Collective cooperation during rationalization and retrenchment
- A study of practice in and around the formal cooperation committee system in Danish local government (the MED-system) during rationalization and retrenchment
Ph.d.-thesis by Nana Wesley Hansen
This thesis is a study of collective cooperation between employees and management in two Danish municipalities. Specifically, it analyzes cooperation in and around the formal committee system – called the ‘MED-system’ – during a period of rationalization and tight budgets. The study uses a multi-comparative research design which compares cooperation in two municipalities, at three different management levels and in two different welfare sector administrations (schooling and social psychiatry). In addition, cooperation and negotiation processes are compared with each other.
First, the literature concerning collective cooperation and negotiation at Danish workplaces is discussed. This body of literature mainly adopts a historical institutionalist understanding of what structures cooperation and negotiation. The literature offers a detailed analysis of the collective bargaining and cooperative committee system’s origins, and identifies changes in each system over time. These approaches, however, cannot explain why the historically constructed norms are rarely followed at the local level.
Nevertheless, the Danish literature on decentralized negotiation and cooperation highlights three characteristics which provide clear assumptions about how local cooperation practices will pan put in public sector workplaces. Namely, that it is the relationship between manager and employee representative which mainly structures the cooperative practice; that the formal cooperation committee system and the local wage negotiation system in practice will interact; and finally the assumption that several institutional logics are at play in the process of cooperation. Despite these key insights, more theoretical development is required to capture the mechanisms of cooperation and negotiation at the local level.
It is argued in the thesis, that a fine-grained institutional view is called for which can offer new perspectives on the interaction between institutions and action. To achieve this, a theoretical approach is developed drawing on concepts from cultural sociology and organizational analysis.
Specifically, the new-institutionalist concept of multiple institutional logics is used to combine Industrial Relations theory’s strong comprehension of the institutional structuring of the employment relationship with understandings from studies of management and professions, which also influence cooperation at the workplace. However, it is argued that the concept of multiple institutional logics must be moderated in order to operationalize the concept to the study of practice in collective cooperation, where logics do not play out unambiguously, but rather seem to be combined in creative ways.
Drawing on the sociologist Ann Swidler's theoretical claim that values and norms are available to actors as part of their cultural repertoire, the thesis argues for a refocusing of the analysis of the multiple institutional logics. Rather than seeing them as unitary and separate entities, this thesis views them as more loosely coupled entities consisting of inbuilt dilemmas. Semiotic codes are introduced as an important tool for being able to break the institutional logics down into their different components, and understanding how the logics can both challenge each other and be combined.
In addition, it is argued that practice not only plays out in settled and unsettled times, but is also present in routinized situations (such as yearly cooperation committee meetings and collective bargaining rounds), as well as in unexpected and uncertain situations. During rationalization, it is mainly the latter which affects the workplace. While rationalization challenges collective cooperation at most levels in the committee system, rationalization does not in itself produce unsettled times at the workplace. In order to explain this, the thesis draws an analytical distinction between strategic action and another form of action named ‘snarrådighed’ in Danish. In this thesis the term ‘Snarrådighed’ (which does not translate well into English but draws on a previously described form of action in the social science literature, which has been framed by the Greek term ‘metis’) refers to tactical actions which – in opposition to strategic actions – are neither informed by what is considered normatively appropriate in the individual situation nor by rational objective interest. The theis argues that ‘snarrådighed’ is built on practical knowledge of what works, but is adjusted in response to a volatile and changing world of work where issues and situations continually arise, without there being any clearly formulated interests or norms for managers and employee representatives to draw upon.
The empirical analysis concludes that although the MED-system is meant to be a unified and integrated cooperative committee system, it in fact functions as two different cooperation systems: a representative political system at the central management levels in the municipal organization, where strategic action characterizes cooperative practice; and a workplace based cooperative system at the level of the individual institution where snarrådighed’ to a greater extent characterizes the cooperative practice. Based on this empirical finding, Hansen concludes that the idea of the relationship between manager and employee which structures the cooperative practice, must be revised. It is in fact just as much the management hierarchy of the organization, which determines practice.
Nana Wesley Hansen defended her PhD dissertation on Friday the 20th of December at the University of Copenhagen. The members of the assessment committee was: Associate Professor Carsten Strøby, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen (chairman), Professor Ann Westenholz, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School and Research Director Sissel C. Trygstad, Fafo, Oslo, Norway.