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The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.

Complex coordination across time, space, and cultures involves a great deal of uncertainty. This uncertainty may be accepted and handled with judgment and pragmatism, but more often in contemporary modern society, it is treated as a technical problem to be 'solved'. This is a book about the paradoxical implications of the quest for certainty in interorganizational relations in the complex field of development aid.

Authors Alexius and Vähämäki scrutinize questions related to the concept Obsessive Measurement Disorder, i.e. what causes an increase in control mechanisms, and how and when can this prove counterproductive? They further investigate the question on why performance management - and measurement requirements seem in some instances to hinder, and in others to support the implementation of aid projects and programs.

Drawing on 80 original interviews with aid bureaucrats working at different levels and in different organizations, including public agencies, companies, non-government organisations, and universities all involved in development aid projects financed fully, or in part, by the Swedish taxpayer, they identify coping mechanisms and responses that may help to prevent the extremes of obsessive measurement disorder, and foster instead pragmatic, constructive organizing and learning that benefits not only aid organizations and their employees, but also - and more fundamentally - the societies in need.

Based on fourteen empirical case studies, this far-reaching book explains why and how markets are organized, through examining the role of values and value work in markets. - Economic values shape markets, as do sustainability, safety, decency, public health and democracy. Based on micro-process studies in a large number of markets, this innovative volume presents a typology of strategic responses to value plurality in markets and helps explain how such value work influences market reform. Value plurality may be reinforced and turned into open conflicts, but may also be played down in configurations that neutralize, align, balance, or hierarchize values. - A multi-disciplinary work, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in markets, particularly in the creating, organizing and development of markets, including the consequences of such undertakings. It will also be an invaluable resource to politicians and their advisors, who often initiate market reforms or have to deal with the consequences of previous reforms.

The contribution of this paper centers on organizational conditions and mechanisms for long-term justification and survival of constitutional hybrids—organizations that not only integrate various institutional logics, but also integrate structural elements, ideal-typical of different types of organizations and societal spheres. Responding to calls for studies that relate macro-, meso-and micro-level analyses, we draw on Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of justification and a 70-year mixed-method case study of the mutually owned Swedish insurance firm, Folksam. We describe how this mutually owned enterprise went from justifying its profitmaking during the social-democratic regime to justifying its principle of mutual benefit in the decades following amarket turn in the 1980s. Our multi-level, longitudinal analysis suggests that constitutional hybrids like Folksam may survive and avoid isomorphism by making flexible use of their two-sided "Janus face"of civic and market logics of justification.