Co-Existing Logics in Court Administration: Micro-Level Substantiations of Institutional Pluralism

Given courts' pluralistic institutional embeddedness and the need to assure legitimacy, they are confronted with a growing amount and variety of external expectations, e.g., from politics or the media who refer to distinct institutional logics. In parallel, courts' working conditions have significantly changed, leading to an increased involvement of non-judicial actors who are - due to their professional backgrounds - assumed to be "carriers of extraneous logics". This paper hypothesizes that courts are pluralistic due to changes in external demands. Drawing upon a directed content analysis of 20 semistructured interviews with court professionals, this paper investigates what kinds of logics co-exist with regard to the administration of courts and how they can be typified. In addition, the paper also analyzes how court employees deal with this institutional pluralism. Findings indicate that institutional pluralism occurs not only at the intersection with their institutional environment but also within the courts, whereby boundary spanners seem to play an important role in buffering the challenges associated therewith. Furthermore, non-judicial actors seem to get accustomed to a dominating professional legal logic, implying that there exists some kind of a primacy of the judicial logic in intraorganizational matters. This paper advances the understanding of how court actors deal with competing logics and how institutional logics unfold at the micro-level of individuals' daily work activities.