Betina Wolfgang Rennison

Historical discourses of public management in Denmark: Past emergence and present challenge

Abstract The management phenomenon does not simply arise out of nothing. It has emerged against the background of a protracted process that has gradually created the conditions for that which we now refer to as ‘management’.This article investigates the construction of the concept of management in the Danish public sector in the 20th century, revealing a transformation of the concept characterized by four different discourses that have rendered management a question of bureaucratic control, efficient rationalization, sectoral planning and, finally, professional management. The article accounts for the particular time-dependent conceptions that inform our knowledge of the past and contribute to our understanding of contemporary semantic possibilities for management. By this means, the article sheds new light on the emergence of public management from the past and the challenges it faces in the present.

Opening Systems Theory: A Note on the Recent Special Issue of Organization

Organization recently devoted a special issue to Niklas Luhmanns systems theory. Since Luhmanns work remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, the issue was an important opportunity to introduce Niklas Luhmanns contribution to organization theory to this audience. Unfortunately, the primarily theoretical approach to systems theory presented in the issue may leave the reader wondering what, if anything, Luhmanns work might contribute to empirical research into organizations. This note is an attempt to draw attention to the potential of Luhmanns approach in this regard.

Cash, codes and complexity

‘How on earth can it be so difficult to manage a pay cheque?’ said the manager of an administrative office when I interviewed him. ‘In this New Pay system there are so many and often conflicting considerations to be aware of.’ While this web of considerations makes managing a pay cheque a complicated affair, however, it also establishes the very conditions that make management possible. As this chapter will show,ˡ complexity offers managers not just ‘a difficult tight-rope to walk on’, as the administrator described it, but also an opportunity to approach pay as a management issue in the first place; moreover, it functions as a mean to construct management as such. This can be seen very clearly in regard to a new pay technology that has been implemented in the Danish public sector over the last ten years. Here pay is discussed in different ways, which makes the decisions more complicated than ever before, and also more complicated than the designers of the new scale ever imagined.