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This doctoral thesis reports on an organizational history of the city of Dresden, with respect to the conflicting construction of a new bridge at Waldschlösschen. This project finds its origins in the late 19th century and culminated in a highly polarizing conflict in 2009, opposing various local, national and international institutional constituents. The core of the conflict was the City's decision in 1996 to proceed with the planning and construction of the four-lane bridge in the middle of what eventually became known in 2004 as the UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape "Dresden and the Elbe Valley". The project was criticized due to its impact on the landscape, to its questionable effect on traffic reduction, and its expensive nature, and provoked the withdrawal of the site from list for WH sites, a premiere in Europe. I draw upon this case to make a few points in the broader field of organization research. First, I propose to consider the interplay of institutional effects and of path dependence in the analysis of an organization and its subsequent decision-making. Secondly, I suggest considering "paths" as mere virtual schemas of solutions to collective problems, and to label their actual manifestations "path instantiations". In this respect, I claim that path-researchers could learn from institutional accounts by observing how actors in organizations draw on their institutional context to nest these instantiations. A last point is made by stressing the potential for actors to disrupt path-dependent developments, and how such disruptions may actually reinforce the path under scrutiny. Drawing on the Dresden case, we see how members of the City, under the path-like influence of a technical solution, contributed to instantiate the idea of a bridge at Waldschlösschen by drawing on the institutional logics of democracy and of state-bureaucracy. Strategies of power retention, myth development, and legal binding were employed to support the development of the project. This institutional effort was rewarded by ...

AbstractRejoining other authors' arguments in favor of less linear and more process-based studies of change in purpose-oriented networks (PONs), we propose conceiving of PONs not as social entities or forms, but as processes constantly in flux. From this perspective, PONs comprise more or less interconnected processes constantly at play, albeit with more or less intensity, depending on the reflexive management and actions of their participants. We contend that a process view sheds light on three major themes categorizing extant research on network development: network development as the product of engineered, planned managerial actions; network evolution as the product of unintended, systemic changes both within and outside of PONs; and the management of network tensions as the central object of managerial attention.

Este artigo desenvolve as bases para uma teoria da organização decisória. Abordagens importantes, como a teoria do sistema sociológico, a parcial e a meta-organização, ou organização, compartilham a suposição de que as decisões são um componente central das organizações. No entanto, os estudos da organização ainda não prestam contas do papel da decisão no surgimento e continuação da organização. No entanto, se as sociedades pré-modernas poderiam contar com a ordem institucionalizada sob a forma de tradições e autoridades, o mundo contemporâneo repousa em uma miríade de decisões para lidar com complexidades sociais. Desenvolvemos uma teoria integrada de organização decisória na qual articulamos diversos conceitos de teoria organizacional, apresentando assim a organização como um sistema de decisão e uma ordem social baseada em decisões. Olhando ainda mais para a organização como contínuo um, distinguimos entre "organização entitativa", ou seja, graus de organizacionalidade no nível da entidade e "organização estrutural", ou seja, uma combinação de elementos de organizacionalidade. Essa abordagem constitui um importante desenvolvimento para a Teoria das Organizações, pois nos ajuda a analisar e a complexa camada e o entrelaçamento das ordens sociais dentro, de fora, entre elas, e como organização, e identificar futuras pesquisas sobre o aninhamento da organização e a manutenção dos limites organizacionais.

This research note documents the initial findings of an ongoing ethnographic study at a fire and emergency service. This particular organization has become a focus of attention because of its skilled coordination of handling large‐scale organized events in cooperation with a large number of other organizations, thereby increasing their reliability. First of all, we will introduce the case and our observations, then discuss our findings against the backdrop of high‐reliability theory. We use these findings to characterize high‐reliability networks.

The literature on collaborative governance has generated several comprehensive models detailing the conditions which collaborations must meet to achieve collaborative performance. The importance of each separate condition – such as the presence of incentives to participate, appropriate institutional designs, or facilitative leadership – has been validated in various studies. How all of these conditions interact with each other, and whether all of the conditions need to be present to achieve performance, is less well understood. Leveraging the rich resource of the newly created Collaborative Governance Case Database, this article explores the different pathways to performance used by 26 local collaborations. The analysis shows that the presence of strong incentives for partners to collaborate is a crucial condition for success; almost all performing cases shared this starting point. Performance was then achieved by combining strong incentives with either clear institutional design (e.g. explicit rules, transparent decision-making) or with intensive collaborative processes (e.g. face-to-face dialogue, knowledge sharing). This analysis shows that the current models for collaborative governance can serve as roadmaps, laying out all of the different conditions than may be important, but that collaborations can follow different routes to reach their objectives.

AbstractAs administrations increasingly rely on interorganizational networks to organize public service provision, this article inspects the role resourcing plays in the way managers working in networks cope in the face of extreme events. Using comparative analyses of fieldwork in the context of two emergency service networks in two major cities in Germany and the US, we introduce the concept of resource transposition. This concept holds the potential to explain why and how networks might perform well in situations that drain its central participants' resources. We highlight the relevance of four practices: resource (re)production; resource administration through integration; resource administration through centralization; resource support. We derive a set of propositions underlining the usefulness of the concept of resource transposition.

AbstractA wide range of actors are seeking to democratize energy systems. In the collaborative governance process of energy system transitions to net zero, however, many energy democracy concepts are watered down or abandoned entirely. Using five renewable energy case studies, we first explore the diversity of energy democratizing system challengers and bottom-up actors. Secondly, we analyze the role of conflict and challenges arising from the subsequent collaborative governance process and identify what appear to be blind spots in the CG literature. Our case studies on Berlin (GER), Jena (GER), Kalmar (SWE), Minneapolis (US) and Southeast England (UK) include different types of policy processes and actors. They suggest that actors championing energy democracy principles play an important role in opening participation in the early stages of collaborative energy transition governance. As collaborative governance progresses, participation tends to be increasingly restricted. We conclude that collaborative processes by themselves are insufficient in maintaining energy democracy principles in the energy transition. These require institutional embedding of participative facilitation and consensus building. The Kalmar case study as our only successful example of energy democracy suggests that a more intermediated and service-oriented approach to energy provision can create a business case for democratizing energy provision through collaborative governance.

Hochwasser, Brände, Stromausfälle oder Vandalismus – Kulturgüter können durch verschiedene Ereignisse gefährdet oder gar zerstört werden. Die Notfallvorsorge für Kulturgüter gehört zwar zu den Kernaufgaben von Kultureinrichtungen, doch nach wie vor fehlen vielerorts die nötigen Ressourcen sowie eine konsequente Koordination aller für einen effektiven Kulturgutschutz notwendigen Partner. Das Diskussionspapier "Organisatorische Voraussetzungen der Notfallvorsorge für Kulturgüter" fasst die bereits etablierten Methoden zur Notfallvorsorge zusammen und gibt Empfehlungen zur Weiterentwicklung.