Strategic and Enforced Logics Hybridization: An Agency View within French Hospitals and Universities

Abstract

Adopting an agentic positioning, we question and compare competing logics hybridization within French hospitals and universities facing major reforms inspired by new public management. In addition to the resulting forms of hybridization exposed in the literature (accepted or refused), we observe four additional modes: instrumentalized, uncomfortable, reformulated, and suffered. They all reveal the varied manner with which each professional faces reform. However, we develop a new argument: the ways professionals hybridize (or do not) their prevailing logic depends on an overarching mode of hybridization that characterizes the way their organization deals with reform. We identify two contrasting modes: overarching strategic logics hybridization and overarching enforced logics hybridization. They give insight into how actors decouple structure from practices. We contribute to the literature on logics hybridization by first analyzing the role of specific actors who act as either a translator-actor or a closure-actor to respectively facilitate appropriation of the reforms or to protect professionals against the growing dominance of the new logic introduced by the law; and secondly by discussing importance of articulating higher and lower organizational levels all involved in hybridization.

Citation

Grenier, C. and Bernardini-Perinciolo, J. (2016), "Strategic and Enforced Logics Hybridization: An Agency View within French Hospitals and Universities", Towards a Comparative Institutionalism: Forms, Dynamics and Logics Across the Organizational Fields of Health Care and Higher Education (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 45), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 109-144. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20150000045016