Bagga Bjerge and Toke Bjerregaard
In many public sector reform processes, employees’ roles as professional experts are shifting toward more entrepreneurial and market-oriented roles, a change that entails a shift…
Abstract
Purpose
In many public sector reform processes, employees’ roles as professional experts are shifting toward more entrepreneurial and market-oriented roles, a change that entails a shift in the demands made of these employees. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reflections, considerations, and experiences of such employees regarding the spaces of possibility open to them in which to act in accordance with this new role.
Design/methodology/approach
Two ethnographic studies were carried out in drug and alcohol treatment services and in city and business development in the Danish welfare system.
Findings
Although the areas of investigation are not related in their daily practices, the authors trace similar responses to the demands made of their respective employees as their role shifts from that of professional experts to include more entrepreneurial aspects. The authors observe that employees are often eager to align new demands and practices, and the authors identify various challenges in respect of the structural public set-up of these services, which often leaves the employees to operate in what could be described as a “twilight zone” between the public and the private.
Originality/value
While scholars often have accounted for situations where such pluralistic roles create conflict, the authors also answer calls to capture moments of synergy where tensions of role paradox are constructively exploited. In this process of ongoing production, images of hierarchy and bureaucracy, rather than merely casting shadows over more bottom-up process of entrepreneurship, are actively used, alongside images of entrepreneurship, in the mutual construction of different roles and the constantly shifting relationality between them, conflicting or synergetic. The definitions and interpretations of the role of the public sector employee are not entirely fixed, but rather subject to ongoing (re)construction in the daily workings of public organizations.
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Toke Bjerregaard, Mai S. Linneberg and Jakob Lauring
The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of how the transfer and adoption of headquarters (HQ)-mandated work practices are shaped by ongoing struggles among the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of how the transfer and adoption of headquarters (HQ)-mandated work practices are shaped by ongoing struggles among the multiple actors of a subsidiary. This paper suggests an alternative perspective for theorizing and researching the management practices and structures that emerge in the face of HQ demands for divergent practice change in subsidiaries, namely, a theory of practice approach.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reports the findings of an ethnographic field study in a UK subsidiary of a multinational corporation based in Denmark.
Findings
The study provides a relevant contribution by demonstrating how the degree of adoption of alternative, HQ-mandated work systems undergoes dramatic changes over time due to socially dynamic negotiations and struggles between interest groups in a subsidiary.
Research limitations/implications
A practice theoretical approach unveils the underlying social micro-dynamics that shape the degree to which employees in subsidiaries “internalize”, actively sustain or disrupt divergent practices representing a given contextual rationale.
Originality/value
The practice perspective provides a way for understanding how the practices and rationales that emerge locally in response to HQ-demands are under ongoing (re)reconstruction. It responds to calls for research on why and how contextual rationales, institutional or cultural features, actively are made salient, polarized or convergent, in conflictual practice transfer processes due to local contingencies.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the collaboration strategies employed by collaborating small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and university researchers for initiating…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the collaboration strategies employed by collaborating small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and university researchers for initiating and optimizing the process and outcome of R&D collaboration.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based upon a qualitative study of the total population of university departments and SMEs involved in collaborative research projects sponsored by a new governmental programme in Denmark, the aim of which was to build new R&D alliances between industry and universities.
Findings
The findings show how partners choose to pursue difference short‐ or long‐term strategies to optimize the process and outcome of university‐industry (UI) collaboration. Some collaborations were thus informed by a short‐term strategy aimed at achieving immediate R&D results. However, to a high extent, many SME partners relied upon a long‐term strategy aiming at developing UI relations beyond the immediate project and practical learning. A variety of shifting strategies shape researchers' decisions during UI collaborations, which thus convey different notions of success.
Research limitations/implications
The findings of the present research point to the importance of taking the diverse reasons and micro strategies informing collaborative efforts into account when studying UI collaborations.
Practical implications
Different strategies may prove successful in optimizing the outcome of UI collaborations depending upon, e.g. partners' previous collaborative experiences. Policies should incorporate some openness towards the differential premises and reasons for UI collaboration.
Originality/value
Relatively little research has addressed the development of UI relationships from the micro‐level perspective of the discretionary decisions and strategies of collaborating researchers.
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The purpose of this paper is to shed light on how actors within, on the surface, similar organizations cope and work with imposed institutional changes.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on how actors within, on the surface, similar organizations cope and work with imposed institutional changes.
Design methodology/approach
This research is based on an ethnographic field study addressing why, despite being exposed to the same institutional demands, organizational actors respond by developing diverging institutional orders of appropriate organizational conduct. This research examines how middle managers and frontline staff in two similar Danish social care organizations respond to demands to adopt a New Public Management (NPM)‐based logic of individualized service delivery.
Findings
The study shows how institutional diversity may underlie apparently similar organizational structures and responses. NPM‐style modernization efforts partly converged with diverse professional motives and rationales around, on the surface, similar organizational changes. The findings illustrate how differential institutional orders are maintained by middle managers and frontline staff despite exposure to the same demands.
Research limitations/implications
There are different limitations to this ethnographic field study due to the character of the methodology, the limited number of organizations, informants and time span covered. Attending to micro‐level processes within organizations provides a rich understanding of how particular forms of organization and action emerge in response to institutional demands. This calls for more ethnographic research on how actors within organizations cope and work institutional change.
Originality/value
Relatively little organizational research has addressed how individual actors at the lower levels of organizations cope and work with institutional changes using ethnographic methodology.
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Toke Bjerregaard, Jakob Lauring and Anders Klitmøller
Functionalist models of intercultural interaction have serious limitations relying on static and decontextualized culture views. This paper sets out to outline newer developments…
Abstract
Purpose
Functionalist models of intercultural interaction have serious limitations relying on static and decontextualized culture views. This paper sets out to outline newer developments in anthropological theory in order to provide inspirations to a more dynamic and contextual approach for understanding intercultural communication research in cross‐cultural management (CCM).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper analyzes the established approaches to the cultural underpinnings of intercultural communication in CCM and examines how newer developments in anthropology may contribute to this research.
Findings
The standard frameworks for classifying cultures in CCM are based on a view of culture as static, formal mental codes and values abstracted from the context of valuation. However, this view, underwriting the dominating research stream, has been abandoned in the discipline of anthropology from which it originated. This theory gap between intercultural communication research in CCM and anthropology tends to exclude from CCM an understanding of how the context of social, organizational and power relationships shapes the role of culture in communication.
Practical implications
The paper proposes to substitute the view of culture as comprising of abstract values and codes as determinants of communication with concepts of culture as dynamically enfolded in practice and socially situated in specific contexts, in order to give new directions to theories on intercultural communication in CCM.
Originality/value
Scant research has compared intercultural communication research in CCM with new anthropological developments. New insights from anthropology are analyzed in order to open up analytical space in CCM.
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In order to provide new and other directions to institutional studies in organization theory, Lawrence and Suddaby forward the notion of institutional work of actors aimed at…
Abstract
Purpose
In order to provide new and other directions to institutional studies in organization theory, Lawrence and Suddaby forward the notion of institutional work of actors aimed at maintaining, changing and disrupting institutions. The purpose of this paper is to further theory and method in studying the institutional work of people in organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
Methodological insights from the ways in which theories of human agency in institutional contexts have co‐evolved with field study methodologies are analyzed in related fields of research, particularly in sociology and anthropology.
Findings
The ways have been analyzed in which social theories of human agency in institutional contexts and field methodology have co‐evolved in an inter‐disciplinary perspective. The analysis shows how field methodologies may provide inspirations to theory and method in studying institutional work.
Research limitations/implications
The findings suggest that institutional organization research may prosper by grounding the study of institutional work on ethnographic methodologies.
Originality/value
This paper contributes methodological inspirations to studying organizational actors' work with accomplishing change and stability, which constitutes a comparatively underexplored line of inquiry in organizational institutionalism.