“Trust us, we’re professionals”

Abstract: Over the past thirty years, public sector organisations have increasingly sought to become more alike their private sector counterparts, with the implementation of management tools, viewing the public as customers and society as a marketplace. Such reforms can be seen as the development of New Public Management (NPM). However, with unintended consequences, as professionals, be it teachers, nurses or social workers, are constrained by the organisation from actually focusing on their profession. Instead being increasingly tasked with administrative procedures whilst partaking in performance measuring activities. Whilst managers become instruments of control rather than facilitators. The dichotomy of trust and control proves to be a highly relevant discussion as relatively little research has been done on governance mechanisms within university context, and aims to highlight new methods of governance in the form of trust-based management. This research paper therefore aims to explore perceptions of existing governance mechanisms of both Trust and Control within a public organisation, specifically within a university context, where autonomy has previously been premiered. This culminates in a theoretical framework for governance mechanisms. The methodology applied in this study take the form of a qualitative interview study of both managers and professionals within faculty organisations at Lund University. The paper concludes that there is indeed room for lessened administrative procedures and that there is the need for more time to be spent on feedback within the faculty organisations. We find that high levels of NPM create activities which sap time from empowering the workforce.