State-owned enterprises after the market turn: Hybridisation and the historical development of nested paradoxes in the case of Norway

Abstract

The article studies the recent history of state owned enterprises (SOEs) in Norway through the lens of paradox theory. A tension between business goals and political goals lie at the heart of SOEs, and I analyse processes of partial privatisations in the 1990s and early 2000s as attempts to overcome this original paradox. Through the public listing of major SOEs, the Norwegian state became the largest owner on the Oslo stock exchange and a new corporate governance setup for these entities arose. I propose to see this development as a case of historically developed nested paradoxes, and argue that a new paradox emerged in which the Norwegian state attempted to reach political goals through the ownership of SOEs by not having explicit political goals. I find two main equilibrating mechanisms for this paradox, and discuss some of the ways paradoxical tensions of SOEs still persist despite attempts to overcome them.