Nadia Hafner
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Hafner
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  • Publication
    Community-Interaktionen: Analyse einer Finanzierungsreform im Bildungssektor
    (Universität St. Gallen, 2021-09-20)
    Hafner, Nadia
    This dissertation addresses the role of social interactions in the implementation of institutional change. This work explores how community interactions influence the translation and interpretation of institutional logic. Although the importance of interactions has long been recognized in new institutionalism, research has not typically focused on the significant contribution of interactions between and within communities. Rather, scholars have concentrated on the actions and reactions of individual actors or organizations without considering interactions among actors. Using a 10-year (20082019) case study, we explore the importance of interactions in institutional processes. The case study is about a funding reform in the special education system of a Swiss canton. The research method combines participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and documentary evidence. This dissertation presents interactions between and within communities as key dimensions of the organizational field. The empirical analysis indicates that communities in an organizational field actively and continuously construct meanings of institutions in social interactions. Consistent with the perspective of the new institutionalism, each community has demonstrably developed different interpretations of financing reform, depending on its inherent rationality. These different interpretations elicit different types of responses to institutional specifications. Because actors are involved in communities, organizations, and in an organizational field, these translations and interpretations do not occur in isolation, but are negotiated in social interactions. Two types of social interactions were identified: between-community interactions and within-community interactions. This dissertation contributes to new institutionalism by demonstrating that interactions are a central mechanism through which the meanings of institutions are negotiated and enacted.
    Type: doctoral thesis
    URL: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:ch:bel-2263808
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/109916