Local government projectification in practice – a multiple institutional logic perspective

ABSTRACT

During the last couple of decades, we have witnessed a proliferation of the project as an organizational solution in sectors as diverse as IT, housing, social services, education and culture. Despite a growing interest in the phenomenon, we know surprisingly little of how processes of public sector projectification unfold in practice, especially at local government level. This article uses an institutional logic perspective to illustrate and argue that public sector projectification can be understood and conceptualized as the enactment of multiple, co-existing institutional logics, but where one particular logic is of growing importance – the project logic. It is argued that even though the project form is often perceived as more flexible than that of the bureaucracy, the practical outcome seldom represents a radical break with traditional, bureaucratic management models. Rather, it appears to aid a rediscovery and reuse of central bureaucratic practices and procedures such as reporting, documentation and standardization.

KEYWORDS:

• Projectification
• institutional logics
• local government practices
• Bureaucratization
• ethnography

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express his sincere appreciation to Patrik Hall, Björn Badersten, Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren, Josef Chaib and two anonymous reviewers whose guidance and support greatly enhanced the quality of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Swedish Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Mats Fred

Mats Fred is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University, Sweden. His interests include the role of change agents and experimental techniques and tools of governance in local government. Recently he co-edited The Projectification of the Public Sector (Routledge, 2019) and published his dissertation ‘Projectification, the Trojan horse of local government’ (Department of Political Science, Lund, 2018).