Business Process Re-Engineering and Balanced Scorecard in Swedish Public Sector Organizations: Solutions for Problems or Problems for Solutions?

Abstract

This article analyzes and discusses the adoption and implementation of Business Process Re‐Engineering (BPR) at a hospital and Balanced Scorecard (BSC) at a local government. At the hospital, BPR was adopted as a solution to problems, but became de-coupled from operations, and later used for legitimacy reasons. At the local government, without having identified clear problems, BSC was adopted as an attractive solution but became coupled, rather than de-coupled, to operations. Our study shows that de-coupling does not follow the path proposed by neo-institutional theory, and that legitimacy from popular management concepts can be obtained both by coupling and by de-coupling the concepts from operations.

Keywords:

• business process re-Engineering
• balanced scorecard
• management concepts
• legitimacy
• de-coupling

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A version of this article was presented at the 26^th International Labor Process Conference in March 2008. We are grateful to advice given at the conference. We would also like to thank Anna Berg Jansson for collecting parts of the data used in this article.

Notes

Both authors have contributed equally to the writing of this paper.