Kvalitetsidén möter praktiken institutionalisering, meningsskapande och organisationskultur

Sammanfattning: The Idea of Quality Encounters an Organizational Practice

Institutionalization, Sensemaking and Organizational Culture



In the new millennium the ideas of New Public Management (NPM) have become more and more popular within the public sector and its health care. NPM is a management philosophy that, among other things, aims at making public organizations more business like. The study explores the encounter between the organizational practice and an NPM idea, the idea of quality, at Landstinget in Värmland (LiV). More precisely the study aims at contributing to the discourse on effects of institutionalization as well as to knowledge on the process of local institutionalization. Another purpose of the study is to contribute to quality development in organizations.

In order to do this, a project of quality (LiV 2002) at LiV is followed in time and space. In the empirical section three actor groups are identified, the new management, the old officials and the health care personnel. Between the old officials and the new management, and between the health care personnel and the new management conflicts burst out. The reason for these conflicts is, among other things, the actor groups' diverging cultural conceptions.

In the conclusion the idea of quality is, to a certain extent, found to be institutionalized in the formal structure of LiV. But the greater part of the actors' action and thought schemes are unaffected. However, the actors at LiV are not fully unaffected by the idea of quality. It is argued that the cultural conceptions of the old officials and the health care personnel are reproduced during the work on quality. In the discussion concerning contributions, a model for studying local institutionalization from the perspective of sensemaking is put forward. It is argued that the model enables students of local institutionalization to focus on the cognitive micro processes of institutionalization. In the discussion on quality development, the focus is on difficulties and obstacles with quality development. These are found to be cultural conceptions, preservative sensemaking, processes of translation and that most public organizations are arena organizations.