New Organisation and Leadership Structure in a Danish Municipality

Author(s):

Klaus Kasper Kofod(presenting / submitting)Klaus Kasper Kofod(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2011

Network:

26. Educational Leadership

Format:

Paper

Session Information

26 SES 12 B,

Paper Session

Time:

2011-09-16

08:30-10:00

Room:

JK 25/138,G, 20

Chair:

Klaus Kasper Kofod

Contribution

General dscription

Since the 1980’ies the Danish public sector has been under continuous modernisation (Ejersbo & Greve, 2005; Hjort, 2001; Klausen, 2001). During the last 5-6 years there has been a tendency in the direction of different forms of merging smaller institutions into bigger ones. That is the case in most parts of the public sector and the speed with which this movement has been going on has accelerated since the so called structural reform i.e. the reform from 2007 where 171 Danish municipalities have been merged into 98 (Pedersen, 2004). Simultaneous with this development there has been a wave of merging of smaller municipal institutions into bigger ones.

In the process of this development there has emerged different and in some cases new organisation forms: a) the mergers can be traditional mergers where two or more smaller institutions that work with the same issues are merged into one bigger one be it a school or a kindergarten. b) A horizontal merger, where several institutions like fx. 4 kindergartens are merged into what is called a cluster model or district model with one common institutional leader, the cluster or the district leader is responsible for the overall operation of the institution whereas the former leaders of each of the four institutions now becomes what is called daily or pedagogical leaders. c) A vertical merger where fx. a kindergarten, a primary school and a after school centre is merged into a single institutions with one leader and kindergarten leader, a primary school leader and an after school centre with its own leader as deputies to the overall leader of the centre. d) In between these forms the may be several hybrids where institutions be they of the same kind or different kinds may have more or less loose cooperation (Klaus Kasper Kofod, 2007 ).These forms of organising are quite new in Denmark but a hypothesis is that we will see more of these organising forms in the years to come and there are parallel trends in other Nordic countries.

The paper will with a departure in the horizontal kind of reorganising of a Danish municipality’s day care institutions investigate the consequences of this kind of reorganisation on leadership, and organising of the institutions. The aim of the paper is to focus on the intentions behind the introduction of district organisation and on the consequences of this reorganisation for the institutions in order to see how this new form of organising of the organisations works and what consequences the reorganisation has had both decentrally in the institutions and centr4ally in the municipal’s central administration.

The aim of the paper is with a single municipality as a case to investigate how new organisation and leadership forms affect the output of the institutions, the power distribution(Christensen & Jensen, 1986), the leadership (Dean, 1999; K. K. Kofod, 2007; Weick, 1976, 2001) and the efficiency of the institutions.

Method

Methodology The study is based on a multi method research design.: 1) All leaders and employees will answer a questionnaire, there will be 2) group interviews with daily leaders, employees, presidents of the boards of the 7 participating institutions, members of parent representatives in the institutions’ boards, and with members of the central administration. 3) There will be individual interviews with the leaders of each the institution, with 2 superintendants, and with the political president of committee of the municipality’s committee for children. 4) There will be document investigation.

Expected Outcomes

Conclusions, expected outcomes and findings I expect that we will see that the institutions landscape in the coming years will change profoundly with new organisational forms and new forms of organising of the work. Thereby the organisations’ output will be affected, the employees’ work conditions will be affected, the leadership conditions will be affected, and the connections to the municipality’s central administrations will be affected. One of the more common emerging organisation forms is the district model as in the present municipality. Because this cluster or district organisation form looks like a new trend it is very important to investigate in the beginning of the development to be able to do some forecasting of the future organisations forms in the day-care sector. Therefore the municipality’s institutional structure in the day-care sector is an interesting study object. So the research results will possibly give some clues of the direction and the consequences of these new organisation forms in Denmark and possible in other Scandinavian countries as well.

References

Selected Reference List Christensen, S., & Jensen, P.-E. D. (1986). Kontrol i det stille - om magt og deltagelse (1 ed.). Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Magt og styring i det moderne samfund [Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society]. London: Sage. Ejersbo, N., & Greve, C. (2005). Moderniseringen af den offentlige sektor. København: Børsen Offentlig ledelse. Hjort, K. (2001). Moderniseringen af den offentlige sektor. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur. Klausen, K. K. (2001). Skulle det være noget særligt? - organisation og ledelse i det offentlige [Is it supposed to be something special? - Organisation and leadership in the public sector] (1st ed.). København: Børsens Forlag A/S. Kofod, K. K. (2007). Ledelse af sociale institutioner. Pædagogisk ledelse under forandring [Management of social institutions. Pedagogical management under change]. Københvan: Børsens Forlag. Kofod, K. K. (2007 ). Ledelse af sociale institutioner. Pædagogisk ledelse under forandring København: Børsen. Pedersen, J. S. (2004). Nye rammer. Offentlig opgaveløsning under og efter strukturreformen. København: Børsens Forlag. Weick, K. E. (1976). Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Quarterly, 21. Weick, K. E. (2001). Making Sense of the Organization (1st ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Author Information

Klaus Kasper Kofod (presenting / submitting)

School of Education, University of Aarhus

Educational sociology

Copenhagen

Klaus Kasper Kofod (presenting / submitting)

School of Education, University of Aarhus, Denmark

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