Search results

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 investigate how fairness evaluations are constructed in a B2B context.

This paper conducts a field study of Air Greenland and its internal and external customers based on strong structuration theory (Stones, 2005). The authors employ context and conduct analysis to analyze how fairness evaluations emerge across four levels of structuration.

The paper finds that fairness evaluations emerge as a result of the interaction between external institutional pressures, agents' internal structures, and situated reflection and outcomes. The construction of fairness evaluations was embedded in contradictory institutional structures, where groups of actors constructed different evaluations of fair profits, procedures and prices. Actors furthermore worked on changing position-practice relations which shifted relations, external structures and affected outcomes and fairness evaluations.

This paper offers a conceptualization of embedded agency as emerging across the four levels of structuration. This contributes to debates in strong structuration theory through conceptualizing and analyzing how actors may be both be constrained and oriented by structures while reflexively adapting structures across the four levels of structuration. The paper extends extant pricing fairness research by illustrating how actors' construction of fairness flexibly develop fairness evaluations while responding to legitimacy and societal demands, including the needs of particular customer groups.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Danish higher education institutions (HEIs) navigate the demands and expectations of accreditation procedures, and how the limited freedom posed by accreditation schemes is used by HEIs by way of translation.

Through document studies of policy documents and the institutional self-assessment reports, the paper follows the concept of quality from the international level to the Danish national level, and onwards into the individual HEIs, where the authors examine how notions of quality are constructed through the translation of national regulation, guidelines and procedures of accreditation into the self-narratives of the self-assessment reports.

The authors find that the national guidelines for accreditation represents a complex translation of supranational guidelines by minimizing certain aspects and enhancing others. This national translation is then analyzed as the frame for the institutional translations where the analysis reveals how HEIs exercise a great deal of agency, within a quite narrow frame constituted by regulations and guidelines.

By using the Olivers (1991) typology of organizational responses, the authors discuss how the HEIs not only imitate and abide to institutionalized norms and concepts of quality but also reformulate, edit, omit and enhance certain elements of quality. The authors demonstrate that when accreditation meets the HEIs, it is clearly the national agendas that are most pervasive and offer the most relevant vocabulary for the HEIs.

This study focuses on ratcheting and budget behavior in nonprofit museums. Specifically, the authors examine how performance compared with the budget affects future revenue budgets, and how this differs from the extant literature focused on for-profit organizations. The study focuses specifically on the relationship between museums and their sources of public funding and how this affects how museums prepare budgets.

Based on four years of data covering 97 state-subsidized Danish museums, the authors analyze budget ratcheting using least absolute deviation (LAD) estimations in the form of median regressions.

The authors find that when actual revenue from admission charges is below the budget, the decrease in the following year's budget is greater than the increase in the following year's budget when actual revenue from admission charges is above the budget (i.e. the authors find asymmetrical ratcheting).

The findings are based on a specific setting (Danish museums), and the results may not be generalizable to other settings.

This study provides insights into the museum sector and other sectors with similar characteristics and contributes to understanding the differences between museums and for-profit organizations when it comes to budgeting. As private-sector management practices are gaining ground in the museum sector, it is important to learn more about budgeting-related issues in this sector.

The asymmetrical ratcheting the authors find is the opposite of ratcheting typically found in for-profit organizations. The authors attribute the results to the incentive conflict between museums and their public funding sources. The authors point to the museums' dependence on public funding as an explanation for the results and, thereby, extend the knowledge on ratcheting to organizations with different characteristics than traditional, for-profit organizations.

Efficient and effective knowledge transfer is important in complex building renovation projects. The addition of sustainability requirements in building renovation adds complexity. This paper aims to investigate the development of innovative public procurement schemes to support sustainable building renovation projects. These blueprints for procurement innovation can support similar efforts in other countries.

This study is based on a longitudinal case study using interviews with primary stakeholders and workshops with industry practitioners to supplement the analysis of public tender documents from the Danish public building clients.

The key tenants of the Danish model for strategic partnerships are a single strategic partner, systematic conflict resolution, framework agreements, risk management and joint educational programs. Three phases in the development of the procurement scheme are identified: experiment, definition and replication.

Strategic partnerships and other types of relational contract schemes are not very prevalent in most countries. How these contracts are developed and defined is not well understood. This paper shows how one such contracting scheme is developed, how it is defined and replicated.

High rates of suicide and self-harm are reported in prisons in Western countries, while fewer studies exist from a non-Western context. This study aims to identify rates of suicide, non-fatal suicide attempts and self-harm in Moroccan prisons and to better understand the context, methods, tools, predictors and profile of persons engaged in the acts.

The authors report findings from a mixed-methods study carried out before an intervention project. The study consists of a systematic literature review, an analysis of suicide case files, a quantitative survey on suicide attempts and self-harm, as well as interviews and focus group discussions. The authors calculate suicide, suicide attempt and self-harm rates and present descriptive data on the incidents. The authors use regression models to explore the association between the number of incidents per individual and selected predictors, adjusting for clustering by institution.

Over a four-year period, 29 detained persons in Morocco died by suicide (average annual suicide rate 8.7 per 100,000). Most were men under the age of 30. Hanging accounted for all but one case. In one year, 230 suicide attempts were reported. Over a three-months period, 110 self-harm cases were reported from 18 institutions, cutting being the most common method. Self-harm was significantly more prevalent among persons with a life sentence or repeated incarcerations.

To make the study manageable as part of an intervention project, the authors collected data on suicides and suicide attempts from all prisons, while data on self-harm were collected from fewer prisons and over a shorter time period. The authors did not collect comparable information from detained persons who did not die by suicide, attempt suicide or self-harm. This prevented comparative analyses. Further, it is possible that self-harm cases were not reported if they did not result in serious physical injury. Data were collected by prison staff; thus, the voice of incarcerated persons is absent.

This study provided a solid basis for designing an intervention project including the development of a national prison policy and guidelines on suicides, suicide attempts and self-harm and a country-wide training program for prison staff. It also led to a better surveillance system, allowing for trend analysis and better-informed policymaking. The qualitative results helped create an understanding of how staff may trivialize self-harm. This was integrated into the training package for staff, resulting in the creation of prison staff trainers who became the strongest advocates against the notion that self-harm was best ignored.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first published data on suicide and self-harm in Moroccan prisons. It underscores the necessity for the intervention project and gives valuable insights into suicide and self-harm in a non-Western prison context. Further research is needed to assess whether the findings are typical of the region.

This study aims to explore how network visualization provides opportunities for learners to explore data literacy concepts using locally and personally relevant data.

The researchers designed six locally relevant network visualization activities to support students’ data reasoning practices toward understanding aggregate patterns in data. Cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999) guides the analysis to identify how network visualization activities mediate students’ emerging understanding of aggregate data sets.

Pre/posttest findings indicate that this implementation positively impacted students’ understanding of network visualization concepts, as they were able to identify and interpret key relationships from novel networks. Interaction analysis (Jordan and Henderson, 1995) of video data revealed nuances of how activities mediated students’ improved ability to interpret network data. Some challenges noted in other studies, such as students’ tendency to focus on familiar concepts, are also noted as teachers supported conversations to help students move beyond them.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study the authors are aware of that supported elementary students in exploring data literacy through network visualization. The authors discuss how network visualizations and locally/personally meaningful data provide opportunities for learning data literacy concepts across the curriculum.

This article explores consumers' attitudes to the trend of gourmet burgers, notably the gourmet burgers' combination of highbrow food (gourmet) and lowbrow food (fast food). The authors use the case of the NOMA cheeseburger from the iconic New Nordic restaurant NOMA.

The data set consists of interviews (n = 20) with urban Danish consumers attending the NOMA burger pop-up.

The analysis highlights an acceptance among informants of “gourmetfied” burgers. This signals a change in the culinary status of burgers in Danish food culture. The authors also discovered some ambivalence in relation to the highbrow-lowbrow negotiations: while all informants celebrate the casualization of NOMA during the burger pop-up, half of the informants found the burger underwhelming: it did not live up to the edginess of the NOMA brand.

The authors believe this research can inform people working with culinary highbrow-lowbrow mix in their food designs, notably in relation to developing and matching the relation between symbolic and material aspects of the food design.

The authors argue that the concept of transgression can help us theorize how consumers accept, refuse, and negotiate boundaries in relation to gourmet burgers, and more generally between food consumption mixing highbrow and lowbrow elements. More particularly, the authors propose to distinguish between symbolic, social, and material transgressions. This perspective might also be interesting for practitioners in the field.

The COVID-19 lockdown severely impacted organizations in the cultural and tourist business as their products all of a sudden “disappeared”. This study aims to explore if and how the unexpected and disruptive nature of the pandemic accelerated the development of new communication strategies on their social media.

The study draws on data from 24 midsize cultural institutions and tourist attractions in Denmark over the first two months of the lockdown in 2020. Approximately 900 posts on Facebook were collected and analyzed through the netnographic method. The analysis followed a two-layered qualitative approach. First, open coding to identify typologies and enable a comparison with established strategies from the literature review. Then, an exploratory examination was conducted across the typologies.

Nine different content categories were identified in the data and subsequently assessed and discussed in relation to the literature on strategies and dialogic intentions. This resulted in the emergence of two new overarching strategies: hope and host.

While hope is particularly relevant in crisis situations, the utilization of employees in the host role presents an opportunity for further development and engagement. Further, the results call for future research that breaks with the traditional quest for ideal strategies for the benefit of exploring the notion of “strategic doers”.

The identification of the hope and host strategies, along with the analysis of content categories and their alignment with various strategic intentions, contributes to the existing knowledge in this field. Further, the classic perception of engagement as driven by explicit interaction and dialogue is also challenged.