Abstract
Local government in a Nordic context is commonly referred to as “welfare municipalities” or “local welfare states” – where a great share of provision of health and welfare services is decentralized to local governments (Grønlie 1991, Baldersheim, Rose and Sandberg 2017). Management, as well as provision of services, have throughout history been delegated to the health professions, social workers, teachers etc. Even the chief executives in local government, health and welfare sectors have traditionally been recruited from within the professions’ own ranks. Thus, performance and quality standards as well as management of the services, have been influenced both by a public ethos (Perry 1996, Coursey & Pandey, 2007) and professional norms (Bøgh Angdersen 2009). However, in the wake of NPM-inspired reforms during the past decades, there is evidence that traditional public ethos, values and professional norms among civil servants and managers have been challenged. It is likely that civil service employees are more driven by economic incentives then the “old” traditional public service norms. Consequently, they may adapt into hybrid managerial roles (Kirkpatrick, Dent and Kragh Jespersen 2011), or being transformed from “knights” to “knaves” (Le Grand 2003). Taking this point of departure, the purpose of this paper is to explore the public ethos profiles, and how it differs among high-ranking local government managers in a Norwegian welfare municipality context.
We raise a two-folded research question; 1) whether the public ethos profile, among these managers, is influenced by their professional identity, and 2) whether professional norms and traditional public ethos values is present, challenged or blurred by economic incentives: NPM-inspired performance management, financial- and tight-budgetary-control.
Methodology
The paper is based on Norwegian data from the TopNordic-survey. A comparable multidimensional questionnaire has been developed and used in Denmark for several years (Bertelsen & Hansen 2016) The questionnaire has been translated into Norwegian and the Norwegian dataset consist of data from 647 executive municipal administrative managers with an overall response rate of 42.4% and data from 317 municipalities (74.4%). In the analyses we have applied principal component analyses to test component loadings of factors in several scales as well as descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression modelling.
Tentative results
Following Coursey & Pandey (2007) the first dimension of public ethos “Attraction to policy making” (ATPM) consists of items describing an interest in politics and policy making. The second dimension, “Civic duty” (CD) describes a commitment to public service. The third dimension, “Compassion” (CO) describes the affinity to help the needy in society.
There seem to be a gender related association of professional identity and NPM-related measures on public ethos (political interest and public service orientation) amongst Norwegian municipal executive managers.
