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This article explores how the Danish public sector, over time, has followed different temporal strategies in order to extend the present and handle the system's increasing complexity, thereby counteracting a tendency towards entropy. It proposes that historical changes in the public sector's understandings of the concepts of “time” and “change” can be seen as the answer to the sector's enduring problem of ever-increasing complexity.

The authors conduct second-order observations of how the Danish public sector, in the period from 1900 until 2020, observes “time” and “change”. More specifically, they first observe how issues over time are temporalized in different forms, before employing the guiding distinction, operation/temporalization, to analyse the differences between temporalities.

The authors show that, today, the Danish public sector deals with the problems of complexity and entropy through, what is called, potentialization. Potentialization entails operations that aim to increase potentialities, rather than realize possibilities within a given potentiality. It works by extending the present, drawing on a particular temporality which is split into a present present and a future future.

The paper offers managers insights into the implications of their own observations of time and change, including how they might draw on different temporal semantics, through which managerial situations emerge differently. The paper also reveals that issues of transformation are not always about transformation, rather they concern the question of how to handle an increasing internal complexity.

The article shows that potentialization and its temporal semantic of “transformation” also comes with a price – namely that it dissolves the certainties of structures, which results in conflicting expectations.

The paper draws on systems theory, including its notions of time and entropy, to analyse the evolution of public administration and management. It thereby produces a diagnosis of the present which offers insights into contemporary conditions for public management.

The purpose of this paper is to argue and explore how local meaning-making processes of leaders also occur in embodied and affective registers. The paper aims to introduce the theoretical concept of affect to studies of local public leadership.

The paper reports from an ethnographic study of local leaders managing educational institutions in Denmark. The paper takes a constructivist or interpretive approach where it is acknowledged that data is not just out-there ready to be collected and reported but is constructed and interpreted in particular manners as part of the complex encounter between researcher and field.

The paper zooms in one particular instance where a leader breaks down in tears and where the tears seem to evoke a particular affective atmosphere. Thus, the paper shows how, just below the elite narrative of a need for stronger, individual and more evidence-based management, we find a myriad of meaning-making processes that transgress distinctions between the corporeal, affective and discursive.

As an ethnography conducted in a local setting, the paper avoids broad generalisations. The findings reflect the theoretical ambition of discussing the role of embodiment and affect in local leadership as much as the studied setting.

The study testify to how policy implementation can take many unexpected turns as local leaders interpret and make sense of policy ambitions in many different ways. Moreover, it testifies to how leaders are informed by embodied experiences and affective atmospheres in their sense-making processes.

The paper is one of the first attempts in public leadership to discuss the role of embodiment and affect in local public leadership.