PROFESSIONS,INSTITUTIONAL DYNAMICS,AND NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN THE DANISH HOSPITAL FIELD

ABSTRACT

This article elucidates the role of professionals as stakeholders in the Danish hospital field. The sociological new-institutionalism has illuminated the role of professions as carriers of rationalities and norms and their role in radical changes in organizational fields, but we are short of contributions that elucidate their role as stakeholders in connection with incremental changes in mature organizational fields.

First we focus on what interests professions can be expected to safeguard. We will argue that professions protect and expand their professional rationalities. In mature fields this must be done in interaction with the state apparatus that in numerous ways regulates the professions.

Second we assume that in mature organizational fields, dominated by professional interpretative schemes, the professions’ safeguarding of interests will be tied to their influence on the creation of new institutions within the existing institutional landscape in the field. More specifically we argue that the professions’ opportunities of influence depend on:

The existing constellationof institutions in the field.