Managers negotiating identities: Hybridizing professionalism and mangerialism in faith-based health organizations and in religious organizations

Avhandling (ph.d.) - VID vitenskapelige høgskole, Oslo, 2019This thesis focuses on hybrid professional managers’ self-understanding in the context of their everyday work. In particular, I address the following question: In a context of institutional change, how do managers negotiate their professional and managerial identities? Situated within the domain of organization and management studies, this thesis adopts an institutional theory perspective. I study the meeting of professionalism and managerialism as intersecting institutional logics. Logics are “the rules of the game” that guide actions (Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). Inside organizations, individuals shape and modify the institutions of profession and management. I study such efforts as institutional work (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2009). By drawing on coexisting institutional logics and through empirical description, I aim to develop a theoretical framework that shows how identities are negotiated by managers. To achieve this goal, I investigate a faith-based hospital, and a diocese within the EvangelicalLutheran Church of Norway. Such organizations are considered understudied strongholds of traditions, permeated by ideology and safeguarded by professions (Tracey, Phillips, & Lounsbury, 2014). I use a qualitative research approach and an embedded, multiple case study (Stake, 2013) that provides rich and detailed knowledge of managers in their context. Paper I: Sirris, S.(2019) Coherent and contextual identities and roles? Hybrid professional managers prioritizing of coexisting institutional logics. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 35(4): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2019.101063 Paper II: Sirris, S.(2019). “The pastors’ dilemma” revisited. Religious leaders connecting the spiritual and organizational realms through conceptual work. Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion, 16(3), 290-313. DOI: 10.1080/14766086.2019.1574599 Paper III: Sirris, S. and Byrkjeflot, H. (2019). Realising calling through managers’ identity work. Comparing themes of calling in faith-based and religious organisations. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 32(2), 132.147. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1890-7008-2019-02-03publishedVersio

Managing diversity and inclusion in nursing homes: Practices and regulations

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.Changing demographics and a rising number of immigrants entering the labor market have posed new challenges to managers in work organizations. Within this context, Norway has been noted to have a highly regulated work sector that is considered beneficial for minorities and marginalized groups. Through a case study of three nursing homes in Norway, this paper analyzes how manag-ers engage with diversity-related regulations when addressing their everyday challenges, and how their enacted practices affect the inclusion of immigrants in the workplace. The study applies a practice-theoretical approach and contributes to diversity management research by identifying how managers’ differing enactments of inclusion-related practices are connected to competing institutional logics. The analysis shows how the co-existence of multiple institutional logics in this context represents an arena for political struggle.publishedVersio

Collaboration in Hybrid Spaces: The Case of Nordic Efforts to Counter Violent Extremism

In this article, we analyze policy regulating the multiagency organizational approaches used in Nordic countries to prevent violent extremism. From an institutional logic perspective and a conceptualization of multiagency work as conducted in hybrid spaces, we analyze and develop a new theoretical framework to explain how central policies inhabit distinctive logics that compete, mix, and co-exist in these spaces, and how they inscribe specific power relations embedded in dominant discourses

Being compassionate. Institutionalizing through values work in a faith-based organization

This study extends the emergent stream of values work by theorizing a process of value inquiry that links the facts of a situation with the ideals of institutional social engagement and the common good. The value inquiry is identified as an open-ended process of questioning, reframing, and reinterpreting the dominant value frames. Through investigating values work in a faith-based health care organization in Norway, this study finds that the questioning of dominant value frames opens the possibility of reconsidering what constitutes the beliefs of the organization and of finding a meaningful way to re-frame its value-creating activities. In questioning the value frames, the actors move beyond a linear view of institutional complexity to recognize how values and organizational agency are both maintained and revised in the face of conflicting demands. The social order that emerges is driven by the creative discernment of people who are empowered to act in accord with the demands and possibilities of the situation, rather than out of obedience and rule following. In this way, the process leads toward a deliberation of ethical standards and contributes to a richer moral discourse. This study finds the process of value inquiry to be evident throughout the organization’s history as changing circumstances have been balanced against compassionate organizational aims. This process has resulted in an emerging and inherent institutional logic of compassion composed of a multiplicity of “value spheres.” Judgment of the validity of these values is a “matter of faith,” by which individuals seek and claim to be instruments of practice. The process of value inquiry is explored as a shuttling between the telling of sacred stories and the doing of sacred practice. The values are found to reside partly in the narrative unconscious and partly in pre-reflective corporeal action. An understanding of the sacred stories and practices becomes a major driver in institutional maintenance, ethical agency, and the institutionalizing of compassion. Paper I: Espedal, G. (2019). Wide awake housekeepers on duty: The institutional logic of compassion in a faith-based organization. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 32(1), 22-39. DOI: 10.18261/issn.1890-7008-2019-01-02 Paper II: Espedal, G., & Carlsen, A. (2019). Don’t pass them by: Figuring the sacred in organizational values work. Journal of Business Ethics, DOI:10.1007/s10551-019-04266-w Paper III: Espedal, G., Carlsen, A., & Askeland, H. (2019). How do we reach out to those we are here for? Value inquiry in sustaining institutions. In preparation for submission.publishedVersio

How radical is radical innovation? A study of multi-level structure of public innovation process in Norway.

This thesis is about innovation in the public sector in Norway, using discourse analysis to analyze documents and texts from the Government (Ministry of Local Government and Development, KMD), and KS's program; Partnership for radical innovation, to get a better understanding of how radical innovation are understood and facilitated. In addition, I conducted interviews with people who work in different levels in the public sector administration (national, regional and municipal). Based on the understanding of major societal challenges related to social, environmental and economic issues, radical innovation is promoted as one of the answers to more effectively meet these grand challenges. The research questions are related to how radical innovation is understood and applied in the public discourse and are related to two dimensions; newness and governance patterns. Newness is analyzed in relation to two categories taken from theory, incremental and disruptive innovation. Governance patterns are analyzed according to categories derived from a mix of theory and empirical data. From theory I used four categories given as four governance models. From empirical data a category emerged, which was not so easily placed in the category of incremental or disruptive. They went beyond disruptive change in product or process. These findings formed the basis for an understanding of innovations fundamentally challenging governance systems and their economic, social and environmental dimensions. Theory from social innovation and innovation in the public sector was used to study the sampled data. The thesis does not conclude what radical innovation is, or a simple answer to how the term is understood in the public discourse in Norway. A consistent finding at all levels the study examined is a vague approach to how radical innovation differs from innovation in the public sector. It seems that the main approach is to understand radical innovations related to disruptive innovations of products, services and processes. But also to a degree in what ways radical innovation can challenge basic systems and governance systems and their economic, social and environmental dimensions. One relevant question when it comes to innovation I public sector is; can radical innovation be called radical if not simultaneously addressing system level, acknowledging and III confronting political and power issues across societies? The danger otherwise, is as Unger mention, that social innovation is absorbed into existing systems – tamed into irrelevance

Working Environment Activities in Hospitals: Expansion of Scope and Decentralization of Responsibility

This article analyzes how two development traits in the regulatory requirements for Working Environment (WE) activities – an expansion of scope and a decentralization of responsibility – are understood and handled over time by actors responsible for WE activities in Norwegian hospitals. The expanded scope of WE activities is studied based on the requirements outlined in The Working Environment Act, public health science theory, and the WE challenges in hospitals. The decentralized responsibility for WE activities is studied based on Internal Control (IC) reform and other hospital reforms inspired by New Public Management (NPM). The final section of the article discusses the effects of the two development traits, and how these enlarge the line manager’s area of responsibility. The article is based on a qualitative, longitudinal study conducted in three Norwegian hospitals in 1998-1999 and 2013

‘Cake is not an attack on democracy’: Moving beyond carceral Pride and building queer coalitions in post–22/7 Norway

The pieing of a far-right politician at the 2016 Oslo Pride parade was met with condemnation from the media and within Norway’s LGBT movement. The pie-thrower, a member of the European queer-anarchist band Cistem Failure, was charged with committing an “attack on democracy,” a part of the criminal code strengthened after the 22/7 terrorist attacks in 2011 and sentenced to imprisonment followed by deportation. This article reflects critically on the dominant narratives of this event as well as Pride politics more generally, and places them in context with Norway’s increasing mainstreaming of right-wing populism and liberal LGBT organizations’ dependence on state protection and inclusion policies. Drawing on Emma Russell’s critical historical and queer optic, Jin Haritaworn’s regenerative analytic, and Cistem Failure’s alter-narratives, I argue that Norway’s growing “security governance” promotes a divisive othering and obscures the violent exclusion of “undeserving” queers; this presents a deeply disturbing challenge to the democratic right to protest and public dissent. In turn, I advocate for the urgency of a transformative, coalitional politics of radical care - unafraid of confrontation and refusal, committed to the everyday acts of leaving nobody behind and to envisioning a world otherwise.submittedVersio

School closures in Norway and The Netherlands during the Covid-19 pandemic - A comparative case study on policy decision making during a transboundary crisis

Masteroppgave i administrasjon og organisasjonsvitenskapAORG350MASV-AOR

Institutional leadership—the historical case study of a religious organisation

In this chapter, I discuss institutional leadership vis-à-vis the value of poverty. To do so, I analyse how poverty has been conceptualised within a Catholic religious organisation, the Jesuits. The chapter shows that, in the Jesuit case, poverty is not strictly defined. Instead, poverty results from the constant dialogue between the individual Jesuit and their leader. This means that the understanding of what constitutes poverty is neither explicit nor implicit. The chapter contributes to our understanding of institutional leadership as the promotion and protection of values, as per Selznick’s classical definition. However, we discuss a less known part of Selznick’s work in which the ambiguous character of values is highlighted. In this sense, and after the Jesuit case, we advance the possibility that the promotion and protection of institutional values by institutional leaders does not necessarily imply the definition of what a value is. As values are not defined beforehand but the result of a constant dialogue between the leader and their followers, institutional leadership can be revisited and freed from the heroic view that has long characterised it