Hans Hasselbladh

The Project of Rationalization: A Critique and Reappraisal of Neo-Institutionalism in Organization Studies

This article critically approaches various neo-institutional accounts of the process of formal organizing. While acknowledging the importance of the overall orientation marked by neo-institutional studies, the article identifies several crucial aspects that have escaped the attention of neo-institutional research. In particular, it criticizes the inability of neo-institutionalism to provide an account of the means linking situated forms of organizing with wider instrumental beliefs and practices, in terms other than adaptivist, diffusionist. Such a limitation is partly a consequence of unwillingness of neo-institutionalism to focus on and analyze the very architecture of the rationalized patterns and relationships which neo-institutionalists claim to be diffusing across organizational populations and fields. Drawing on several sources, the article develops a framework that seeks to outline the conceptual means for decomposing the carriers of rationalized patterns, models and techniques and showing the distinctive ways in which they implicate the building blocks of formal organizing.

Webs of Knowledge and Circuits of Communication : Constructing Rationalized Agency in Swedish Health Care

In this article we analyse an institutional transformation of Swedish health care that is underway. We combine the recent work from the ‘Governmentality’-tradition with contributions by John Meyer and associates. The latter is used to explain how these changes are rendered as necessary and natural. The main part of our analysis concerns how the institutional construction of rationalized agency is instrumented. To accomplish that, Dean’s (1999) categories technologies of agency and technologies of performance are used to conceptualize some of the means and principles mobilized in the ongoing institutional transformation of Swedish health care. Firstly, we display the emergence of a complex landscape of new actors, arenas and new practices that regulate and coordinate medical practice. Secondly, various attempts to imbue agency into the patients are analysed as an example of a technology of agency put to use. The conclusions present a more comprehensive picture of governing through new forms of agency. Technologies of agency are closely intertwined with appeals to common goods, the formation of new arenas and forms of expertise.

Forms of Intervention in Public Sector Organizations: Generic Traits in Public Sector Reforms

The present paper argues that recent research on public sector reforms offers few contributions to the body of knowledge on this topic because it adds little to the conclusions drawn during the first generation of research in this area. Although these later studies have often been context-specific and have explored the details of the process of change in some depth, it is rather difficult to compare their results or to make reasoned judgements of the comprehensiveness and centrality of the analysed change. Although most public sector reforms that affect hospitals, schools or social services are initiated and designed by national governments, individual case studies of local administrations often fail to capture the generic traits of nationwide reforms. However, public sector change cannot be approached as if it comprises collections of nominally independent local events. The present paper argues for two new approaches to the study of public sector change: (i) the systematic categorization of the different forms of governmental intervention under study and (ii) analysis of the ways in which these forms of intervention are linked and interact. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper suggests a generic classification of these forms of intervention that can be used in empirical research on comprehensive public sector change. Consequently, five interventions in public sector organizations are suggested, namely political intervention, intervention by laws and regulations, intervention by audit and inspection, intervention by management and intervention by rationalizing professional practice. The model is particularly well suited to the longitudinal analysis of complex public sector reforms. This approach provides a conceptual tool to distinguish between interventions based on different forms of knowledge and to investigate how they are linked to each other vertically and horizontally. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model by analysing two empirical examples of reforms in which a variety of interventions were imposed at the local level, through legislation as well as a spectrum of voluntary measures proposed by government agencies, by national associations for local and regional councils and by other national or regional actors.

Work, control and computation: Rethinking the legacy of neo-institutionalism

This chapter claims technology to be a principal mode of regulation in formal organizations alongside social structure and culture. Such a claim breaks with the conventional neo-institutional outlook that considers technology outside the object of institutional analysis of organizations. The distinctive regulative logic of computational technology is manifested in the increasing entanglement of domain-specific practices and their underlying cognitive and normative order with the decontextualized principles and methods that have traditionally been deployed in the management and control of work operations. Such entanglement and the effects it generates reflect the reshuffling of the regulative reach of technology, social structure and culture under the pressures exercised by the dynamics of current technological change and the impressive involvement of computational systems and artefacts in human affairs.

Agency and Institutions in Organization Studies

Agency and institutions are essential concepts within institutional theory. In this Perspectives issue, we draw on a select group of Organization Studies articles to provide an overview of the topic of agency and institutions. We first consider different ways of defining agency and institutions and examine their implications for institutional theory. We then analyse the relationship of actors and institutions through four lenses – the wilful actor, collective intentionality, patchwork institutions and modular individuals. Our analysis leads us to dissociate agency from individuals and view it as a capacity or quality that stems from resources, rights and obligations tied to the roles and social positions actors occupy. Roles and social positions are institutionally engineered. It is social actors qua occupants of roles and positions (not individuals) that enter the social ‘stage’ and exercise agency.

Performative policy: the case of Swedish healthcare reforms

ABSTRACT In this article we analyze public sector change as a profoundly constructed phenomenon – as performative reforms. Public sector reforms, of which policy processes are an integral part, are constituted and realized through long chains of interventions. Communicative–discursive interventions posit and constitute problems as real and important, while technocratic interventions, such as plans, analyses, and schemes construct new imagined worlds for possible and attractive instrumental solutions. Our empirical results display circular movements of three modes of change, making up a continuous policy cycle in the transformation of Swedish health, reiterated on different levels of the system, in different scales, and with different actors involved. The continuity of the reforms is to a large extent the result of a successful institutionalization of the policy cycle and its content. It is stabilized as a set of discourse and social technologies, distributed throughout the entire healthcare system and almost impossible to question.