scholarly journals What Is a Good Workplace? Tracing the Logics of NPM among Managers and Professionals in Swedish Elderly Care

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Britt-Inger Keisu ◽  
Ann Öhman ◽  
Birgit Enberg
Keyword(s):  
Working Conditions ◽  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Elderly Care ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Occupational Therapists ◽  
Working Relationships ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
New Public

Neoliberal policies such as new public management (NPM) have been pivotal to the Swedish elderly care system for two decades. This article explores the discourses of NPM and work by focusing on how a good workplace is represented by professionals and managers in Swedish elderly care. Using qualitative interviews with 31 managers, nurses, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists at nine workplaces, we identified four competing meanings (‘storylines’) of how a good workplace is constructed among the interviewees within an ongoing struggle between two discourses. Three storylines, i.e., striving to achieve the mission, a desire to work in elderly care, and striving for good working relationships, are linked to the neoliberal discourse of organizational effectiveness. In contrast, the fourth storyline, support and better working conditions, is related to a welfare-state discourse of traditional labor relations with strong historical roots. Four subject positions available to the managers and professionals were identified: the bureaucrat, the passionate, the professional, and the critic. We conclude that NPM is translated on top of existing discourses, such as those of traditional labor relations, care ideals, and practices, that are already established in elderly care workplaces and that counteract the new policy.

"Jedes starre Konzept ist schlecht und passt net' in diese Welt"

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (148) ◽  
pp. 369-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer ◽  
Ariadne Sondermann ◽  
Olaf Behrend
Keyword(s):  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
Public Employment Service ◽  
New Public ◽  
Recent Reform ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
New Procedures

The recent reform of the Bundesagentur fijr Arbeit, Germany's Public Employment Service (PES), has introduced elements of New Public Management, including internal controlling and attempts at standardizing assessments ('profiling' of unemployed people) and procedures. Based on qualitative interviews with PES staff, we show that standardization and controlling are perceived as contradicting the 'case-oriented approach' used by PES staff in dealing with unemployed people. It is therefore not surprising that staff members use considerable discretion when (re-)assigning unemployed people to one of the categories pre-defined by PES headquarters. All in all, the new procedures lead to numerous contradictions, which often result in bewilderment and puzzlement on the part of the unemployed.

scholarly journals Metagoverning Collaborative Innovation in Governance Networks

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (7) ◽  
pp. 826-839 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Sørensen ◽  
Jacob Torfing
Keyword(s):  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Elderly Care ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Public ◽  
Collaborative Innovation ◽  
Governance Networks ◽  
Public And Private Sector

Western liberal governments increasingly seek to improve the performance of the public sector by spurring innovation. New Public Management reforms from the 1980s onward viewed strategic entrepreneurial leadership and public–private competition as key drivers of public innovation. By contrast, the current wave of New Public Governance reforms perceives collaboration between relevant and affected actors from the public and private sector as the primary vehicle of public innovation, and tends to see governance networks as potential arenas for collaborative innovation. The new focus on collaborative innovation in networks poses a fundamental challenge for public managers, elected politicians, and others aiming to metagovern governance networks. Hence, we claim that a specific metagovernance strategy is needed when the purpose of governance networks is to stimulate efficiency, effectiveness, and democratic legitimacy through innovation rather than incremental improvements. The article aims to sketch out the contours of such a strategy by comparing it with more traditional metagovernance strategies. The argument is illustrated by an empirical analysis of an example of collaborative innovation in Danish elderly care.

scholarly journals ‘It’s a Profession, it Isn’t a Job’: Police Officers’ Views on the Professionalisation of Policing in England

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Lumsden
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Top Down ◽  
New Public ◽  
Government Reforms ◽  
Evidence Based Policing

This article focuses on police officers’ views on the professionalisation of policing in England against a backdrop of government reforms to policing via establishment of the College of Policing, evidence-based policing, and a period of austerity. Police officers view professionalisation as linked to top-down government reforms, education and recruitment, building of an evidence-base, and ethics of policing (Peelian principles). These elements are further entangled with new public management principles, highlighting the ways in which professionalism can be used as a technology of control to discipline workers. There are tensions between the government’s top-down drive for police organisations to professionalise and officers’ bottom-up views on policing as an established profession. Data are presented from qualitative interviews with 15 police officers and staff in England.

scholarly journals Resistance-driven Innovation? Frontline Public Welfare Workers’ Coping with Top- down Implementation

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gry Høiland ◽  
Elisabeth Willumsen
Keyword(s):  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Frontline Employees ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
New Public ◽  
Resis Tance ◽  
Welfare Workers

Employee-based innovation researchers point to the important role of welfare workers in public service innovations. Bureaucratic and New Public Management inspired managerial agendas, still widely present in Nordic welfare organizations have been tied to an increase in feelings of inau- thenticity and use of coping strategies by welfare workers. At the same time, post-NPM principles of collaboration and service tailoring are more in line with professional values of welfare workers. Drawing on a critical realist informed case study comprising qualitative interviews and observations in the Norwegian public welfare and employment services, we describe types of revision and resis- tance practices used by frontline employees when faced with top-down implementation instructions, linking them to different types of innovations. The article adds to literatures on employee-based innovation by conceptualizing resistance practices as value-motivated resistance-driven innovation that may have a function of calibrating public value creation in welfare organizations submerged in bureaucratic and NPM-inspired managerial regimes

The Public Servant

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ehn
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
New Public ◽  
Formal Organizations ◽  
Statutory Regulation

This chapter discusses Swedish public servants and the question whether they are to be considered as traditional bureaucrats or as “managers,” modeled after the private sector. The chapter shows that nowadays Swedish public servants can hardly be characterized as old-fashioned bureaucrats, but neither as fully fledged managers. Instead, they are generally best described as “private servants.” The privatization of the public servant is partly expressed by an alignment between the public and the private sector regarding the statutory regulation of working conditions. Also, New-Public-Management-inspired reforms have created a situation where public servants have come to regard the agencies as formal organizations in their own right. They tend to see themselves as just another worker in any organization, whether it be public or private. There is a limited, and declining, understanding of the specific requirements that are entailed by the position of public servant.

scholarly journals Non-Governmental Childcare Centres in a Neoliberal Environment: the Case of Lithuania

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-86
Author(s):  
Ilona Tamutienė
Keyword(s):  
Social Services ◽  
Public Management ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Management Tools ◽  
New Public ◽  
The Government ◽  
Socially Excluded

Abstract The article examines how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working with children from poor and socially excluded families operate in the neoliberal environment. The case of non-governmental school-age childcare centres (SACCs) in Lithuania was analysed. SACCs provide social services to children from poor and socially excluded families. The study is based on 62 qualitative interviews with experts working in non-governmental SACCs. Results indicate that financial support from ministry and municipalities enables SACCs to survive. From the perspective of SACCs it has been observed that government uses new public management tools in a modern fashion to transfer the responsibility onto the shoulders of non-governmental SACCs, while the government reduces its contribution to symbolic financial support and the request for accountability. The current government–NGOs relationship, based on neoliberal ideology and new public managements tools, has negative consequences and does not ensure social services for socially excluded target groups, especially in a country with a sizable welfare gap.

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