Selvledende organisationer i den offentlige sektor: Modsætninger og konflikter i radikal decentralisering

The dissertation focuses on self-managing organizations (SMOs), as novel organizational structures, in which managerial authority is decentralized through formalized organizational processes and structures. Two longitudinal field studies follow a public addiction rehabilitation agency and a self-organizing hospital department during their work distributing decision authority, managerial roles, and evaluation of conflicts and performance to the frontline-employee level. The work contributes, using current empirical research, to a novel body of literature on SMOs by applying a dialectical-process perspective to show how they create new contradictions for employees and managers in public organizations. In studying the emerging processes of SMOs, the dissertation is guided by the following research question: What contradictions occur in public SMOs, and how do these contradictions affect such organizations and their stakeholders?
The results of the dissertation are based on qualitative case-study investigations of SMOs in health and social care. Both studies employ an ethnographic approach including interviews, observations, shadowing and document analysis. The work consists of three articles that explore public SMOs from a multi-level analytical perspective in order to elucidate the societal, organizational and subjective dimensions of self-organization. The aim of the work is to expand the current scientific understanding of SMOs, which have been investigated mostly theoretically by researchers and empirically by practitioner-oriented writers, within private-sector organizations. The work sheds empirical light on the phenomenon of the SMO in a public organizational context to expand this research avenue.