Haldor Byrkjeflot

Public Sector Organisations and Reputation Management: Five Problems

ABSTRACT This article discusses five problems that most public organizations will face when adopting a popular, yet largely unexplored management concept: reputation management. The inherently political nature of public organizations constrains their reputation management strategies. Furthermore, they have trouble connecting with their stakeholders on an emotional level, standing out as unique and differentiated organizations, communicating as coherent bodies, and maintaining excellent reputations. In this article, we examine in depth the nature of these problems and seek to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities and limitations of reputation management in a public sector context.

From Label to Practice: The Process of Creating New Nordic Cuisine

This article examines the process of creation of new Nordic cuisine (NNC) as a culinary innovation, focusing on the main stages, actors, and mechanisms that shaped the new label and its practices and facilitated its diffusion in the region and internationally. Fast-paced diffusion was possible because NNC was conceived as an identity movement, triggered by active involvement of entrepreneurial leaders from the culinary profession, high-profile political supporters, legitimating scientists, disseminating media, and interpreting audiences. It was facilitated by three mechanisms: First, the use of an “empty” label, without a previous meaning in food, yet with positive connotations in other domains, allowed establishing a positive abstract notion open to interpretations and different practices. Second, the invitation for participation and financial support for innovative initiatives allowed for more actors and institutions to develop practices associated with the NNC label. Third, organized dissemination allowed the excitement and engagement with the new label to spread quickly.

Three conceptualizations of hybrid management in hospitals

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to bring the discussion on the relationship between management and medicine a step forward by focussing on: first, how the notion of hybrid and hybridity has been used in the literature on healthcare management. Second, the authors have mapped the alternative ways that the concept have been used in order to conceptualize a more specific set of possible combinations of managerial and professional roles in healthcare management. Hybrid management is a topic that ought to be important for training, communication among researchers and for identifying areas of future research: in management, in healthcare reforms, in sociology of professions and in theory of organizations. Design/methodology/approach – The authors provide a systematic literature review in order to map the various conceptualizations of hybrid management. The authors have searched for “hybrid leadership,” “hybrid management” combined with hospitals and health care in a whole range of journals, identified in...

The Many Faces of Accountability: Comparing Reforms in Welfare, Hospitals and Migration

Welfare reforms involve trade-off between different accountability types, such as political, administrative, legal and social accountability. This variety of accountability types is used to investigate consequences of reforms in three different welfare services in Norway; social services, hospitals and immigration. The study finds that more complex, dynamic and layered accountability forms are emerging, but that there are some differences across reform areas. The reforms in immigration seem to change accountability relations the most in hospitals, administrative and political accountability is up against professional accountability, and we see that politicians lack overall capacity and have to rely on administrative accountability in social services. In order to analyze how reforms affect accountability relations one has to study both the formal and informal changes, as well as the relationship between politics and professionalism.

Reshaping public accountability: Hospital reforms in Germany, Norway and Denmark

The article contributes to the literature on multi-level welfare governance and public accountability in the context of recent European hospital reforms. Focusing on the changing dynamics between regional and central governance of hospitals in Germany, Norway and Denmark, we raise concerns about the reshaping of traditional public accountability mechanisms. We argue that, triggered by growing financial pressures, corporatization and professionalization have increasingly removed decision-making power from regional political bodies in hospital funding and planning. National governments have tightened their control over the overall trajectory of their hospital systems, but have also shifted significant responsibility downwards to the hospital level. This has reshaped public accountability relationships towards more managerial or professional types embedded within multi-level forms of governance. Points for practitioners Our study may be taken to suggest that if reforms are responses to policy pressures, the accompanying changes in accountability relationships and arrangements in turn contribute to altering the pressures and constraints that form the context for administrative, managerial and professional work. As reforms in Norwegian, Danish and German healthcare contribute to corporatization, centralization and economization, there is reason to expect that what officials are held accountable for, and how, is also likely to change and to accentuate the span between policy aims and actual managerial and professional performance.

Bureaucracy: An Idea Whose Time has Come (Again)?

In this chapter, we focus on the stabilizing functions of public bureaux and examine some of the consequences attendant upon attempts to make them less hierarchical and more ‘flexible’. In so doing, we seek to evidence the ways in which what are represented as anachronistic practices in the machinery of government may actually provide political life with particular required ‘constituting’ qualities. While such practices have been negatively coded by reformers as ‘conservative’, we hope to show that their very conservatism may serve positive political purposes, not the least of which is in the constitution of what we call ‘responsible’ (as opposed to simply ‘responsive’) government. Through a critical interrogation of certain key tropes of contemporary programmes of modernization and reform, we indicate how these programmes are blind to the critical role of bureaucracy in setting the standards that enable governmental institutions to act in a flexible and responsible way.

Management in hospitals – a career track and a career trap. A comparison of physicians and nurses in Norway

Purpose – The hospital sector has expanded in Norway with reforms and a strong demand for better management. The purpose of this paper is to examine: first, how this has affected physicians and nurses in management; second, how management roles in hospitals are changing; and third, how these two professions are tackling their new roles. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a review of the secondary literature and a case study undertaken in the spring, 2012. Findings – In Norway, two reforms have been introduced aimed at creating stronger management positions with less professional influence. The leader has full responsibility for a particular unit, which means that the jurisdiction of managers has expanded and that management has become more time consuming. Physicians – traditionally those in charge of hospitals – are facing competition from other professions, especially nursing, which has gained representation in top management positions, particularly at middle management level. Originality/v...

Higher Education and Health Organizational Fields in the Age of “World Class” and “Best Practices”

Abstract The paper sets forth and examines the assumptions underlying two global ideas – world class and best practices – and their application to (higher) education and health organizations. Our basic (ex-ante) assumption is that both sectors are influenced by organizational fields that embody these ideas. However, we also assume that these sectors differ, and thus, that one should find between sector variations in the influence of such ideas. The findings suggest that both sectors have been affected by hegemonic ideas, yet in rather different ways, and that these ideas, particularly the metrics being used, pose different challenges in the two sectors.

What is the ‘Neo-Weberian State’ as a Regime of Public Administration?

The “Neo-Weberian State” (NWS) has been a much-discussed concept in public administration studies since Pollitt and Bouckaert introduced it in their Public Management Reform book. This chapter takes a closer look at the concept and compares NWS with its much longer pedigree of Neo-Weberian State Theory in sociology. The chapter examines ‘administrative statesmanship’ in relation to the NWS framework. The chapter finally illustrates what NWS mean by looking at the empirical case of Denmark. The chapter concludes that the Weberian state is a much more basic conceptualization of state affairs than it is given credit for in the Neo-Weberian reform approach. It makes more sense to talk about degrees of weberianism rather than to distinguish between states that are (neo)-Weberian and those who are not.

Accountability in Multilevel Health Care Services: The Case of Norway

Public-sector reforms in Europe have taken shape in two main waves over the last three decades: New Public Management (NPM), which began in the early 1980s, and post-NPM from the late 1990s onwards (Christensen & Laegreid, 2007). NPM is based on neo-institutional economic theory and management theory.