Staff councils in hospitals as co-managers? A blind spot in codetermination research

Abstract

New Public Management (NPM) has triggered far-reaching transformations within hospital sectors worldwide and professionalized hospital management has put employee representation under pressure. In this context the current state of research points out that codetermination actors are taking increasingly over the role of co-managers. To test this hypothesis, the cognitive and normative structures in the mind-sets of staff council members at four German university hospitals have been reconstructed on the bases of problem-centered interviews. The results show that the structural change in the German hospital sector affects employee representation in university clinics extensively. However, there is no clear-cut development towards a co-management orientation within the mind-sets of the staff council members. On the contrary, co-management is rejected in varying degrees. The reason for that being is that staff councils in German university hospitals, in addition to their institutional codetermination function, see themselves closely linked to the institutional mission of providing a public good. This is firmly embedded in the cognitive and normative structures of the mindsets. Although the study focusses on a very specific area of co-determination, it exemplifies how the political agenda of the NPM can irritate and break institutionalized patterns in industrial relations.