Ideas on Organizing Municipalities

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the question of organization has been a matter of great interest in many Swedish municipalities, and remains so today. What are the ideas behind the way municipalities organize themselves and how are the ideas related to the municipality context? This is the focus of this article. The discussion is based on a broad study of organizing activities in four municipalities in Sweden.

The ideas of organizing identified in the study are analysed in two institutional dimensions related to contextual circumstances. The first covers the way the ideas are influenced by two ways of thinking, termed respectively political and administrative logic. The second dimension covers the way the ideas are affected by local and national institutional thinking. We show how these dimensions influence organizing.

Key words:

• Institution
• institutionalizing
• municipality
• organization
• organizing
• public sector

Notes

¹ See, for example, Knorr Cetina (1994).

² The approach can, using the terminology in Christensen et al. (2005), be characterized as both a culture perspective and a myth perspective, depending on whether the emphasis is on institutionalizing processes as influenced respectively by internal or external circumstances. Both these perspectives are used in the approach in this article.

³ Administration can be regarded in different ways. Hood and Jackson (1991: 12–14) use the terms Doctrine, Justification and Philosophy when they discuss administration. By Doctrine, they mean ‘specific ideas about what shall be done in administration’. Justification stands for ‘the reasons which are given for following a particular doctrine’. Philosophy denotes ‘a constellation of doctrines which is relatively coherent in terms of the justification for them’. New public management is an example on one Philosophy. In this article, the term Administrative Logic is used as a collective name for a system of rules contrasting to another system of rules named as Political Logic. Administrative Logic can be discussed in terms of different Philosophies. This is not done in this article.

⁴ Hansen and Ejersbo (2002) discuss this kind of interaction in a similar way and in terms of the relationship between politicians and administrators. They regard this relationship as a logic of disharmony. The logical disharmony is based on two different logics of action. The first is termed political actions, which are based on constituency cases and can therefore be characterized as having an inductive logic of action. The second is termed administrative actions, which are based on general statements of laws, rules, objectives and values, and is therefore characterized as a deductive logic of action.

⁵ I use a roman numbering system for ideas about organizing processes in order to separate them from ideas about organization structures.

⁶ This way of using institutional theory was inspired mostly from Scott (2001) and Peters (2004).