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"Exploring the mechanisms underlying performance comparisons, Performance Comparison and Organizational Service Provision investigates how such assessments shape hospitals' service provision and medical professionals' work. With a focus on U.S. health care, this study outlines how medical quality was defined and compared in the hospital sector from the late 19th century to the present. Developing a novel theoretical framework to investigate performance comparisons, several different forms of internal and external performance assessments are contrasted throughout this period. The transformative effects of these comparisons on hospitals' relationships to patients, insurers, regulators, and staff are analyzed and their ramifications for current hospital care are explored. Drawing on this analysis, the book examines the controversial nature of these measures and the struggles among hospital managers, patients, physicians, and policy makers to determine hospital quality. Affording a deeper understanding of how performance comparisons influence organizational service provision, the book will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of fields including organization studies, accountability and evaluation, health care, and policy research as well as practitioners in hospital care and management"--

Die moderne Gesellschaft übertrifft hinsichtlich ihrer ausgeprägten Leistungs- und Vergleichsorientierung alle ihre Vorläufer. Dabei ist jedoch zu prüfen, ob dies gleichermaßen für alle gesellschaftlichen Bereiche gilt, welche Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten sich beobachten lassen. Die Beiträge des Bandes beschreiben Leistungsvergleiche bzw. Verhältnisse von Leistung und Vergleich in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Teilsystemen und beleuchten es zugleich an ausgewählten sozialen Strukturbildungen wie Staaten, Organisationen oder Professionen. Gefragt wird neben den jeweiligen Funktionen und Folgen auch nach Brüchen, Konflikten und Grenzen der leistungsbezogenen Vergleichslogik. Der Inhalt · Ausdifferenzierung und Funktionen von Vergleichen · Steuerung und Kontrolle durch Leistungsvergleiche · Einschränkungen und Grenzen Die Zielgruppe Sozialwissenschaftlerinnen und Sozialwissenschaftler Der Autor und die Autorin Dipl.-Soz. Christopher Dorn ist Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Lehrgebiet Soziologie III, Organisationssoziologie und qualitative Methoden, an der FernUniversität in Hagen. Dr. Veronika Tacke ist Professorin für Organisationssoziologie an der Universität Bielefeld

Society overflows with waste, and waste and discard studies emphasize the social construction and contingency of waste, outlining it as the negatively valued. However, organizational sociology currently does not reflect these insights and rarely accounts for waste. Therefore, this article asks what kind of theory is required to capture waste in organized contexts. By searching for waste in Scott and Davis' well-accepted three perspectives on organizations (as rational, natural, or open systems), it becomes evident that each perspective conceptualizes waste based on its theoretical conception of organizations (rational: disorder; natural: disintegration; open: overdetermination) that is mirrored in different accounts of waste. While these perspectives assign negative value to different organizational conditions, they offer little insight into how organizations themselves disvalue entities and generate waste. To overcome this shortcoming, the article introduces an integrative perspective that incorporates the three prevalent perspectives, conceptualizing organizations as closed and open systems (COS) based on Luhmann's system concept and observation theory. The COS perspective explains how organizations construct waste through their selective indication of values and disvalues. It thereby identifies waste as a contingent yet inevitable part of any organization and shifts attention from the study of symptomatic waste to its underlying origins.