Not So Logical, After All – Public Managers’ Understandings of Media

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how public organizations, through their senior managers, perceive media-related activities and to what extent these perceptions support the existence of a ‘media logic.’ We interviewed 64 managers from 40 Swedish government agencies and compared their perceptions related to media with their perceptions related to the corporate logic, which has become vital in public sector contexts. The findings reveal that media and media-oriented activities are understood as contextual, contingent, and driven by individual events. In contrast to the understandings of management and strategy (i.e. corporate logic), which was much more coherent, universal, and aligned to sectoral conditions. Accordingly, media are generally more open for interpretations, local adaptations, and contextualization, making it difficult to provide clear-cut answers to what media means for public organizations. Our study suggests that public managers understand media in a manner that challenges the media logic rationale. We also challenge an institutional logic argument that institutional structures surrounding public organizations are, in general, to be seen as open for strategic responses. Our results point in another direction. The way managers understand different institutional structures, such as those associated with media, are, to a much greater extent, characterized by uncertainty linked to a lack of necessary knowledge about what constitutes the underlying qualities of the structures at hand; and by ambiguity about what meanings to mobilize and follow when institutional structures are to be introduced into specific organizational contexts.