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How do top bureaucrats define, in their own words, their professional identity and the norms they work by? Do they define them in line with a Weberian ideal type of the bureaucrat and bureaucratic norms? Or rather by a modernised entrepreneurial ideal type, often associated with New Public Management reforms? Further, what can such self-presentations tell us about professional norms operating in top bureaucrats’ daily work, and about institutional or wider societal logics guiding the non-elected, administrative side of contemporary government? The top officials, the senior civil servants in central ministries, who take part in policy-making and serve the political leadership, have a specific role distinct from that of the politicians and are guided by professional norms. Scholars focusing on this level of top bureaucrats have described their professional norms as being about serving the elected politicians loyally, but also contributing technical and thematic expertise independent of political considerations and ensuring that policy is developed according to legal standards. This chapter investigates how top bureaucrats themselves define those norms and that role – is it in line with an ideal close to Weberian ideal type characteristics, or not?

How can we explain the development – or equally the non-development – of professional ethics norms in a particular case? And how can we enhance compliance with existing professional ethical norms? In this chapter, I develop a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that call for the construction, reform or continuance of a professional ethos. These demands may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective clients and the general public collectively as interested third parties. The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: these are the felt-motivations of individual professionals at the coalface of action that drive them to recognize, acknowledge and act upon a professional norm. This material includes traditions and stories, the conscious application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of cultivating attractive role-identities and so on. As well as considering such ethical-materiel, I canvas the institutional and cultural supports that facilitate the production of these motives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way “hybrid” clinical managers in Kenyan public hospitals interpret and enact hybrid clinical managerial roles in complex healthcare settings affected by professional, managerial and practical norms.

The authors conducted a case study of two Kenyan district hospitals, involving repeated interviews with eight mid-level clinical managers complemented by interviews with 51 frontline workers and 6 senior managers, and 480 h of ethnographic field observations. The authors analysed and theorised data by combining inductive and deductive approaches in an iterative cycle.

Kenyan hybrid clinical managers were unprepared for managerial roles and mostly reluctant to do them. Therefore, hybrids’ understandings and enactment of their roles was determined by strong professional norms, official hospital management norms (perceived to be dysfunctional and unsupportive) and local practical norms developed in response to this context. To navigate the tensions between managerial and clinical roles in the absence of management skills and effective structures, hybrids drew meaning from clinical roles, navigating tensions using prevailing routines and unofficial practical norms.

Understanding hybrids’ interpretation and enactment of their roles is shaped by context and social norms and this is vital in determining the future development of health system’s leadership and governance. Thus, healthcare reforms or efforts aimed towards increasing compliance of public servants have little influence on behaviour of key actors because they fail to address or acknowledge the norms affecting behaviours in practice. The authors suggest that a key skill for clinical managers in managers in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) is learning how to read, navigate and when opportune use local practical norms to improve service delivery when possible and to help them operate in these new roles.

The authors believe that this paper is the first to empirically examine and discuss hybrid clinical healthcare in the LMICs context. The authors make a novel theoretical contribution by describing the important role of practical norms in LMIC healthcare contexts, alongside managerial and professional norms, and ways in which these provide hybrids with considerable agency which has not been previously discussed in the relevant literature.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the professional norms surrounding school development, with a special emphasis on school principals’ pedagogical leadership.

A norm perspective is used to identify possible links between legal norms, professional norms, and actions. The findings are based on answers given by 974 school principals in a web-based questionnaire. The design of the study and the findings are structured around three questions used to identify professional norms: what tasks principals prioritize as pedagogical leaders, where the external expectations on principals are derived from, and with whom school principals communicate regarding issues related to their pedagogical leadership.

The most evident professional norms identified in this study are that principals should: be present and close to the teaching and learning processes; involve teachers in quality development; enhance the development of formative assessments; engage in teacher development; develop the internal organization of the school to promote learning.

The norm perspective and the findings of this study could be used by principals, principal trainers, and researchers to reflect on pedagogical leadership in different contexts. A challenge for principals is to become aware of the professional norms that guide them, and to close the gap between their “desirable” norms and their actions. Action alternatives and professional norms become visible through discussions emanating from questions about what leaders do, how they do so and why they do what they do, which is a way to strengthen both the profession and the individual principals.

The research sought to expand the conceptual understanding of the antecedents of decision-making under ethical conditions. This study aims to better understand the relationships among need for cognition (NFC), the individual ethical positions of ethical idealism and ethical relativism, organizational and professional socialization, work-related norms and ethical perceptions.

The study compared the impact of environmental influences (i.e. socialization and work-related norm) and individual temporally stable characteristics (i.e. NFC and ethical position) on ethical perceptions. The research surveyed marketers and tested a hypothesized model using structural equation modeling.

NFC influences marketers’ individual ethical position, their professional socialization and their work norms. The work norms of marketers are influenced by individual ethical position and organizational socialization, but not by professional socialization. Professional socialization is influenced by ethical idealism and not ethical relativism.

A judgmental sampling technique was used and the findings cannot be generalized to other populations.

This research provides managers with alternative tools to encourage compliance with professional and corporate guidelines. If managers are seeking an enduring positive influence on work norms, they should be as concerned about the thinking of their employees and their employees’ ethical positions as they are with the vocational rules their subordinates adopt.

Society will benefit from better understanding the different ways in which the ethical perceptions of individual employees are influenced and the various ways in which managers can contribute to ethically responsible corporations.

Although NFC has been examined in other vocational and decision-making contexts, its influence on individual ethical position, vocational socialization and work-related norms has not been empirically examined in ethical contexts for business decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a rational perspective can be used to interpret cooperation problems in a health care organisation. This perspective is proposed as a complementary perspective to the cultural perspective that dominates as an explanation of cooperation problems. The focus of the research is multiprofessional teamwork in contemporary Swedish health care.

Four cases studies, in which the cooperation in daily work is described, are used to test the two perspectives. The cases concern the cooperative methods health care professionals use when work conditions depend upon an internal norm of mutual cooperation. Although the research is not designed to evaluate the two perspectives, it permits the rational explanations of cooperation problems to be compared with possibly cultural explanations.

The investigation concludes that health care cooperation problems may be primarily explained by the rational perspective, and only secondarily by the cultural perspective. The actors can be seen as underinstitutionalised in the sense they have not yet developed the intra‐organisational norms of cooperation needed for the provision of customised health care.

The paper provides a complementary explanatory framework of cooperation problems based on actors' perceptions of their self‐interests as producers. The examples of uncooperative behaviour reflect two forms of the free rider problem that Ostrom describes as a Common Pool Resource Problem. Management has to prove that cooperation is beneficial to the team members and has to promote a cooperative team spirit by instilling a common understanding of the concept of cooperation.

Training implies certain dealings in which one has to make a choice among various options. Choosing to solve a certain problem implies formulating a value judgement about the available alternatives. Such choices are generally based on ethical decisions. Hardly any ethical professional code for industrial trainers has been explicitly formulated until now. Investigates the issue of professional code and standards in this profession compared to other professions. At the same time describes a working method that benefits the process of realization necessary in dealing with the ethical issue in training.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an analytical approach that allows capturing a variety of outcomes of health care reforms. Specifically, by means of employing neo-institutional perspective, it is suggested that scholars need to take a step back and analyze the interrelation between regulatory, organizational and professional norms (dimensions). This approach improves our understanding of the complex outcomes of health care reforms. To illustrate this point, the case of coordination reform in Norway is discussed. This reform has been one of the most complex health care reforms with ambitious goals of achieving perfectly integrated care between hospitals and municipalities. The analysis through the three sets of institutional norms (dimensions) provides more comprehensive understanding of the various outcomes of the reform. The conclusion is that in order to understand the vast complexity of the outcomes of different health care reforms, we need to carefully study the institutional characteristics of rules, clinical codes of conduct, organizational characteristics as well as interplay between them. Analysis based on the three dimensions, shows that the neo-institutional approach, is of highest relevance to understand the outcomes of the complex health reforms.

Discussion in this paper is inspired by author’s PhD dissertation that comprised a study of juridification, understood as legal regulation, in treatment practice in the field of specialized health services. Three dimensions described in this paper are derived from the analysis of two types of empirical material: legal regulations and administrative guidelines in the area of patients’ rights interviews with psychiatrists and psychologists in the region of Western Norway about how they practice the regulations. The aim of this empirical study was to explore the implications the new regulations have had for clinical practice after the patients’ rights regulations became binding for clinical reasoning in Norway. This paper presents a viewpoint that applies the three dimensions derived from the empirical analysis to the discussion about the outcomes of one of the most complex Norwegian health reforms, i.e. coordination re-form. It is argued that the observations can be relevant for the analysis of the implication of health reforms in general.

The observations presented in the discussion of the possible implications of regulations of coordination reform indicate the complexity and sometimes contradictory outcomes of health regulations. There is a complex interplay between the different kinds of regulatory tools, which might have different implications at different levels. The same regulations can both strengthen and weaken established institutional order. Implications of such processes need to be empirically explored and neo-institutional approach still is of highest relevance in helping scholars understand the complex outcomes of health regulations.

Outcomes of regulations will depend on the balance between regulations and other institutional dimensions. The significant aspect of it is that this balance between the dimensions is not a zero sum equation, which means that all dimensions can be strengthened or weakened simultaneously.

The institutional dimensions can be in different balance relation with each other. The point of departure in this paper is that the legal regulations have been strengthened, i.e. expanded with regard to the coordination in health services. This development has been called juridification. The outcomes of it will depend on the balance between regulations and other institutional dimensions at work. The significant aspect of it is that this balance is not a zero sum equation, which means that all dimensions can be strengthened or weakened simultaneously.

This paper aims to center on the value of cultivating norms for market orientation (MO) in professional service firms (PSFs). Based on social capital theory, three variables for norm-based behavioral activities of MO were suggested, i.e. leadership support (LS), relationship learning in teams (RLT) and collective engagement (CE). Moreover, three variables were suggested as performance outcomes of norm-based behavioral activities of MO, i.e. employee commitment (EC), service quality provision (SQP) and two dimensions of a firm’s innovative capability (exploratory [EXPLOR] and exploitative innovation [EXPLOIT]).

Using a survey, a conceptual model was developed and empirically tested. All participants were employed in consultancy firms representing the population of PSFs.

The findings reveal that RLT, LS and employee CE are particularly suitable in forming norm-based behavioral activities of MO for PSFs. Moreover, the findings reveal that the two dimensions of a firm’s innovative capability (EXPLOR and EXPLOIT) provide strong performance outcomes for norm-based behavioral activities of MO. Moreover, the results also reveal that norm-based behavioral activities of MO for PSFs influenced both EC and SQP.

Using social capital theory, the study contributes to identifying both forming variables and performance outcomes centered on norm-based behavioral activities of MO for PSFs.