Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen

Public Market - Political Firms

The main argument in this paper is that private companies become an integral part of the political system when public services are contracted out. Private companies begin to compete for influence on political goals to strengthen their positions for future tenders. Firms that are subcontractors to the public sector find that everyday financial decisions may have an impact on the political process. It becomes necessary for a private firm in the public market to internalize the logic of politics. The system theory developed by Niklas Luhmann is the theoretical point of departure, while the empirical study examines the Danish firm Scan Care and its attempt to construct a market for services for elderly people in the first half of the 1990s. The author of this article believes that when public services are contracted out to the private sector, the size of both sectors changes, as does the quality of the relationship between public and private and the semantic meaning of both terms. Contracting out not only leads to a larger market, but also to more politics. Politics explode out of the framework of the public sector into the private sector and become a basic condition for the involvement of firms in public markets.

Conceptual History and the Diagnostics of the Present

Abstract This article explores Niklas Luhmanns semantic analytical strategy. With Luhmann we get a sociologically informed conceptual history in which Kosellecks guiding distinction between conceptual history and social history is replaced with a distinction between semantic and social structure, where the latter should be interpreted as the form of communicative differentiation and structural coupling within society. Here the guiding idea is that the constitution of social systems and social forms is reflected in semantic development. I would like to present Luhmanns concepts of semantics, but in a way that might improve its empirical sensitivity and thereby make it more adequate to the observation of contemporary semantic changes.

Playful hyper responsibility: toward a dislocation of parents’ responsibility?

Over the past 10–15 years, state-funded schools have begun to require parents to assume an undefined and infinite personal responsibility. In this article, we investigate how schools organize responsibility games to respond to this challenge and how these games affect the concept of responsibility. We point to a dislocation in the way parents are assigned responsibility, because the definition of responsibility is not only a question of formulating rules or providing advice. We argue that what emerges is a kind of playful hyper responsibility that identifies responsibility as the participation in a process of public exploration by parents of the definition of their specific responsibilities. This has several consequences, one of which is that it becomes difficult to have a political discussion about what can reasonably be expected of parents.

THE SELF-INFANTILISED ADULT AND THE MANAGEMENT OF PERSONALITY

The new practices of human resource management can be seen as an expression of management communication, which has become increasingly pedagogical. This article is based on Luhmann systems theory regarding second-order observation. The article tries to observe how management communications observe the self-observations of employees, and claims that these observations take place within the code of the pedagogic. A number of effects are discussed: how the employee becomes a formator of him/herself as the medium child, how the employee is expected to observe him/herself with a corrective pedagogical gaze, and finally how this installs a kind of a self-screening of the employee.The new practices of human resource management can be seen as an expression of management communication, which has become increasingly pedagogical. This article is based on Luhmann systems theory regarding second-order observation. The article tries to observe how management communications observe the self-observations of employees, and claims that these observations take place within the code of the pedagogic. A number of effects are discussed: how the employee becomes a formator of him/herself as the medium child, how the employee is expected to observe him/herself with a corrective pedagogical gaze, and finally how this installs a kind of a self-screening of the employee.

Playful organisations: Undecidability as a scarce resource

This article explores how organisational play becomes a managerial tool to increase and benefit from undecidability. The article draws on Niklas Luhmanns concept of decision and on Gregory Batesons theory of play to create a conceptual framework for analysing the relation between decision and undecidability. With an empirical point of departure in Danish public school policy and two concrete examples of games utilised in school development, the article analyses how play is a way for organisations to simultaneously decide and also avoid making a decision, thus keeping flexibility and possibilities intact. In its final sections, the article discusses what happens to conditions of decision-making when organisations do not just see undecidability as a given condition, but as a limited resource indispensable for change and renewal. The article advances discussions of organisational play by exploring the consequences play has for the very conditions of organising and for key concepts in organisation theory.

Playful membership: embracing an unknown future

This article studies the implications of current attempts by organizations to adapt to a world of constant change by introducing the notion of playful organizational membership. To this end we conduct a brief semantic history of organizational play and argue that when organizations play, employees are expected to engage in playful exploration of alternative selves. Drawing on Niklas Luhmanns theory of time and decision-making and Gregory Batesons theory of play, the article analyses three empirical examples of how games play with conceptions of time. We explore how games represent an organizational desire to reach out – not just to the future – but to futures beyond the future presently imaginable. The article concludes that playful membership is membership through which employees are expected to develop a surplus of potential identities and continuously cross boundaries between real and virtual social worlds.

To Promise a Promise: When Contractors Desire a Life-long Partnership

The idea of partnerships has united the right and left of the political spectrum, the public sector with voluntary organizations, voluntary organizations with private companies, and private companies with the public sector. In general, partnership is construed in opposition to contracts. Contracts are often criticized for being short-sighted, inflexible and control-oriented, making them inimical to fostering trust in society. As the multinational service firm ISS put it, ‘Partnerships are based on mutual trust and shared responsibility rather than contract and control as in traditional outsourcing’ (Sondergard 2003: 407). Partnership is articulated as everything that contracts are not. ISS and Horsholm Hospital even compare partnerships to true love: Often a picture is worth a thousand words, and even though the comparison only goes so far, the difference between outsourcing and partnership is comparable to the difference between paying for sex on one hand and love on the other hand. Paying for sex is a ‘commodity’ where the interest of the buyer and the supplier are entirely different and where one supplier can be exchanged for another without difficulty. Love on the other hand refers to a relationship in which two people enrich each other in shared development. And as in love, a partnership requires openness and trust in order to succeed. (Horsholm Hospital 2002)

Introduction: The necessity of a new understanding of responsibility for modern society

The aim of this publication is to promote the interdisciplinary discussion of conditions, mechanisms and challenges of the attribution of responsibility under the condition of trust in systems, instead of trust in individual people . Traditionally, the concept of responsibility is understood in an individualized and frequently moral sense . In contrast to that, our starting hypothesis is that modern society is characterized by (potentially) critical constellations, in which the attribution of responsibility to individual people or organizations is not undisputedly possible . This holds for phenomena from the realm of technology, but is also true regarding social developments such as the latest financial crisis . This publication brings the perspectives of Politicaland Management-Studies together with the perspective of Scienceand TechnologyStudies as well as sociological, judicial and pedagogic viewpoints to scrutinize precarious attribution of responsibility as a phenomenon of the modern, functionally differentiated society: What new mechanisms and ways of attribution of responsibility evolve when a default in knowledge, systems or things cannot unequivocally be attributed to the mistake of an individual person? What significance do people have, if they are no longer the undisputed addresses of responsibility? And how does politics deal with the challenge to be of being held increasingly responsible for failed expectations?

Citizens’ contracts as a tricky steering medium

In this chapter I seek to analyse how the form of contract is reshaped to work as a public steering medium in relation to citizens. In private law a contract is defined as a voluntary agreement binding on individual freedom. Freedom and personal responsibility are presumed in private contracting. However, today’s public sector is making a misreading of private contracting in the logic of public steering, turning the causality upside down. Public contracting with individual citizens is seen as a technology for the making of individual freedom and responsibility, turning the single individual citizen into a partner of the state.

The Semantic Analytical Strategy and Diagnostics of Present

My own work taking departure in systems theory has to do with contemporary conditions public management and its changes within the last 70 years. I am interesting in a topic likes ‘citizen contracts’ because they express a new management ambition regarding citizenship and because this concept put classical distinctions of the legal state at stake such as administration/citizen, administrative act/contract and public/private. I am interested in a topic like ‘internal contract’ because they reentry contract-relation into the organization and changes the rule of the game of political decisions making. And I am interested in public organized health games between parents within the context of public schools because they invite to a strange scene of communication where the participants never knows whether expectations are formed in the code of power, education or play. So basically I am interested in all the surprising folding of the forms of functional differentiation forming the possibilities and impossibilities of public management. Rather than studying the transformation from stratification to functional differentiation, I am interested in the present transformation within functional differentiation putting the premises of functional differentiation and formal organizing at stake.