Reshaping public accountability : hospital reforms in Germany, Norway and Denmark

The article contributes to the literature on multi-level welfare governance and public accountability in the context of recent European hospital reforms. Focusing on the changing dynamics between regional and central governance of hospitals in Germany, Norway and Denmark, we raise concerns about the reshaping of traditional public accountability mechanisms. We argue that, triggered by growing financial pressures, corporatization and professionalization have increasingly removed decision-making power from regional political bodies in hospital funding and planning. National governments have tightened their control over the overall trajectory of their hospital systems, but have also shifted significant responsibility downwards to the hospital level. This has reshaped public accountability relationships towards more managerial or professional types embedded within multi-level forms of governance.Points for practitionersOur study may be taken to suggest that if reforms are responses to policy pressures, the accompanying changes in accountability relationships and arrangements in turn contribute to altering the pressures and constraints that form the context for administrative, managerial and professional work. As reforms in Norwegian, Danish and German healthcare contribute to corporatization, centralization and economization, there is reason to expect that what officials are held accountable for, and how, is also likely to change and to accentuate the span between policy aims and actual managerial and professional performance

Nordic responses to Covid-19: governance and policy measures in the early phases of the pandemic

This paper explores and compares health system responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, in the context of existing governance features. Content compiled in the Covid-19 Health System Response Monitor combined with other publicly available country information serve as the foundation for this analysis. The analysis mainly covers early response until August 2020, but includes some key policy and epidemiological developments up until December 2020. Our findings suggest that despite the many similarities in adopted policy measures, the five countries display differences in implementation as well as outcomes. Declaration of state of emergency has differed in the Nordic region, whereas the emphasis on specialist advisory agencies in the decision-making process is a common feature. There may be differences in how respective populations complied with the recommended measures, and we suggest that other structural and circumstantial factors may have an important role in variations in outcomes across the Nordic countries. The high incidence rates among migrant populations and temporary migrant workers, as well as differences in working conditions are important factors to explore further. An important question for future research is how the COVID-19 epidemic will influence legislation and key principles of governance in the Nordic countries

Bargaining regimes, variable pay and financial participation: some survey evidence on pay determination

Contains fulltext : 110365.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)17 p

‘Good leaders do the dirty work’ implicit leadership theory at the multicultural workplace. Kap. 6

Today, workplaces are increasingly culturally diverse, and managers and employees interact across various societal cultures. Facilitating communication and cooperation among individuals to accomplish shared goals is central to leadership, and multicultural workplaces represent new challenges and opportunities in this regard. This chapter proposes values work as a strategy, inquiring into the implicit ideas of good and bad leadership at the multicultural workplace with loosely held cultural categories. The aim of the chapter is to examine the factors that shape managers’ and employees’ implicit ideas of leadership and to analyse how leadership is negotiated in everyday interaction across cultures. Three nursing homes in Oslo, Norway, are the empirical context of the case study