۱- Introduction

۲- Theoretical framework

۳- Methodology

۴- Three logics of work environment management

۵- Concluding discussion

References

Abstract

In this study we explore the development and enactment of institutional logics in the field of work environment management. We show how three historically developed logics constitute different values and practices that guide professionals’ organizational action. Using both historical and contemporary qualitative data, we show how the three institutional logics are present in the field of work environment, and how the logics are enacted simultaneously by actors within four large organizations in Denmark. The study contributes to the literature on institutional logics. The logics perspective is combined with critical realism to describe the inter-relatedness between the levels of society, institutional fields, and organizations, and by elaborating the near-decomposable relations between institutional logics and orders. The study contributes to the literature on work environment management by investigating the ideational lenses through which regulations and interventions are perceived by organizational actors, and how these perceptions may lead to different organizational outcomes and outlooks in work environment management.

Introduction

Work environment management has evolved considerably during the last 40 years. From being a matter of preventing chemical risks and workplace accidents in the early 1970s, this management area is now also concerned with creating sustainable performance cultures and dealing with a wide array of psychosocial issues. The approach has developed from a model where the organization simply complies with an extensive list of external formal requirements, to a model that integrates work environment tasks into the organization’s fundamental practices and strategies. Correspondingly, work environment professionals have moved from positions outside the companies in the regulatory wider participatory labor market structures, to positions inside the companies in professionalized staff functions, where they have gradually replaced the voluntary employee and management representatives (Seim, Limborg, & Jensen, 2015). However, work environment management is not only an organizational technical task, but also part of a wider industrial relations system whereby it is subject to political and ideological conflicts and compromises evolving over time. Thus, the field of work environment management constitutes a richly textured empirical case, which is suitable for investigating and illustrating how institutional and organizational dynamics simultaneously play out at multiple levels, including the deeply institutionalized and stabilizing level of society, the level of the work environment field, and the more adaptive practice development at the organizational level. To explain how the management of work environment changes on these different levels we incorporate an analytical framework inspired by critical realism in general and Margaret Archer in particular (1995; 1998) into theories of institutional logics.