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1 – 10 of 210Susan Newberry and Kerry Jacobs
New Zealand is widely recognised as extreme in its New Public Financial Management reforms. Scrutiny of the reformed financial management system reveals its consistency with a…
Abstract
New Zealand is widely recognised as extreme in its New Public Financial Management reforms. Scrutiny of the reformed financial management system reveals its consistency with a controversial political agenda: trade liberalisation of even core social services such as social welfare, health and education. Further, the detailed requirements are systematically biased towards withdrawing from government services (by running them down) and/or privatising them (by artificially inflating reported costs, thus projecting an appearance of inefficiency). The legislation underpinning the New Zealand model was shepherded through parliament by a Minister of Finance who publicly opposed exposing social services to market forces. Drawing on archival records, this article provides a historical account of how this legislation came into being. The legislation handed key levers of power to extend the reforms to the Treasury. Particular attention is paid to the friction within the government of the time over extending the reforms to social policy, and the role of the Treasury. Possibly, some ministers who drove the reforms through did not appreciate their nature. Alternatively, the handover of the levers of power could be perceived as an attempt to avoid blame.
Gina Dokko, Amit Nigam and Daisy Chung
The emergence of an evidence-based medicine logic represents a major change in the large and complex field of American healthcare. In this analytical case study, the authors show…
Abstract
The emergence of an evidence-based medicine logic represents a major change in the large and complex field of American healthcare. In this analytical case study, the authors show that the intellectual school of evidence-based medicine became an important meso-structure that facilitated the growth of the new logic in American healthcare. The new intellectual school was a community of scholars who generated shared rules and resources through intergenerational mentoring. The school engaged in advocacy to advance new intellectual paradigms for conceptualizing healthcare quality that, when connected with material practices in the field of American healthcare, came to form a new institutional logic.
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Juries are a decision making peer group composed of citizens who did not volunteer for the task, who do not know one another, and who are not connected to the people and events in…
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Juries are a decision making peer group composed of citizens who did not volunteer for the task, who do not know one another, and who are not connected to the people and events in the trial on which they will render a verdict. This chapter illuminates the communication events during deliberations, from selecting a foreperson, deciding when and how to vote, participation and turn-taking, the emergence of conflict, and rule-breaking. Deadlock juries, storytelling jurors, and juror misconduct are described during the group's task. Sources for scholars to gain access to jury data, partner with organizations in the judicial system, and available recent recordings of jury deliberations are shared. Knowledge gaps are pointed out in understanding how group verdicts emerge from the unregulated talk of jurors, as well as new challenges for the judicial system as the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic suddenly rendered jury service an unhealthy task for citizens.
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Thomas Gegenhuber, Danielle Logue, C.R. (Bob) Hinings and Michael Barrett
Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital…
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Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.
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Jennifer Dusdal, Mike Zapp, Marcelo Marques and Justin J.W. Powell
Informed by multiple disciplines, theories, and methods, higher education scholars have developed a robust and diverse literature in many countries. Yet, some important…
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Informed by multiple disciplines, theories, and methods, higher education scholars have developed a robust and diverse literature in many countries. Yet, some important (organizational) sociological perspectives, both more established and more recent, are insufficiently linked. In particular, we identify two theoretical strands – institutional and relational – that, when joined, help to explain contemporary developments in global higher education and yield new organizational insights. We review relevant literature from each perspective, both in their general formulations and with specific reference to contemporary higher education research. Within the broad institutional strand, we highlight strategic action fields, organizational actorhood, and associational memberships. Within the relational strand, we focus on ties and relationships that are especially crucial as science has entered an age of (inter)national research collaboration. Across these theories, we discuss linkages between concepts, objects, and levels of analysis. We explore the methodological approach of social network analysis as it offers great potential to connect these strands and, thus, to advance contemporary higher education research in a collaborative era.
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Rómulo Pinheiro, Lars Geschwind, Francisco O. Ramirez and Karsten Vrangbæk
Following the spirit of an earlier volume in the series focusing on ‘Comparative Approaches to Organizational Research’, the mandate of the current volume is to provide a…
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Following the spirit of an earlier volume in the series focusing on ‘Comparative Approaches to Organizational Research’, the mandate of the current volume is to provide a comparative account of dynamics across two organizational fields – health care and higher education – and, subsequently, two specific types of organizational forms – hospitals and universities. In so doing, we take a broader perspective encompassing various conceptual and theoretical points of departure emanating from, mostly, the institutional literature in the social sciences (and its various perspectives), but also from public policy and administration literatures – of relevance to scholars and the communities of practice working within either field. In this introductory paper to the volume, we provide a brief overview of developments across the two organizational fields and illuminate on the most important scholarly traditions underpinning the study of both system dynamics as a whole as well as universities and hospitals as organizations and institutions. We conclude by reflecting on the implication of the volume’s key findings in regards to comparative research within organizational studies.
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