Search results

In this chapter the authors focus on the role of power associated with microfoundations of organizational hybridity. They develop a framework that illuminates how key sources of power based on Buchanan and Badham (2008) and French and Raven (1959) manifest at the level of everyday work practices. Using this framework, they draw on existing studies concerning hybridity in professional organizations to illustrate how different forms of power come into play when actors guided by different logics engage in day-to-day professional work. Overall, the authors suggest that more attention to how micro-level actors use different forms of power to support, hamper, or alter different mechanisms to manage tensions among competing logics in everyday work is critical to improving our understanding about the microfoundations of institutionalism.

This chapter identifies assumptions, conceptual issues and challenges in the literature on hybrid organizations that draws on the institutional logics perspective. The authors build on the existing literature reviews as well as on an analysis of the 10 most cited and 10 most recently published articles at the intersection of hybrid organizations and institutional logics. The authors further draw from the literature on theory construction and theory development and growth to strengthen our analysis of this body of work and reflect upon future theoretical developments. From this analysis, the authors highlight four challenges to current research on organizational hybridity with an institutional logics lens and develop four suggestions to inspire future research. In doing so, they aim at seeding a more nuanced use of the institutional logics perspective and thereby foster the development of innovative and cumulative theory and empirical research on organizational hybridity.

Public sector reforms of recent decades in Europe have promoted managerialism and aimed at introducing private sector thinking and practices. However, with regard to public sector executives’ self-understanding, managerial role identities have not replaced bureaucratic ones; rather, components from both paradigms were combined. In this chapter, we introduce a bi-dimensional identity approach (attitudes and practices) that allows for different combinations and forms of hybridity. Empirically, we explore the role identities of public sector executives across Europe, building on survey data from over 7,000 top public officials in 19 countries (COCOPS survey). We identify country-level profiles, as well as patterns across countries, and find that administrative traditions can account for these profiles and patterns only to a limited extent. Rather, they have to be complemented by factors such as stability of the institutional environment (indicating lower shares of hybrid combinations) or extent of reform pressures (indicating higher shares of hybrid combinations).

This chapter takes a new approach to emotions through the lens of a relational identity among hybrid professionals, using those in healthcare as particularly relevant examples. Sharpening the focus on underpinning emotional dynamics may further explain how professional managers can be effective in hybrid roles. The chapter seeks to build on the internal emotional states of these professional managers by understanding how outward emotional displays might influence their subordinates. The understanding of how emotional states/displays in manager–employee relationships influence target behaviors may help multiprofessional organizations generate better-informed leadership practice in relation to desired organizational outcomes, e.g. more efficient and effective health services.

This work aims at investigating how different governments, and political contexts, perform public service organisations as hybrid organisations in the case of health social assistance care services. Run using qualitative methods (interviews and direct observation), it presents a descriptive comparative study upon five local PSOs, from five European countries, engaged in delivering services for people with autism. Analysing their developmental paths in the light of neo-institutional theories, the study points out that the trigger for the development of hybrid organisations lies in the users and governments have the crucial role of being the enabler of the process, within an evolving complex relationship between public sector and third sector, as well as society at large.

Teaching executive courses always raises the challenge of how to deal with the tension between theory and practice. The present chapter analyses the use of experiments in practice as a pedagogical approach to deal with this tension in Master’s programmes.

The empirical data comprise eight qualitative interviews with former students, exam papers and participant observations during the course ‘Experimental Management Practice’ over a period of five years.

The course requires the participants to experiment with their (managerial) practice and make these experiments the learning material and stepping stone for formulating problems in new ways. We argue that it is fruitful to make a distinction between practical problems and knowledge problems, and that playful shifts back and forth between the two forms of problems can provide learning. We also argue that it is important to observe the distinction between the role of the manager and the role of the student in order to meet ethical challenges, inevitably raised by experimenting with practice. Finally we argue that the experimental teaching practice can be conceptualised as a monstrous pedagogy, as the pedagogy creates a liminal zone with hybrid characteristics.

The chapter provides new conceptualizations of the tensions between theory and practice based on our experiences from one degree programme. It would have been interesting to study other executive programmes and which pedagogy they use fort dealing with this tension.

Many Master’s programmes draw empirical data from the students’ own practice into the teaching. We argue that using experiments is highly useful to identify some of the general challenges inherent in analyses of one’s own practice. It does not solve the tension between theory and practice but creates new challenges, potentialities, dilemmas and insights.

We suggest using ‘monstrosity’ as an umbrella term for ‘hybrid’ and ‘liminality’ of the complex relations that are at play in further education of practitioners. We compare the idea of the monstrous to the notion of educating ‘reflected practitioners’, and we argue that in a situation where the public manager is expected to define his/her own role, we might be better off educating a ‘monstrous practitioner’ instead of a ‘reflecting’ one.

We bring together the institutional theory literature on institutional logics and the information systems (IS) literature that conceptualizes a relational view of affordances to explore the digital changes unfolding in the delivery of professional services. Through a qualitative inductive study of the development of an app led by a clinician manager in an Australian hospital, we investigate how multiple institutional logics shape the design of affordances when an organization develops new digital technologies for frontline professional work. Our findings show how a billing function was designed into the app by the development team over four episodes to afford potential physician users with billing usability, billing acceptability, billing authority and billing discretion. These affordances emerged as different elements of professional, state, managerial and market logics became activated, interpreted, evaluated, negotiated and designed into the digital technology through the team’s interactions with the clinician manager, a hybrid professional, during the app development process. Our findings contribute new insight to the affordance-based logics perspective by deepening understanding of the process through which multiple institutional logics play out in the design of affordances of digital technology. We also highlight the role of hybrid professionals in this digital transformation of frontline professional work.

The emerging roles of management accountants as either hybrid accountants or business partners are a cause for much debate in the literature. Of the two characteristics related to these roles, namely information provider and interpreter, and decision-maker, the latter remains under-researched. The present study adds to the decision-maker debate by examining business decision-making involvement. Survey responses from a diverse sample of mostly Institute of Management Accountants (USA) and Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK) members were obtained and analysed to examine their current business decision-making involvement, including an investigation guided by role theory into possible contextual factors associated with different levels of decision-making involvement. The business decision-making involvement of management accountants varies significantly, and is less pervasive than widely believed. A significant proportion (53%) of management accountants in traditional management accounting positions report no, or limited, business decision-making involvement. Management accountants employed in smaller firms, and middle-aged professionals, are more likely to be involved in making business decisions. The inverted u-shaped association between age and decision-making involvement identified in this study, requires further investigation. The large cross-sectional analysis of the present study extends prior research which was mostly narrowly focussed due to its case study nature. The varying levels of decision-making involvement, and contextual variables associated with higher level involvement, shed some light on the intricacies of the role of management accountants. Professional associations and educators should note that the roles of today’s management accountants vary greatly between information provider and decision-maker.

In this study, we are addressing changes in managerial logics after the introduction of New Public Management (NPM)-reforms in two public sectors in Norway, namely the hospital and the university sectors. These sectors were previously dominated by professional and political logic in management, and the focus is on professionals in managerial positions. We are asking: How do professionals in managerial positions across universities and hospitals mediate between previous and newly introduced logics in management after NPM-reforms? We have chosen to compare changes in management across the hospital and the university sectors. Both sectors are largely publicly owned and dominated by professions, but their mission differs. The empirical material comprises interviews with formal leaders from dissimilar professional backgrounds, at different levels in the organisations in two cases. The findings show that management influenced by the market logic has been introduced, but in a hybrid version. The professional logic has however not been left behind, but expanded and supplied by a neo-bureaucratic logic. Leadership is functioning as a ‘catalyst’ to handle the different logics. The originality of this paper is a comparison of management in health care and higher education related to a model of hybrid management.