How Does Image Accompany Structure in Organizations? Exploring Professionalism and Managerialism in the Organizational Images of Swedish Hospitals

Abstract: With the emergence of New Public Management in the 1980s, Western public sectors saw a gradual shift in logics of work control from professionalism to managerialism. For public sector organizations to attain legitimacy in this new climate, their organizational structures have been aligned according to extant societal expectations of managerialist efficiency. In addition to structure, organizations are also asked to have an organizational image that appeals to the same societal expectations if legitimacy is to be achieved. The pursuit of legitimacy is an aspect that connects image and structure but this has been neglected in previous research. Against this, the purpose of the present thesis is to explore whether and how changes in organizational image covariate positively with shifts in organizational structure. In order to investigate this, an organizational discourse analysis has been conducted on a sample of Swedish hospitals’ webpages in 2005 and 2013 as a way to learn more about the distribution of professionalism and managerialism in these entities’ images. The results indicate that the two logics of work control have increased between the studied years but managerialism displays a slightly bigger growth. Nevertheless, a blend of professionalism and managerialism is what is most apparent in the organizational images of the sampled hospitals in both 2005 and 2013. While previous literature has argued that organizational structures have shifted decisively towards managerialism, this thesis indicates that the change has been more nuanced when it comes to organizational images.