Danish Public Sector Research Articles

Translating trust as a magic concept in public sector reforms: A comparative study of the Danish and Swedish trust reform

In response to growing criticism of new public management reforms, the Nordic countries have introduced so-called trust reforms aimed at transforming public sector management and leadership. There is, however, scarce knowledge about the role of organizational concepts in national trust reform and how they are translated, not least in a comparative perspective. This study offers an in-depth analysis of how robustly “trust” as a concept has been translated in Danish and Swedish public sector reforms. Drawing on the literature on organizational translation, we use the translational diamond as a theoretical framework for a comparative analysis based primarily on document studies, triangulated with supplementary survey data and interviews. Findings indicate that the Swedish reform has both a stronger strategic and local anchoring as well as a more elaborate use of reflective and experimental reform activities. However, the study also points to other factors of importance to robust translations, such as long-term commitment and political support.

The clinical profile of individuals with symptoms of knee osteoarthritis referred to secondary care in Denmark: Across-sectional study of 282 people.

The clinical profile of individuals with symptoms of knee osteoarthritis referred to secondary care in Denmark: Across-sectional study of 282 people.

Exploring alignment of assumptions in plural leadership: A case study of managers’ implicit leadership theories in the danish public sector

Several researchers have observed that growing attention has been given to the concept of plural leadership in the past couple of decades. However, the role of the manager is largely overlooked in the plural leadership literature. In this study, I draw on the concept of implicit leadership theories to explore how managers’ assumptions about leadership might influence organisations’ ability to realise plural leadership. Based on participant observation and interview data, I identify three basic managerial assumptions about leadership that align poorly with the principles of plural leadership: (1) management positions entail ultimate accountability, (2) disagreement is definitively bad, and (3) resistance is exclusively caused by faulty processes. I argue that these assumptions constitute an obstacle to the practical realisation of plural leadership and consequently that interventions targeting managers’ implicit leadership theories might be effective in developing plural leadership beyond rhetorical changes.

COVID-19 as crisis-induced innovation lab

Against a tragic background, this study shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed positive innovations in both welfare solutions as well as in public governance solutions of the Danish public sector. Drawing on qualitative as well as quantitative data, this article outlines the character and perceived effects of new welfare solutions among vulnerable citizens, as well as a number of preceding, organizational changes in the administrative machinery of the public sector. Based on this analysis, we generate and discuss a hypothesis about a possible relationship between the governance and welfare innovations that emerged during COVID-19.

Transformation and potentialization: how to extend the present and produce possibilities?

PurposeThis article explores how the Danish public sector, over time, has followed different temporal strategies in order to extend the present and handle the system's increasing complexity, thereby counteracting a tendency towards entropy. It proposes that historical changes in the public sector's understandings of the concepts of “time” and “change” can be seen as the answer to the sector's enduring problem of ever-increasing complexity.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conduct second-order observations of how the Danish public sector, in the period from 1900 until 2020, observes “time” and “change”. More specifically, they first observe how issues over time are temporalized in different forms, before employing the guiding distinction, operation/temporalization, to analyse the differences between temporalities.FindingsThe authors show that, today, the Danish public sector deals with the problems of complexity and entropy through, what is called, potentialization. Potentialization entails operations that aim to increase potentialities, rather than realize possibilities within a given potentiality. It works by extending the present, drawing on a particular temporality which is split into a present present and a future future.Practical implicationsThe paper offers managers insights into the implications of their own observations of time and change, including how they might draw on different temporal semantics, through which managerial situations emerge differently. The paper also reveals that issues of transformation are not always about transformation, rather they concern the question of how to handle an increasing internal complexity.Social implicationsThe article shows that potentialization and its temporal semantic of “transformation” also comes with a price – namely that it dissolves the certainties of structures, which results in conflicting expectations.Originality/valueThe paper draws on systems theory, including its notions of time and entropy, to analyse the evolution of public administration and management. It thereby produces a diagnosis of the present which offers insights into contemporary conditions for public management.

COVID-19-induced governance transformation: How external shocks may spur cross-organizational collaboration and trust-based management.

AbstractPersistent efforts to meet the demand for cross‐organizational collaboration and trust‐based management have been halted by a mixture of bureaucratic inertia and entrenched New Public Management thinking. This article explores whether the COVID‐crisis has broken the reform deadlock. Based on a handful of recent surveys and interviews conducted by Danish public sector organizations, we look at the crisis‐induced transformations in local public administration. The main finding is that the pandemic has forced administrative agencies to collaborate with each other to solve new and pressing problems in a turbulent environment. Similarly, it has urged public managers to trust the skills and motivation of their employees, who must solve administrative tasks in innovative ways and with limited managerial support, supervision and monitoring. While changes may amount to little more than a temporary departure from normalcy, lesson‐drawing, learning retention and proactive leadership may help to produce a sustainable transformation.

Chronic disorders, work-unit leadership quality and long-term sickness absence among 33 025 public hospital employees.

This study aimed to examine the association between work-unit level leadership quality and individual-level long-term sickness absence (LTSA) in the hospital sector and effect modification by chronic disorders. This longitudinal analysis included 33 025 Danish public hospital employees who were followed-up for one year after baseline in March 2014. Leadership quality was assessed by questionnaire with mean responses aggregated by work-unit and characterized in tertiles. LTSA during follow-up was determined from employer records. Chronic disorders at baseline was assessed from the Danish hospital and prescription registers. We performed multilevel logistic regression to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) adjusting for potential confounders. We evaluated interaction between chronic illness and low leadership quality on multiplicative and additive scales. We identified employees as healthy (60.8%) or with somatic (31.6%), mental (3.3%), or both somatic and mental (4.3%) disorders. During follow-up, 6% of employees registered a LTSA. Medium and high leadership quality were associated with lower risk of LTSA with OR of 0.84 (95% CI 0.76-0.94) and 0.73 (95% CI 0.65-0.82) respectively, compared to low leadership quality. Associations were similar for healthy employees and employees with only somatic disorders, whereas no association was observed for employees with mental disorders (in presence or absence of somatic disorders). No statistically significant (α=0.05) interactions between leadership quality and chronic disorders on LTSA were observed. The findings suggest that the quality of leadership in work units is associated with risk of long-term sick leave in the Danish public hospital sector and that strong leadership protects employees against LTSA.

Understandings of Social Innovation within the Danish Public Sector: A Literature Review

Social innovation is an emerging theme within innovation theory, and so is the concept of public service innovation networks for social innovation (PSINSIs). The purpose of this article is to explore how social innovation in Danish public services is conceptualised and enacted through the lenses of public service innovation networks for social innovation. To do this, a thorough integrative review of the literature dealing with the Danish context is conducted. The Danish context is interesting in order to investigate these network arrangements, firstly because they are not well understood in the context of the Nordic welfare states, which Denmark is part of, and then because municipalities and civil society have historically had a mutually dependent relationship in Denmark. The article highlights that social innovation is framed in several ways in the Danish public sector. In particular, the results show that the literature can be grouped according to four themes: (1) samskabelse (co-creation), (2) collaboration with civil society, (3) social entrepreneurs and social innovation and (4) public–private innovation partnerships. Moreover, the article presents and discusses a number of Danish empirical projects that may be understood through the lens of the PSINSI framework. Hence, the paper contributes with new theoretical perspectives, in addition to contributing to practice.

Speculative Data Work & Dashboards

This paper studies data work in an organizational context, and suggests speculative data work as a useful concept and the speculative dashboard as a design concept, to better understand and support cooperative work. Drawing on fieldwork in a Danish public sector organisation, the paper identifies and conceptualizes the speculative data work performed around processes of digitalization and the push to become data-driven. The speculative dashboard is proposed as a design concept and opportunity for design, using practices from speculative design and research to facilitate speculation about data?its sources, visualizations, practices and infrastructures. It does so by hacking the 'genre' of the business intelligence data dashboard, and using it as a framework for the juxtaposition of different kinds of data, facilitating and encouraging speculation on alternative visions for data types and use. The paper contributes an empirical study of organizational use of and attitudes towards data, informing a novel design method and concept for co-speculating on alternative visions of and for organizational data.

Public Value through Innovation: Danish Public Managers’ Views on Barriers and Boosters

ABSTRACT This paper adds to current conversations on public value and public sector innovation by offering a quantitative analysis of the multiple types of public value that Danish public sector managers perceive to have created by innovating. Previous studies have primarily investigated public innovation on a case-by-case basis – and few with a focus on the outcomes of innovation. Access to a unique dataset permits a comprehensive study across the entire Danish public sector, centered on public managers’ perceptions of value created by public innovation. Using logistic regression analysis, a number of variables are tested to explore which antecedents will affect managers’ reported value creation.

Helping or intervening? Modes of ordering in public sector digitalization

PurposeThis paper examines how digital reforms affect the relationship between frontline workers and citizens in Danish public sector institutions. Using ethnographic research in two branches of public administration, the study highlights how frontline workers act in accordance with seemingly contradictory modes of ordering. Their acts problematize linear conceptualizations of change that often prevail in digital reforms.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a comparative ethnographic study of frontline workers in the Danish tax and customs administration and municipal citizen service centers. The concept of modes of ordering is used to highlight new tensions that arise as frontline workers adapt to make digital reforms work.FindingsFrontline workers act according to two different modes of ordering based on the separation between helping citizens help themselves and helping citizens directly. National policies and strategies promote the underlying rationale of the first mode but, as this paper shows, this mode is sustained by a second mode, which involves the intervention of professionals when citizens cannot be helped to help themselves.Originality/valueThe paper, which contributes to our understanding of how digitalization is changing public administrations and the relationship between frontline workers and citizens, challenges applying a linear, technocratic focus in discourses on public sector digitalization and highlights the contradictory practices of frontline work. It demonstrates the necessity of going beyond policy narratives and calls for increased attention to how frontline workers adapt to make reforms work.

Lifestylisation of the social: The government of diabetes care in Denmark.

Since the 1970s, the public authorities of many OECD countries have emphasised the need for preventing lifestyle diseases and promoting the vigour of their populations. Based on the Foucauldian analytics of dispositive, we critically address some of the normative implications of the preventive interventions in the area of type 2 diabetes care. Through an analysis of public health documents from 1981 to 2016, it is shown that the government of lifestyle was extended and institutionalised by a reform of the Danish public sector in 2007. Following the reform, rationalities of public health policies sought to prevent unhealthy lifestyles not only through individual behaviour but also through the social surroundings of citizens. In contrast to the claim that we are seeing a retraction of state responsibility and interventions in the area of public health, it is suggested that we are witnessing an expansion in state ambitions expressed through a lifestyle dispositive. These ambitions are less about transferring the responsibility to the individual and more about governing and mobilising the social relations and environments of type 2 diabetes patients and citizens in general to make the everyday choice of a healthy lifestyle easier.

Towards a Legislative Reform in Denmark?

The digital transformation of the public sector in Denmark has been going on steadily for almost twenty years and has changed the Danish public authorities’ working processes, organization and interaction with citizens. In this article, it is briefly described how national administrative law developed as a response to comparable changes in the Danish public sector in the 1950s to the 1980s. It is assumed that this past development primarily was driven by the need to protect fundamental values embedded in the Danish legal culture. Further, it is examined whether there is any trace of a similar development related to the present digital transformation. Finally, as such a development in Danish case law can be observed, it is assessed whether a legislative reform within administrative law is likely to be initiated and adopted within the next decade.

Emotional demands and exhaustion: cross-sectional and longitudinal associations in a cohort of Danish public sector employees.

To examine cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between content-related emotional demands at work and exhaustion, and to investigate if these associations were modified by other psychosocial work characteristics. In 2007, 4489 Danish public service employees participated in the PRISME study by completing postal questionnaires, and 3224 participated in the follow-up in 2009. Content-related emotional demands were measured by a scale (scored 1 to 5) based on five work-content-related items, and exhaustion was measured with the general exhaustion scale from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) (scored 1 to 5). The cross-sectional and longitudinal associations with exhaustion were analysed in the same model and adjusted for effects of potential confounders. Effect modifications were examined separately for self-reported emotional enrichment, meaningful work, job control, social support at work and quantitative demands. Exhaustion increased with increasing emotional demands, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. However, although statistically significant, the effect was small. In the longitudinal analysis, a one unit increase in emotional demands was associated with a 0.03 unit (95% CI: 0.01-0.06) increase in exhaustion. We found statistically significant effect modification for three of six potentially modifying work characteristics. The effect of emotional demands on exhaustion was lower for participants with high levels of emotional enrichment (cross-sectionally and longitudinally), high levels of meaningful work (longitudinally), and higher for high levels of quantitative demands (cross-sectionally). Increasing content-related emotional demands were associated with increasing levels of exhaustion, cross-sectionally and longitudinally. This effect was reduced if the work was experienced as emotionally enriching and meaningful.

Rescuing Welfare Society: Political Strategies for Mobilizing Civil Society in Denmark, 2010–2018

The article analyzes how civil society is constructed in two Danish civil society strategies from 2010 to 2017, the governmental programmes of the governments in question and the role civil society plays in the proposed upcoming reform of the Danish public sector, the Cohesion Reform. The article approaches civil society from a Foucauldian perspective meaning that it on the one hand analyzes civil society as a transactional reality, something which does not exist as such, but must be continually produced as a given thing with certain values. On the other hand, it means analyzing civil society as a central part of a governmental rationality, or governmentality, which represents the natural movements of society and which government must respect and govern according to. This means that the natural, vital and originary processes of civil society becomes a measurement for good and right government in contradistinction to the artificial, cold and bureaucratic state and thereby posited as the rescuer of welfare society.

Sensemaking and Power

The modernization of governance and the marketization of the Danish public education sector since the 1980s, has resulted in changes both in the constitutive conditions and in the discursive understandings framing the purpose of the public education system for educational leaders, teachers, and social educators working in schools. We know less about how the neoliberal modernization processes affect the schools at a micro-processual sensemaking level and a relational power level. In this analytical perspective, there is a scientific need to understand how these organizing and sensemaking processes are conducted through the discursive construction of power relations in modernized, institutional settings, and how these processes affect the organizational understandings, professional identities and social relations of the members in a high-achieving Danish public school. I investigate leadership from a micro-analytical perspective, as inter-action processes centered around the creation of common understanding and the enactment of policy, and mobilize a theoretical understanding of leadership processes as social sensemaking constructions that are constituted, framed and transformed in a given context of discursive and institutional power. I argue that the members of the organization holding both formal and informal leadership positions construct under-standings through social power struggles in ambiguous and contradictory discursive orders. Further, these struggles create new power relations and democratic forms of leadership within a hidden power structure of a high-achieving Danish school owing to governance transitions in the Danish public education sector.

Interplay between efficiency and quality in contracting: a case of responses to policy changes in public hearing-aid service

ABSTRACTThis article provides a study of supply-side responses to contracting out hearing aid services and products in the Danish public sector. Drawing on the theory of social mechanisms, we show how service quality is reconfigured as a response to the contracting changes and argue that efficiency and quality concerns are always interrelated. We conclude that micro level action-formation components will likely transform the effects of the situational policy changes at the macro level. Therefore, simultaneous management of efficiency and quality is an essential and ongoing effort that requires responsiveness to the non-contractible dimensions of quality.

Token Status and Management Aspirations Among Male and Female Employees in Public Sector Workplaces

This study brings the literature on tokenism together with multiple theoretical lenses on the formation and social construction of men’s and women’s career aspirations. The study builds on comprehensive survey data from the Danish public sector. Results show that, after controlling for alternative explanations with respect to both personal life situation and differences between occupations, token status has a significantly negative effect on women’s management aspirations, while it has no effect on men’s aspirations to management. Furthermore, these findings are generalizable across occupational contexts. At the same time, however, analysis across occupations show that token women are mainly to be found in occupations where women have relatively high managerial aspirations. Token women are therefore characterized by aspirations to management positions, but their status as tokens minimizes these aspirations.

The gender wage gap and the moderating effect of education in public and private sector employment

In many countries, the rules and statutes governing public employment promote both transparency and accountability in employee hiring, promotion, and wage setting. These aspects of public employment might mitigate the pay inequalities women face in the public workplace relative to the private sector. At the same time, these formal aspects of public sector employment and payment systems might also limit the ability of women in the public sector to leverage human capital increases as a means of reducing pay inequalities. Utilizing 25 years of employee‐level data from Denmark, we find that women professionals in the Danish public sector face a smaller wage penalty than their private sector counterparts. However, our findings also suggest that public employment may place structural limits on their ability to leverage educational attainment to close the gap even further.

Explaining a Dark Side: Public Service Motivation, Presenteeism, and Absenteeism

Public service motivation (PSM) has many bright sides, but recent studies also find dark sides, connected to, for instance, higher stress and burnout. However, results on the PSM–absenteeism association are inconclusive. One reason could be that PSM increases presenteeism (going to work even when ill), which in turn increases absenteeism and counteracts—or even exceeds—PSM-based reductions of absenteeism. Based on a three-wave panel study of Danish public and private sector employees, we find a strong positive association between PSM and presenteeism and indications that the PSM–absenteeism link is mediated by presenteeism. The findings suggest that going to work even on days when employees feel ill is a potential dark side of PSM and that it may have long-term consequences for the extent to which employees are absent from their jobs due to sickness. This cautions managers not to expect that high PSM automatically guarantees high performance and low absence.