Journal ArticleDOI
On Justification Work: How Compromising Enables Public Managers to Deal with Conflicting Values
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TLDR
In this article, a qualitative study of daily practices of Dutch health care managers (executives and middle managers) is presented, where the authors show how compromises are constructed and how managers are able to solidify compromises, creating temporary stability in times of public sector change.Abstract:
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In the public administration literature, a variety of
responses to value confl icts have been described, such
as trade-off s, decoupling values, and incrementalism.
Yet little attention has been paid to the possibility of
constructive compromises that enable public managers to
deal with confl icting values simultaneously rather than
separately. Th e authors use Luc Boltanski and Laurent
Th evenot’s theory of justifi cation to extend current conceptualizations
of management of confl icting values. On
the basis of a qualitative study of daily practices of Dutch
health care managers (executives and middle managers),
they show how compromises are constructed and
justifi ed to signifi cant others. Because compromises are
fragile and open to criticism, managers have to perform
continuous “justifi cation work” that entails not only the
use of rhetoric but also the adaption of behavior and
material objects. By inscribing compromises into objects
and behavior, managers are able to solidify compromises,
thereby creating temporary stability in times of public
sector change.read more
Citations
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Micro-processes of Moral Normative Engagement with CSR Tensions: The Role of Spirituality in Justification Work
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Public Administration and Values Oriented to Sustainability: A Systematic Approach to the Literature
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How Public Managers Make Tradeoffs Regarding Lives: Evidence from a Flood Planning Survey Experiment
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Communicating under the regimes of divergent ideas: how public agencies in Sweden manage tensions between transparency and consistency
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw on Scandinavian institutionalism to argue that ideas act as imperatives for organizations' communication, whereby differences between ideas can generate tensions that organi c...
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Luc Boltanski,Laurent Thévenot +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the author argues that many situations in social life can be analyzed by their requirement for the justification of action and argues that the human capacity for criticism becomes visible in the daily occurrence of disputes over criteria for justification.
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Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation
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