Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration

Prioritising Integration of Refugees in Municipal Planning at a Local Political Level

2022-12-19T10:04:44+01:00

The recent increase in refugees in Europe highlights the need to advance ways to implement integration policies, develop practice, and improve integration services and programmes.The primary concern of this article is to examine municipalities that have used municipal planning as a strategic tool to improve integration practices. The article is grounded in qualitative research findings from a case study of two Norwegian municipalities.

The key findings indicate that strengthening the administrative and political foundations for integration and involving more partners in the field of integration, appear to be the most evident motives. Using municipal planning as a strategic tool can be beneficial for municipalities with a lack of intersectoral collaboration, difficulties providing and coordinating services, and problems sustaining the engagement of municipal employees in the work of integration. In the two studied municipalities, planning processes was seen as a way of addressing these issues.

Reform in Translation: The Swedish Transport Administration’s Quest for a New Mission Statement

2022-12-19T10:09:19+01:00

The long-term outcomes of reform processes in the public sector remain understudied in the literature. This study investigates the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) employees’ and managers’ translation and internalization of their new role as societal developers. Since the STA’s founding in 2010 and until 2018, the STA head office neither guided nor centrally determined how to define and understand the STA’s role as a societal developer. We examine this internalization process through the lens of Czarniawska’s translation model of the distribution of ideas as a collective creation through local translation and adaptation. The study shows that the ongoing friction that occurs when the concept and role of a societal developer are discussed and disseminated within an organization is influenced by prevailing identities and local action nets. It also shows that the translation of this new role eventually failed, due to either it being submerged within already-existing concepts or it having a perceived lack of relevance. We conducted this mixed-method study over six years (2016–2021) using documentary analysis, workshop participation, interviews and a survey.

A Work Environment Blind Spot – Exploring School Principals’ Organisational and Social Work Environments

2022-12-19T10:13:08+01:00

This article examines principals’ social work environment in the context of a series of school reforms inspired by new public management. With the point of departure in Job Demands and Resources, we put forward the following overall research question: which job demands and job resources are related to principals’ job satisfaction? The article has a mixed methods approach, combining material from questionnaires (466 participants) and interviews (15 participants). The results of the questionnaire indicate that job resources such as role clarity, influence, meaningfulness, and social community with senior managers were related to job satisfaction, while lacking job resources (influence, social community with senior managers) and experiencing role conflicts were associated with a higher intention to leave the profession. The interviews provide a more in-depth understanding of the shift of institutional logics within the school sector, enforcing boundaries between principals’ professional and managerial roles in accordance with New Public Managerial Ideas. The separation between profession and management contributes to principals’ organisational and social work environments being in a blind spot. This is not only a problem for the principals, but also a risk factor for the organisations themselves, as stress and ill-health among leaders tend to affect the entire organisation.

Old Wine in a New Bottle? – Interpreting Gender Mainstreaming in a Municipal Reorganisation

2022-12-19T10:16:47+01:00

Gender mainstreaming (GM) has been on the agenda of organisations at various levels in Sweden and worldwide since the 1990s. Research has shown that GM is difficult to apply and has yet to be clearly defined, and additionally that organisations are uncertain about how to implement it. Research also suggests that the dominance of the new public management (NPM) approach within organisations has made GM work more challenging. In this article, we examine GM in a medium-sized Swedish municipality that is reorganising itself to become gender mainstreamed while introducing trust-based governance (TBG). This municipality provides a unique opportunity to study how GM is constructed in a municipality at the intersection of NPM and TBG. Applying a critical perspective, this article analyses documents from reorganisation based on Bacchi’s (2009) policy analysis. The results demonstrate that GM is mainly translated into TBG-inspired practices and that efficiency becomes an overarching concept that entangles GM, TBG and NPM. GM becomes part of cultural change together with TBG, while NPM maintains its dominance in the structural change of the organisation.

Public Sector Projectification – A Systematic Review of the Literature

2022-12-19T10:21:41+01:00

“Projectification” is an emerging subdomain of project management research which argues that proliferation of projects is one of the most important current trends in the public sector. As an emerging sub-field within projectification research, “public sector projectification” has been given increasing attention in the past few years. This article presents a structured literature review (SLR) on “public sector projectification”, with the aim of systematising the existing empirical knowledge guided by the research question: “What are the empirical implications of public sector projectification at the personal, organisational and societal levels in journal articles?” The SLR search detects 53 articles published between 2009 and 2021. Articles were detected by a literature search in three selected scholarly research databases and by reviewing cited references in the articles detected. By analysing researched empirical implications from the projectification literature at the three levels of personal, organisational, and societal, the SLR demonstrates that public sector projectification is a multilevel phenomenon with contradictory implications and interesting dynamics between the levels, which should gain increased attention in both research and practice to release the potential for organising projects in the public sector context.