The role of management in universities has become more complex over the last decades because of changes in legislation, economy, student intake, introduction of new performance indicators for research quality/relevance and output, etc. The Bologna process of making the policies of higher education more similar have had strong effects on Nordic universities. Scholars argue that Denmark is an “extreme case” as the reforms of the higher educational system have gone further than in most of the other European countries. This chapter examines the way in which these dilemmas has affected the management of Copenhagen Business School. The chapter discusses pros and cons of implementing key performance indicators to measure research quality. Throughout the chapter, the author alternates between drawing on her insights from her position as the Vice Dean of Research at Copenhagen Business School.

Patient involvement is a prominent policy aim in modern health care. Today, mental health services employ peer workers (PWs) who have personal experiences with mental illness. Based on 22 interviews with PWs and 26 audio recordings of real-life consultations, we show how PWs talk about their personal experiences as professional qualifications. Furthermore, we demonstrate how in real-life encounters, PWs and patients convert personal experiences into a professional approach through an interactionist role play that balance PWs role as former patients and current professionals. Our analysis shows that PWs combine the personal pronoun 'I' (stressing that it is personal) with the indefinite pronoun 'one' (referring to generalised patient experiences) when they recount illness experiences. This convey that PWs engage with mental illness as both a personal and professional topic. In addition, the analysis shows that PWs (and patients) use professional clues to manifest PWs' positions as professionals. Overall, the article demonstrates that instead of focussing on authentic patient relationships, as previous research has done, it is beneficial to investigate peer work from a symbolic interactionist approach revealing how PWs and patients skilfully manoeuvre the contradictions embedded in the PWs' dual role as former patients and current professionals.

This article explores the performance of agency within the context of unequal power resources and structural constraint. Based on 23 video-recorded placement meetings in three homeless shelters, we find that participants' agency is the outcome of both collaboration and resistance. To avoid interaction that fails to empower, social actors engage in "repair work" and face-saving practices. When clients display "wrong face"-that is, bring problems to the table that are not considered "reasonable"-then the service providers engage in "repair work." Participants turn conflict into collaborative agency because interactions that fail to deliver mutually empowering forms of agency have costs for both: clients' problems are not solved, and service providers fail to reach organizational goals.

This article explores the interaction of two forms of authority: organisational authority and citizen’s authority. The concept of citizen’s authority derives from Pettit, and organisational authority has theoretical roots in Weber. Citizen’s authority entails the right to be the author of your own life decisions, while organisational authority is the right of an actor to speak on behalf of an organisation. With inspiration from Goffman and Austin, we take a performative ethnographic approach to the analysis of 23 video-recorded consultations with homeless individuals (23), their family members (3) and service providers (43) in three Danish shelters. While those with organisational authority (staff) can prevail over those with only citizen’s authority (clients), they typically refrain from doing so in an overt manner. We demonstrate that social actors are skilled at performing different kinds of authority simultaneously; they draw upon conflicting identities as clients, professionals and citizens in a changing front-stage and back-stage environment. The homeless and staff deploy rules and procedures as well as emotion and laughter in their encounters with each other.

This article seeks to develop our understanding of the agency of vulnerable groups who at first sight may not seem to have much agency in their lives. It explores the co-constructed nature of agency in three Danish homeless shelters. Unlike earlier interview-based studies, our research is based on naturalistic data drawn from 23 video-recorded placement meetings. Using concepts from Goffman, we examine how versions of the neediness and worthiness of homeless people are negotiated verbally and bodily between staff and clients. We find that homeless people have to juggle two partly contradictory roles when they are given or take the roles of either a (active) citizen or a (passive) client. Clientship is actively negotiated by both parties and demonstrates the agency of homeless people: they can collaborate with (as clients) or challenge (as citizens) the staff's attempts to formulate solutions to their troubles. We further examine how the professional ideology of client centredness affects the meeting between the two parties. However, we show that, like any discourse, client centredness has no intrinsic meaning and is played out by actors in very different ways. In work with the homeless, the discourse of client centredness is related to discourses of 'neediness', 'worthiness' and 'value for money' that define agency in different ways and make three different client positions available: the resolute client, the acquiescent client and the passive client.

This article examines how social workers and managers perceive meaningful work and expertise in six care and treatment facilities in Denmark. Based on 29 interviews with social workers (n=22) and managers (n=7), the article shows how New Public Management-inspired tools such as scoring schemas align with social work values such as “client-centeredness” and working with the individual welfare recipient face-to-face. The article finds that fitting social work into organizational schemas changes the work practices of social workers and also the way members of this profession define meaningful work and expertise. In addition, the article also finds that scoring schemas cause conflicts among social workers regarding the character of expertise when values of social work (to meet a welfare recipient’s need) must be aligned with NPM-inspired values of organizations (to meet managers’ demand for documentation).