Leo Normann Pedersen & Jeppe Agger Nielsen
Abstract
This article explores a new management form – cluster management – in Danish public-sector day care. Although cluster management has been widely adopted in Danish day care at the municipality level, it has attracted only sparse research attention. We use theoreticalinsights from Scandinavian institutionalism and alongitudinal case-based inquiry to investigate how cluster management has entered and penetrated the man-agement practices of day care in Denmark. We demonstrate how cluster management became widely adopted in the day care field, not only because of its intrinsic proper-ties, but also because of how it was legitimised as a »ready-to-use« management model. Furthermore, our account reveals how cluster management translated into considerably different local variants as it travelled into specific organisations. However, these processes have not occurred sequentially with cluster management first legiti-mised at the field level, then spread, and finally translated into action in the adopting organisations. Instead, we observed entangled field- and organisational-level processes.
Accordingly, we argue that cluster management institutionalisation is most readily understood by simultaneously investigating translation activities in specific organisa-tions, and the social construction work taking place in the broader organisational field.
Introduction
For decades, the Danish public sector has been the subject of considerations about how it can be renewed, and every Danish government since the 1980s has announced a modernisation programme (Ejersbo & Greve, 2008). These programmes have a num-ber of recurring themes. One of them is a greater focus on management. This applies to both the right and the duty to manage, as well as to the quality of management practice. This focus points to a professionalisation of management (Rennison, 2011), also within professions and sectors that previously were fairly resistant towards man-agement (e.g. eldercare, primary schools and day care).
The Danish day care system has witnessed substantial managerial changes in recent years. In general, the new management structures involve larger units than
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ous models and the separation of pedagogical and administrative management. The management role is now characterised as having a wider management span and more strategic tasks. Accordingly, different models such as network management and cluster management have to some extent substituted the traditional model of only one head of an institution and an associate deputy manager. More than one-third of the 98 Danish municipalities have rejected the traditional management structure in day care, while more than half have chosen to combine the traditional model with other types of management (Væksthus for Ledelse, 2011, p. 3). Cluster management seems to be the new model which has won greatest acceptance in Danish municipalities (ibid.). It is defined as »… joint management of a number of day care institutions in which there is one manager with the overall responsibility and a number of subordinate managers, each responsible for the day-to-day management of one or more day care institutions«
(Væksthus for Ledelse 2007, p. 38-39).
Cluster management has not only been adopted in day care. Similar progress is found in other public-sector areas such as elderly care and primary schools. This develop-ment is confirmed by a decrease of 14% in the number of local managers from 2010 to 2012 (KORA, 2013). Cluster management has also gained popularity outside Den-mark (e.g. Borhaug & Lotsberg, 2010). However, the management development within Danish day care seems to differ from that of other parts of the public sector in several ways: the development has occurred later, the process has run over a longer period, and it is less exposed and disputed (Pedersen & Andersen, 2010). Perhaps because of this rather silent existence, research has only paid little attention to management changes in day care. Although some studies have started to investigate management changes in day care (e.g. Væksthus for Ledelse, 2007, 2011; Klausen & Nielsen, 2011;
EVA, 2012a, 2012b), we are faced with a lack of knowledge about how cluster manage-ment has become widely adopted and manifested in different organisational settings.
This paper addresses these issues.
Based on theoretical insights from Scandinavian institutionalism, we consider cluster management as a »travelling« idea (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996; Røvik, 1998) that has entered and penetrated the management practices of day care in Denmark. By choos-ing this approach, we follow a well-established Scandinavian scholarly tradition of examining how management ideas may, or may not, be institutionalised in fields, sec-tors or particular organisations. We argue that cluster management as a travelling idea is most readily understood by simultaneously investigating local translation activities in the individual municipalities and the social construction work taking place in the wider organisational field which may legitimise cluster management as a »ready-to-use« management model (Nielsen, Mathiassen & Newell, 2014). This leads us to pose the following research question: How can we understand the institutionalisation of cluster management as the dynamic interplay between local translation activities in
Cluster Management Institutionalisation particular municipalities and the broader social construction work in the organisa-tional field surrounding the municipalities?
We first outline our theoretical framework of Scandinavian institutionalism before we describe the study design and the methods. We then present the results from the empir-ical analysis. In a final step, we highlight the main research contribution of our study.
Theoretical Framework
The notion of »travelling of ideas« has gained growing acceptance among scholars who seek to describe and explain how management ideas spread and transform themselves into practice (e.g. Czarniawska & Joerges 1996; Røvik 1998, 2007, Pedersen 2014). While institutional diffusion studies inspired by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) have stressed how organisations within an organisational field tend to be similar (i.e.
isomorphism), Scandinavian scholars emphasise the differences that can be observed in organisations that adopt the same management ideas. As Røvik (1998) points out:
»Everything is everywhere, but everywhere differently« (p. 168). Hence, Scandinavian scholars have stressed the need to focus not only on the spread of management ideas, but also on what is happening when management ideas travel into modern organisa-tions. In order to observe these movements, it is crucial to have a time perspective on the studied phenomena and not merely to focus on whether management ideas are adopted or not.
Røvik (1992, 1998) offers a valuable analytical framework divided into three phases showing how management ideas institutionalise. Each of them is perceived as critical, and there is a risk (or possibility) that the institutionalisation process can be inter-rupted along the way in any of the phases. The first phase describes the emergence of the management idea, its genesis. The second phase deals with the social construction work, i.e. the processes of social authorisation whereby new ideas are justified and legit-imated and subsequently spread and adopted by organisations across an organisational field or within a sector. During this phase, new management ideas are associated with successful organisations and presented as something new and interesting, and thereby as an appealing answer to current and future challenges in modern organisations.
The third phase, organisational idea handling, is concerned with the translation of the idea by the organisation when it has been adopted. The notion of translation refers
»to set something in a new place is to construct it anew« (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005, p. 8). As management ideas are confronted with organisational norms and practices, conscious as well as unconscious choices are made, and ideas are likely to develop further while being implemented, sometimes making them more suitable as problem-solving tools in local contexts (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005).
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Røvik (2007) suggests four translation rules that apply inside organisations: copying, addition, omission and alteration. These translation rules make it possible to view translation processes with a certain regularity, and they draw attention to general patterns of the modifications that can occur to travelling management ideas during organisational translation processes (Wærass & Sataøen, 2014). Copying refers to the transfer of a management idea with no or very few changes to the original concept.
Addition means making the idea more concrete and explicit by adding information that was either vague or did not exist in the original model, whereas omission (or subtraction) is about toning down or leaving out some elements of an idea. Finally, alteration involves a radical mode of translation that implies a comprehensive trans-formation of an idea leading to the idea being viewed as local innovation.
Røvik’s phase model is useful as it highlights pivotal events in the institutionalisation process. Yet, it seems to argue for a sequential process view in which ideas are first legitimised, then spread and finally managed and translated locally. Although these phases should be understood as analytical views, the phase model tends to place less emphasis on how field-level and organizational-level processes are entangled as they unfold over time. In this article, we will draw on the work of Røvik, but we empha-sise the dynamic interplay of the social construction work in organisational fields and local translation activities in individual organisations as suggested by Nielsen, Mathi-assen & Newell (2014). By zooming in and zooming out (Nicolini, 2011) and by cou-pling the processes of social construction work and local translation, the article aims to examine cluster management as a travelling organisational idea that is shaped by particular organisations and their environments.
Methods
The Danish public sector is structured into state, regional and local government. At the local level, 98 municipalities are responsible for delivering day care services. Day care covers all municipal day care institutions for children aged 0–5 years. Over a 100-year period, day care has developed from what was, at first, mainly a private social arrange-ment, to currently being a crucial element in the Danish public welfare system. Espe-cially during the period from the early 1970s to the end of the century, when a growing number of women became part of the workforce, the demand for day care rose dramat-ically. Today, 97% of all Danish children between 3 and 5 years and 68% of all children between 0 and 2 years are in public day care (dst.dk, April 2013). Hence, day care lies at the core of the Danish welfare society. In this sense, day care represents a rather ma-ture organisational field (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) formed by well-defined regulatory processes and marked by heterogeneous stakeholders with occasionally conflicting interests including those of the day care institutions themselves, interest groups, trade unions, research and educational institutions, and government agencies.
Cluster Management Institutionalisation
Following previous »travels-of-ideas« studies (e.g., Morris & Lancaster, 2006; Zilber, 2006), this study is based on a longitudinal case-study design (Yin, 2009). Because the study was initiated after the introduction of cluster management, a complete longitudinal design was impossible. We therefore adopted a retrospective longitudi-nal design to retrace activities of the institutiolongitudi-nalisation process covering a ten-year period from 2003 (when the first ideas were initiated) to 2013 (when the model was widely adopted by Danish municipalities). The empirical context under examination is characterised by interplay between various actors, organisations and political goals.
We suggest that this complexity can be best handled using a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews and document analysis.
As summarised in Table 1, the data for this case study include multiple sources of empirical evidence. To match our theoretical framing with empirical material, we drew data from sources that relate both to the broader social construction work and to the local translation activities in particular municipalities. At the field level, we relied on public archive materials as a way to examine how cluster management was justified and socially authorised. At the organisational level, we included two case municipalities (Horsens and Randers) to illustrate the different ways in which cluster management was transformed into practice. While Horsens Municipality was one of the pioneers – they adopted cluster management in day care in 2003 – Randers Mu-nicipality introduced the model much later, in 2011. Given our interest in the cluster management institutionalisation process, we looked for meaningful ways into which categorise our data. Following Langley (1999), we used a temporal bracketing strategy to decompose our process data into periods or events. Accordingly, we identified and
Table 1: Data sources
Level of analysis Data
Field Written documents about cluster management, including policy documents from govern-ment bodies and reports from interest groups and consultants (e.g. Væksthus for Ledelse, 2007, 2011; EVA, 2012a, 2012b; KORA 2013).
Organisation Case studies in two municipalities: Horsens and Randers.
Data:
Written documents, e.g. project descriptions and agendas from the municipalities.
Interviews with managers from different levels in each municipality. In Horsens Munici-pality, we interviewed the top manager (direktøren), the head of the day care organisa-tion (dagtilbudschefen) and a manager of a cluster (dagtilbudsleder). Interviews were conducted in 2009.
In Randers Municipality, we interviewed the head of the day care organisation, the manager of a cluster and a pedagogy manager (pædagogisk leder). Interviews were conducted in 2013.
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named three main periods as the idea of cluster management travelled across and within Danish municipalities: »time for change« (2003–2006), »taking stock« (2007–
2010) and »moving slowly« (2011–2013). In accordance with our theoretical frame-work, each phase contains an analysis of the broader social construction work and local translation activities and of how these processes interact.
Analysis
Time for change (2003-2006)
After decades with a stable organisational structure in the Danish day care sector, ex-perimentation with new organisation forms commenced in the early 2000s. The stand-ard structure, consisting of a head of an institution and a deputy manager, which had existed since the 1960s, was challenged. This model had been so prevalent that it was seen as an institutionalised standard, which for decades had been taken for granted by actors in the day care field. Up to the early 2000s, the homogenisation of day care management in Denmark was so manifest that it was written into a settlement be-tween LGDK (interest group for Danish municipalities) and BUPL (Danish Union of Early Childhood and Youth Educators) regarding the organisation of day care.
In 2003, however, LGDK and BUPL allowed municipalities to deviate from the tradi-tional management model, which made it possible to experiment with new manage-ment forms. Especially LGDK pushed for these changes. BUPL agreed to testing new management forms on an experimental basis under specifically defined conditions, but they still expressed scepticism:
Scepticism is justified because we fear LGDK will seize the opportunity to apply the cost-cutting axe to the day care institutions (BUPL, 2003).
The first experiments with cluster management in day care were carried out from 2003 to 2006 as Horsens Municipality established a cluster management pilot in a selected area of the municipality (Nørgaard, 2004). Horsens is also mentioned as an early adopter of cluster management in day care:
Horsens was one of the first municipalities to adopt cluster management. A lot happened around 2002 and 2003 in what was a massive lobbying effort especially by LGDK (The head of the day care organization in Randers Municipality).
It is reasonable to consider LGDK as the authoritative centre (Røvik, 1992) of the idea of cluster management from 2003 onwards. Other municipalities rapidly followed Horsens Municipality, for instance Høje Taastrup in 2004, Albertslund in 2005 and Svendborg in 2006 (Andersen, Gundelach & Rasmussen, 2008). In these local experi-ments, private consultants as well as consultants from LGDK often participated in
Cluster Management Institutionalisation the implementation process. It was mostly smaller municipalities that adopted cluster management during this early phase. It is also evident that most municipalities imple-mented new management structures only in a limited part of the municipalities’ day care institutions. Furthermore, cluster management was not a well-defined model at that time. For example, in the pioneer municipality, Horsens, the model was even not termed »cluster management«, but »district management« – a concept that later took on an independent, but different meaning.
Horsens Municipality’s translation of cluster management was associated with strate-gic management. The head of the day care organisation explains:
… in a crystal ball, we could see that we needed far more strategic managers – managers who would manage and not sometimes have to be pedagogues and sometimes managers.
Cluster management was introduced at a time characterized by mergers and a general up-sizing of public organisations. In 2004, the Danish Parliament passed the law that three years later led to considerably fewer, but also significantly larger municipali-ties. Small was no longer (necessarily) good. The concept of sustainability appeared and was frequently invoked by the municipalities (and LGDK) to argue in favour of the need for changed management forms in day care. In the process of preparing the merging of municipalities, LGDK published a number of guidelines, e.g. »A catalogue of inspiration – efficiency improvement regarding the structural reform«. Among other things, it states:
The merging of the municipalities affords perfect opportunities for considering the structure of the day care area, including cluster management (LGDK, 2006).
Despite this appeal from LGDK, cluster management was still not on the agenda in most municipalities. However, the pioneer municipality, Horsens, participated actively in the wider social authorisation of cluster management as a durable management model. Being experienced in translating cluster management into practice, they are of-ten invited to participate as speakers at conferences and theme days in other munici-palities considering changing their management structure.
Taking stock (2007–2010)
In the next period, the need for new management structures in day care was stressed more intensively. In the early phase, cluster management was mainly adopted by small municipalities. Even though these small municipalities actively participated in the pro-motion of cluster management, it was a report from Væksthus for Ledelse in 2007 that legitimised cluster management as a new management model. Powerful organisations
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like LGDK and KTO (a negotiating organisation for over a half-million public-sector employees) jointly recommended the need for new management forms (Væksthus for Ledelse, 2007). A further contribution to the social authorisation of cluster manage-ment was that Denmark’s second-largest city, Aarhus, introduced the model in 2007.
Until 2007, there was considerable confusion about the concepts behind the new man-agement forms in day care. Terms like district manman-agement, combined manman-agement and cluster management were used indiscriminately, but actually referred to different man-agement forms. However, the report from Væksthus for Ledelse in 2007 provided an authoritative outline of definitions of the various types of management models, thereby creating an important foundation for a common management vocabulary in the area. At the same time, cluster management was increasingly emphasised as a model that could meet a number of the challenges the day care sector was facing: increased professionali-sation of management, increased pedagogical quality, and not least sustainability:
Therefore, the day care institutions’ sustainability – financially as well as mana-gerially – has reached the agenda. Small is not always good enough. It is neces-sary to have larger institution units in order to meet the new and more complex challenges in day care (Væksthus for Ledelse, 2007, p. 10).
There was, however, little research documentation that cluster management could ac-tually meet these requirements. Nevertheless, deploying arguments that organisations like to appear future-oriented and that modern cluster management breaks with the existing, (old-fashioned) institutionalized management standard (Røvik, 1992) in day care, reports such as the one issued by Væksthus for Ledelse (2007) used convincing quotes from people with first-hand experience of the new management forms in order to convince day care institutions of cluster management’s superiority:
In the past I had a manager who came back frustrated from management meet-ings. The new structure has helped. He now receives advice and is heard. I could
In the past I had a manager who came back frustrated from management meet-ings. The new structure has helped. He now receives advice and is heard. I could