Managing Hybrid Organizations by Susanna Alexius & Staffan Furusten

Author:Susanna Alexius & Staffan Furusten
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319954868
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

8.8 Discussion

Previous research on SOEs has tended to focus on transaction cost studies and principal-agent analyses (Bruton et al. 2015). This is unfortunate since institutional theory on the significance of external expectations and pressures is particularly relevant in our understanding of these companies’ position in the boundary zone between the political sphere and the market (Aharoni 1981, 1986; Rainey and Chun 2005; Radon and Thaler 2005). In addition, as Thomasson (2009) and Alexius (2014) have noted, the topic has rarely been studied from an empirical vantage point of what it means in practice to govern and manage a publicly owned company.

One interesting difference to private companies is that SOEs have no nominating committee or, rather, when the state is the only owner, the nomination and recruitment of board members becomes a matter for politicians and their appointed civil servants in the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation. Here, it seems to be the case that a small number of civil servants have a great amount of influence on appointments to- and the composition of the board. This chapter has sought to describe the daily work of board appointments performed by civil servants in close cooperation with the minister and state secretary in the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation. We have taken a particular interest in the thinking and daily work of the civil servants who perform this work, and analyze how they manage the two main logics at stake—the political logic and the commercial logic—in their practical work of appointing the board members of Swedish SOEs.

At the time of conducting and writing up this case study, the “post-NPM” debate is in full swing in Sweden, and we believe it is reflected in the discrepant views reflected by our informants. Officially, NPM, with its emphasis on a clear division of responsibility and a separation between politics and administration, is still proclaimed, by the senior civil servant who took an active part in introducing the OECD Guidelines on SOE governance, to be the professional way of handling things. But a closer look into the actual daily practice of the headhunters currently at work shows us that negotiating and aligning logics is described as key to their work. These processes seem in turn to be based on conditioned trust between civil servants and politicians.

We foresee that in the emerging NPG era, with its emphasis on adding even more values (such as sustainability and gender equality) as requirements to influence governance processes, the political logic will be further strengthened. As the previously dominating mode of NPM-inspired governance of SOEs is challenged, public appointment officials face increasing pressure to demonstrate that all of the social values at stake for the hybrid organizations are reflected also in the nomination of SOE board members, without compromising business efficiency, public accountability and the public income derived from SOEs . The willingness, judgment and ability to negotiate and align these potentially conflicting values will then be key (Alexius and Tamm Hallström 2014). As the case study continues, our aim

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