through voluntary action by the Swedish textile industry. The analysis shows that information transfer primarily motivated business participation, while consumer pressure, regulatory threats and traditions of government–business cooperation played minor roles. The institutional design of the dialogue ensured close interaction within a homogeneous group, but collective actions were limited by disagreement about the problems to be addressed, prior unilateral environmental commitments by leading companies, and ambivalent engagement. This case provides valuable insights into the effect of institutional design on the actual interplay between business and government and its effects on voluntary governance.
The notion of democratic network governance has attracted growing interest among students of local and regional governance in all the Nordic countries since the 1990s. This article examines whether research in this area reflects a particular Nordic account of democracy. The Nordic countries have strong traditions of local autonomy, local networks and the inclusion of civil society associations. The authors find reason to expect that the Nordic traditions of local and regional governance may have stimulated a common approach to democracy questions with the features of an integrative perspective. At the same time, the differences in the history of democratisation are likely to have urged the approach in different directions. Using evidence from a literature review, the article suggests that, rather than a fully fledged theory, democracy with an intriguing potential and with nuances exists as an issue in the Nordic governance studies.
This article analyzes how the idea of “innovationism” in Sweden has generated a new kind of idea-driven policy around the creation of innovative regional policy. In contrast to similar policies in this area, this policy does not manifest itself through traditional instruments, but evolves through symbolic and ritual performances, in particular through events and conferences. The article asks how this emerging idea has changed the existing institutional formation of sponsoring industrially relevant research. The vision of concerted action between decision-makers within modern innovationism reinforces territorial identity, but it also tends to devolve responsibility to the regional level since concerted action on the national level is hard to obtain. What emerges is a system of governing at a distance where different actors perform their roles according to often academic ideas of innovationism. The study is based on two qualitative studies in Sweden entailing both documentary sources and semi-structured interviews.
During the 1990s a new policy area - ICT-policy - evolved in Swedish politics. It manifested itself through a number of unprecedented initiatives from the government including a new type of institutional set-up. These initiatives all encompassed an underlying idea of governing the new policy area in a manner different from previous modes of governing which emphasised a parliamentary chain of command. Governing concepts such as "dialogue", "networks" and "visionary hearings" became cornerstones for "leading" Sweden into the new "information society". In this article we have the ambition to analyse how a new phenomenon in politics have been received in an age characterised by deregulation, new paradigms in governance and a welfare state in transition. Based on a comprehensive interview survey and a discourse analysis of official documents we can conclude that the new modes of governance have not been efficient tools to accomplish the high ambitions and objectives of the policy. Rather, the new institutions set up to manage 'the future' have in many cases become 'garbage cans' for issues the traditional "institutions" have not been capable of managing. Moreover, they have in confrontation with old institutions become omitted from actual influence.
This article investigates the every-day street-level practice of green public procurement (GPP) in Sweden, a country with one of the most decentralized systems of public administration within the European Union (EU). The street-level procurement officers in Swedish local and regional government are in charge of purchases estimated to represent between 10% and 15% of Sweden’s GDP. This article examines the constraining and enabling factors behind the individual procurement officer’s choice of green procurement in textiles and clothing through a combination of qualitative interviews and a review of documentary sources. The analysis shows that while indirect support through European and national soft regulation and policy advice is imperative for "greening" procurement, the direct factors which influence the local outcome of GPP comprises factors on the local level: political commitment and environmental knowledge, the organizational structure of local government and the local interpretation of the regulatory framework. This study shows that a decentralized structure has possibilities of furthering ambitions of buying green if there are committed politicians and public officials, an optimal level of internal centralisation and an external support structure of knowledge and enabling rules.
Hvilke nye og gamle typer af spørgsmål har svenske politikkere defineret i forhold til den nye informationsteknologi? Kræver nye typer af sammenlignelige problemer og løsninger nye institutionelle former for politisk styring og styringsmidler? I artiklen beskrives den grundlæggende diskurs som denne fremtidsstyring formuleres indenfor. Desuden følger en kortlægning af, hvordan denne diskurs har resulteret i nye institutionelle former for politisk styring og i hvilke "netværk" den har kommet til at spille en stor rolle. Artiklen viser, at diskursen om IT har haft en konkret betydning for organisering af policyområdet IT. Med en mere traditionel måde at se på styring kan man samtidig spørge om denne organisering har været særlig effektiv.
New Public Management (NPM) reform ideas are, in the literature, usually portrayed as exogenous models which somehow permeate public organisations (cf. Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). Hitherto, the question whether internal organisational motives for creating new units has been a contributing factor to the diffusion of NPM ideas has been notably overlooked. It is our contention that theories on bureau-shaping can complement other frameworks for describing the diffusion of NPM reforms. That is, bureaucrats (i.e. public management) can use the ‘discourse’ of NPM for pursuing the creation of new, more policy-shaping and second order functional, units and offices (for example, benchmarking, communication etc) within public organisations, thereby replacing old bureaucratic layers with ‘novel’ offices detached from the daily operative functions of bureaucracy. The aim of our paper is to discuss and review strategies for empirical studies of bureau-shaping theory in the light of public management reforms. Whilst Dunleavy's original thoughts have been widely discussed and contested, few actual attempts have been made to transfer them to empirical studies. In this paper, we examine some of the main traits of criticism, as well as some of the few attempts to apply the theory empirically. In addition, we propose a research strategy for a comparative empirical study of bureaucratic change within local and state administration in Sweden and Denmark inspired by bureau-shaping theory. From a preliminary case study, we conclude that bureau-shaping may be more of a systematic organisational response to administrative reforms than the utility-maximising strategy of individual bureaucrats.
Organisational actors in the public sector are often characterised as path-dependent and tending to reject or translate change in accordance with institutional norms, while management change is often interpreted as emanating from “above” (international organisations, governments, thinktanks). In this article we present, inspired by Dunleavy’s bureau-shaping approach, a complementary understanding of incremental changes which goes beyond the existing explanations. Our claim is that incremental changes often are caused by ‘pull-factors’ inside the organisation. Based on an in-depth study of five Swedish public agencies 1980-2005 we present an inductively-derived typology of organisational change. In the five organisations considered, it is shown that the management level has been able to influence changes which emanate from “push-factors” in the environment (such as streamlining, cost reduction and symbolic adaptations). But the paper also highlights more gradual changes – “small but significant steps” - such as increased hiring of social scientists and managerialisation as important features in the process of reconstructing the agencies as policy-making, rather than operational, units, in line with Dunleavy’s general argument. A conclusion to this is that improved policy-making capacity, paradoxically, may reduce Swedish public agencies’ ability to steer.
This chapter introduces the phenomenon of public sector projectification, critically assessing the nature and consequences of this phenomenon to make clear the importance of studying this development in detail. It describes the specific context of the public sector in relation to processes of projectification, the relation between projectification and politics in state-owned and state-managed sectors and considers the embedded tensions between permanent organisations and temporary organising. Projectification has emerged in close inter-relation with broader discourses of managerialism in public services, often collectively described as “new public management” (NPM). NPM is a broad and contested term covering a substantial and often poorly defined range of activities and processes. Projects are thus a means for government to delegate responsibility for policy outcomes, sharing responsibilities between central and local levels, while still remaining in control in terms of programme development, funding, and evaluation. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
In recent decades, we have witnessed an increasing use of projects and similar temporary modes of organising in the public sector of nations in Europe and around the world. While for some this is a welcome development which unlocks entrepreneurial zeal and renders public services more flexible and accountable, others argue that this seeks to depoliticise policy initiatives, rendering them increasingly technocratic, and that the project organisations formed in this process offer fragmented and unsustainable short-term solutions to long-term problems. This volume sets out to address public sector projectification by drawing together research from a range of academic fields to develop a critical and theoretically-informed understanding of the causes, nature, and consequences of the projectification of the public sector. This book includes 13 chapters and is organised into three parts. The first part centres on the politics of projectification, specifically the role of projects in de-politicisation, often accomplished by rendering the political “technical”. The chapters in the second part all relate to the reframing of the relationship between the centre and periphery, or between policy making and implementation, and the role of temporality in reshaping this relation. The third and final part brings a focus upon the tools, techniques, and agents through which public sector projectification is assembled, constructed, and performed.
Purpose The purpose of this article is to ascertain empirically to what extent we can quantify an occupational shift, where a new type of bureaucracy of organisational professionals is on the rise in tertiary educational institutions in New Zealand. Furthermore, the objective is also to present accountability as the prime factor behind the changes. Design/methodology/approach The analytical strategy of the study takes a point of departure in the distinction between occupational and organisational professionals in the public sector in general, and more specifically in tertiary education (TE). Based on these new categorisations, the authors have used various descriptive historical statistics (both national and institutional) to estimate changes over time. Findings The article finds, in line with some international research, that there has been a comparatively higher growth of organisational professionals in TE in New Zealand, and a significantly higher growth than in the private sector and in the overall public services. The authors hypothesise that this growth can be associated with accountability (both vertical and horizontal) as the dominant notion in TE. Originality/value This article takes a different approach than the existing literature on administrative intensity in TE by looking at occupational changes rather than changes in institutions budgets. This article also confirms some of the findings in the growing international literature on changes in professional roles.