Angela Eicher
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Dr.
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Eicher
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Angela
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angela.eicher@unisg.ch
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+41 71 224 7585

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Management Responses To Multiple Rationalities In Courts - A Review

2012-12-17 , Eicher, Angela , Schedler, Kuno

Courts are multirational organizations in that they are characterized by the coexistence of various rationalities, pursuing divergent goals and following different logical patterns, thus posing additional challenges on management. Rationalities define the distinct way actor groups think, speak and act. Multiple rationalities challenge decision makers in courts as they need to respond by developing practices to deal with the complexity they generate. The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, we intent to critically review and discuss the literature on court management which somehow addresses the phenomenon of multirationality within courts. Second, we draw a nexus between the research fields of court management and New Institutionalism, since the latter is supposed to provide important insights for the former. It is concluded that, although the concept of multirational court management has implicitly already been indicated by some scholars from the field of court management, it has not yet been explicitly mentioned and discussed in sufficient detail. Two research streams are identified. The first stream of research implicitly focuses on multirationality by analyzing the perceptions, attitudes, and relationships of different court actors. Local legal culture is the second stream, which refers to the presence of competing values within courts. For further research, we suggest four types of practices to structure possible managerial responses in courts.

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

2014-09-11 , Eicher, Angela , Schedler, Kuno

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.

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Multirational Management in public administration

2014 , Schedler, Kuno , Eicher, Angela , Schedler, Kuno , Rüegg-Stürm, Johannes

Management in public administration is exposed to multiple rationalities per se: the tension alone between the rationality of politics and the rationality of the administration offers latent conflict potential but also development potential. We interview six public managers of a cantonal administration in order to understand how they perceive and deal with multiple rationalities. It appears that a) all interviewees perceive the different natures of the rationalities of politics and the administration, and b) the practices they apply when they deal with multiple rationalities are heterogeneous to a high degree and - so we assume - strongly depend on the public managers' functions and personalities.

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Rapports entre l'administration et la politique

2013 , Schedler, Kuno , Eicher, Angela , Ladner, Andreas

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Bericht über die EGPA Jahrestagung 2012 : Study Group «Justice and Court Administration»

2012-11-28 , Winkler, Daniela , Eicher, Angela

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Publication

Enacting public management reform : Practices of politicians and public managers

2014-09-11 , Schedler, Kuno , Guenduez, Ali Asker , Eicher, Angela

Public sector reforms are driven by decision situations that can be described as strategic. At the same time, reforms open the field to a plethora of new strategic options. Thus, reforms deliver a fruitful context for the study of strategic decision making. It has been argued that public administration is working in a pluralistic context, which means that its diverse stakeholders may cherish incompatible expectations and requirements towards the administration. A rationality has been defined as a specific way of thinking, speaking, and acting which creates a logic meaning in itself. We see it as a logic of acting, a logic of arguing, and a logic of perceiving and interpreting the wold as it is in an organization. Rationalities are usually guided by external systems of reference such as the legal system or the political system. In organizations, they are re-constructed by social groups within the politico-administrative system (communities of meaning) such as politicians or public managers. Since by specialization, these communities of meaning may develop their own terminology and interpretation schemes, there is some potential for irreconcilable differences. In this paper, we will analyze the rationalities that shape the perceptions, interpretations, and decisions made by politicians and public managers in a situation of reform. We re-coded more than 60 interviews taken in the public administration in Switzerland over a time period of 10 years. Interviewees were members of parliaments, members of cabinets, and public managers, and all the interviews were about their roles and perceptions in reforms on 'outcome-oriented public management' (the Swiss version of the New Public Management). We will argue that all the interviewees felt that they were confronted with multiple rationalities, and that they developed different practices to respond to this situation. As a general rule, we expect to find that politicians will tend to reduce their decision rationality to a monorational one, in that the political rationality dominates all decisions. In contrast, we expect that public managers will have to develop practices of dealing with multiple rationalities on the long term, that is, practices of tolerance and exploitation. Our research will contribute to the theory of strategic decision making in pluralistic contexts (Denis / Langley et al.) as well as to a practical understanding of multirational management in the public sector.

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Publication

Das Verhältnis von Verwaltung und Politik

2013 , Schedler, Kuno , Eicher, Angela , Ladner, Andreas

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The Capability of being a Chameleon : Forms of Institutional Complexity in Court Management and Professionals' Respective Coping Strategies

2015-08-26 , Eicher, Angela , Schedler, Kuno

As previous research has demonstrated, courts have a rather adverse attitude towards externally imposed management endeavors, which among other factors appears to threaten their independence and a strongly related aspiration of maximizing their self-administration capacities. In this context the co-existence of multiple logics regarding both their organization and administration represents an additional management challenge, since these logics are assumed to provide different decision prescriptions. Using Besharov and Smith's (2014) framework to classify distinct logic multiplicity types, this paper contributes to current research about the organizational effects and implications of institutional complexity, thereby enhancing knowledge about the factors that affect actors' respective coping strategies. Based on an embedded case study and by employing an interpretive grounded theory approach the paper thoroughly elaborates on the different forms of institutional complexity in court management to analyze how institutional complexity is dealt with by court professionals. As our findings suggest, the form of institutional complexity not only implies different stress levels for courts and their members but also different strategy choices. Intra-organizational complexity primarily seems to be managed by adhering primacy to the judicial logic, internal boundary spanning practices, and forms of political lobbying. Inter-organizational complexity though is addressed by maintaining and increasing their autonomy through external boundary spanning and the use of different logics as "toolkits". Even though intuitively, one would expect a management logic to prevail in organizational and administrative matters, in many circumstances the judicial logic is still given priority. Contrary to intra-organizational matters, however, judicial professionals seem to be able to strategically adapt their lines of argumentation just like a chameleon to the external expectations and demands by making use of logics as "toolkits". To put it more precisely, it seems that by referring to the respective logics of their external stakeholders and thus by adjusting their communication accordingly, courts are able to exploit distinct logics in their favor. A state of logic multiplicity, therefore, does not necessarily negatively affect an organization and its members by causing stress in form of institutional complexity but might even represent an essential success factor, through enhancing its agency and adaptive capability.

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Publication

Practices of response to multiple rationalities in courts

2012-09-05 , Eicher, Angela , Schedler, Kuno

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Multirationales Management in der öffentlichen Verwaltung

2013 , Schedler, Kuno , Eicher, Angela , Schedler, Kuno , Rüegg-Stürm, Johannes

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