Papers by Christof Brandtner
Global Perspectives, 2022
Introduction to Global Perspectives special collection: The Civic Life of Cities around the World... more Introduction to Global Perspectives special collection: The Civic Life of Cities around the World In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society? Our co-produced approach to studying civil societies through a place-based, organizational lens provides fresh answers to perennial questions about voice, accountability, and embeddedness. The six articles in this collection on the civic life of cities draw on more than 1,400 interviews with organizational leaders in San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, and Vienna. Moving beyond the "big theories" of civil society, the articles illustrate the value of our dual emphasis on place and organizations by showing how comparisons of the people, practices, and partnerships of civil society organizations enable new middle-range theories of civil society. This approach promises to offer rich comparative insights into similarities and differences among organizations around the globe.
Journal of Business Ethics, 2023
Commons enjoy recognition as an alternative to the dichotomy of state and market. In contrast to ... more Commons enjoy recognition as an alternative to the dichotomy of state and market. In contrast to liberal market theorists who frame the commons as resource-based, we build on alternative and critical conceptions that describe the commons as processual, social, and inherently relational. Our analysis adds to these accounts an articulation of the contemporary commons as "social infrastructure" in the urban spatial conditions where the social processes of commoning take place. We argue that the relational features of urban commons depend on social interactions and cross-sector partnerships in physical places that promote social cohesion, suggesting that the urban commons fold together the spatial and social in hitherto undertheorized ways. To theorize this relationship, we articulate the idea of the relational urban commons as sites of social interaction and relationship building-social infrastructure. This conceptualization suggests that the commons can be governed indirectly by enabling access, participation, and partnerships across sectors, fostering mixed uses and the provision of maintenance and repair. As a result, the commons are both maintained by and conducive to place-based cross-sector partnerships, anchored in place in ways that transcend resources, issues, and ownership.
American Journal of Sociology, 2022
Why do some cities adopt practices to resolve social and environmen- tal problems more rapidly a... more Why do some cities adopt practices to resolve social and environmen- tal problems more rapidly and extensively than others? Although dif- fusion studies emphasize administrative adoption by central authori- ties, a range of private and public organizations are involved in the distributed adoption of innovations. The author argues that variation in the adoption of urban innovations results from persistent differences in cities’ organizational communities. An econometric analysis of the geographic dispersion of green construction practices and policies dem- onstrates that cities with greater civic capacity, where values-oriented organizations recognize and tackle social problems, see quicker and more extensive adoption. The effect is largest early in the diffusion process because nonprofits are themselves early adopters of green construction. Municipal policies later legitimate green building, but they follow prior individual organizations. The sequential framework of distributed and administrative adoption contributes to the under- standing of the institutional determinants of responses to climate change, nonprofits as catalysts of urban innovation, and the conse- quences of urban governance on an intercity scale.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 2021
Decoupling theory suggests inconsistencies in what nonprofits do and what they claim to do. Accou... more Decoupling theory suggests inconsistencies in what nonprofits do and what they claim to do. Accountability is a potential antidote to such inconsistencies in the nonprofit sector. To test whether different features of accountability prevent decoupling, I examine the divergence in statements about managerialism among nonprofit organizations in a major U.S. metropolitan area. The analysis compares a survey of organizations to public discourse based on five-million-word website text. Professionalism and evaluation indeed prevent organizations from embellishing their discourse. However, inconsistencies between managerial practices and managerial discourse remain frequent: Organizations continue to present symbolic displays of managerialism to the general public, particularly when their missions are tangible. Furthermore, ratings generate inconsistencies by leading organizations to downplay managerial practices. This study develops an institutional understanding of managerial talk and action, shows that the problem of decoupling in the "age of accountability" is multifaceted, and has implications for the estimation of nonprofit practices using automated text analysis.
The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, 2020
Organization Studies, 2023
Although many contemporary organizations face institutional pressures to embrace open organizing ... more Although many contemporary organizations face institutional pressures to embrace open organizing principles, some defer or decline the call. We examine how existing bureaucratic practices shape organizations’ initial steps towards openness to explain variation in substantive openness in the practice of management. Scrutinizing the assumption that bureaucratic organizations operate behind closed doors, we study the turn to openness in a single metropolitan area with heterogeneous management practices and shared calls for greater transparency and inclusion. Econometric analyses paired with in-depth interviews reveal that more bureaucratic organizations first encountered such ideals of openness because they were quicker to use digital communication tools. How open organizations are managed results from the repurposing of existing practices in pursuit of openness. The turn to openness can be understood as a transformation of existing bureaucratic management instead of de-novo adoption of new practices. Our study illuminates how bureaucratic management counterintuitively enables some organizations to become more open, and offers support for repurposing as a mechanism of change in the transformation of an organizational field.
Private foundations in the United States (US) are powerful actors in contemporary
society. Their... more Private foundations in the United States (US) are powerful actors in contemporary
society. Their influence stems in part from their lack of accountability – they operate free from
market pressures or finding sources of funding, and they are not subject to formal democratic
systems of checks and balances such as elections or mandatory community oversight. In recent
decades, foundations have become increasingly influential in shaping public policy governing
core social services. In US education policy, for example, the influence of private foundations
has reached an unprecedented scope and scale. Although economic and electoral accountability
mechanisms are absent, foundations are aware that their elite status is rooted in a wider
acceptance of their image as promoters of the public good. They are incentivized to maintain
their role as “white hat” actors and, in balancing their policy goals with the desire to avoid social
sanctions, the ways in which they exert influence are shaped and limited by institutional
processes. Drawing on rare elite interview data and archival analyses from five leading education
funders, we observe that foundations seek to sustain their credibility by complying with legal
regulations and by drawing on cultural norms of participation and science to legitimize their
policy activities.
Chapter 14 in Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory
This chapter advances a recursive view of organizations as both sites of important social outcome... more This chapter advances a recursive view of organizations as both sites of important social outcomes, such as inequality, persistence, change, and embeddedness, and drivers of them. Society and people configure organizations, and organizations shape and reproduce society and the lives of people. We illuminate the mechanisms through which these relations co-evolve, highlighting four bundles of social processes that operate inside and outside organizations: 1) discrimination and formalization, 2) institutionalization and imprinting, 3) socializing and mobilization, and 4) learning and access. We contend that organizational theory offers insights to many sociological subfields, and we encourage scholars across the discipline to re-engage with organizational analysis.
The webpages of organizations are both a form of representation and a type of narrative. They en... more The webpages of organizations are both a form of representation and a type of narrative. They entertain, persuade, express a point of view, and provide a means to organize collective action and economic exchange. Increasingly, webpages are the primary point of access between an organization and its environment. An organization’s online presence offers a major new source of rich information about organizations. In this paper, we develop three perspectives on websites from an organizational point of view: as identity projects, tools, and relational maps. We draw on data from the online and offline presences of ‘‘brick and mortar’’ nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area to both illustrate how a digital transformation shaped these organizations and identify a host of new methods that can be used to study organizations using webpages. Finally, we reflect on both the strengths of these new sources of data as well as possible limitations and conclude with theoretical implications for organizational scholars.
Over the past two decades, research has emphasised a shift from city government to urban governan... more Over the past two decades, research has emphasised a shift from city government to urban governance. Such a shift brings about its very own challenges, namely governance gaps, uncertain configurations in governance and a limited capacity to act. In this paper, we argue that the concurrent rise of strategy documents in city administration addresses these challenges. Our central claim is that strategy documents can be understood as a distinct discursive device through which local governments enact aspired governance configurations. We illustrate our argument empirically using two prominent examples that, while showing similar features and characteristics, are anchored in different administrative traditions and institutional frameworks: the city administrations of Sydney, Australia, and Vienna, Austria. The contribution of the paper is to show how strategy documents enact governance configurations along four core dimensions: the setting in space and time, the definition of the public, the framing of the res publica and legitimacy issues. Moreover, our comparative analysis of Sydney and Vienna gives evidence of differences in govern- ance configurations enacted through strategy documents.
This is a comment on a 2013 federal budget law reform in Austria, which introduces strategic perf... more This is a comment on a 2013 federal budget law reform in Austria, which introduces strategic performance management to what is known to be a typical Weberian bureaucracy.
Public administrations are increasingly controlled via outputs and outcomes rather than by the traditional allocation of financial resources and staff. The Austrian Federal Budget Law Reform of 2013 also reflects this trend. Does the focus on the performance of public administration transform the democratic state into “Austria, Inc.”? According to the critics of management-inspired reforms in the public sector, democracy is threatened to degenerate to a post-democratic spectacle with technocratic forms of governance. In this context, the article dis- cusses the public administration reforms that took place both globally and in Austria, and presents the concept of performance orientation. Next, the “quality of democracy” is operationalized in a six-dimensional analytical framework, based on which we critically discuss the political-democratic implications of outcome orientation. The paper concludes that the outcome orientation breaks with the logic of Weberian bureaucracy to some extent; the expected effects on the legal state and the possibility of decoupling and instrumental rationalization are outlined.
This paper aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding a worldwide trend toward mana... more This paper aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding a worldwide trend toward managerialism and strategic performance orientation in city governments, and possible effects on local democracy.
Globalization involves a number of eco-social challenges for cities, which manifest themselves differently on the local level. Through their enormous economic, political and demographic significance, cities play an extraordinarily important role in the reflexive relationship between the global and the local, which Robertson (1995) describes as glocalization. In consideration of the concept of urban governance, this paper discusses the effects of global dynamics on the local eco-social problem solving capacity in cities. The paper draws five conclusions: (1) Global development goes hand in hand with isomorphic change on the local level. (2) Institutional changes in cities have highlighted the importance of the concept of urban governance. (3) Urban governance has, first and foremost, elitist tendencies – the dogma of the entrepreneurial city has gained ground. (4) Urban governance, at the same time, brings along egalitarian tendencies – the inclusive city is the conceptual counterpart of thenentrepreneurial city. (5) Eco-social glocalization is a matter of values.
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Papers by Christof Brandtner
society. Their influence stems in part from their lack of accountability – they operate free from
market pressures or finding sources of funding, and they are not subject to formal democratic
systems of checks and balances such as elections or mandatory community oversight. In recent
decades, foundations have become increasingly influential in shaping public policy governing
core social services. In US education policy, for example, the influence of private foundations
has reached an unprecedented scope and scale. Although economic and electoral accountability
mechanisms are absent, foundations are aware that their elite status is rooted in a wider
acceptance of their image as promoters of the public good. They are incentivized to maintain
their role as “white hat” actors and, in balancing their policy goals with the desire to avoid social
sanctions, the ways in which they exert influence are shaped and limited by institutional
processes. Drawing on rare elite interview data and archival analyses from five leading education
funders, we observe that foundations seek to sustain their credibility by complying with legal
regulations and by drawing on cultural norms of participation and science to legitimize their
policy activities.
Public administrations are increasingly controlled via outputs and outcomes rather than by the traditional allocation of financial resources and staff. The Austrian Federal Budget Law Reform of 2013 also reflects this trend. Does the focus on the performance of public administration transform the democratic state into “Austria, Inc.”? According to the critics of management-inspired reforms in the public sector, democracy is threatened to degenerate to a post-democratic spectacle with technocratic forms of governance. In this context, the article dis- cusses the public administration reforms that took place both globally and in Austria, and presents the concept of performance orientation. Next, the “quality of democracy” is operationalized in a six-dimensional analytical framework, based on which we critically discuss the political-democratic implications of outcome orientation. The paper concludes that the outcome orientation breaks with the logic of Weberian bureaucracy to some extent; the expected effects on the legal state and the possibility of decoupling and instrumental rationalization are outlined.
Globalization involves a number of eco-social challenges for cities, which manifest themselves differently on the local level. Through their enormous economic, political and demographic significance, cities play an extraordinarily important role in the reflexive relationship between the global and the local, which Robertson (1995) describes as glocalization. In consideration of the concept of urban governance, this paper discusses the effects of global dynamics on the local eco-social problem solving capacity in cities. The paper draws five conclusions: (1) Global development goes hand in hand with isomorphic change on the local level. (2) Institutional changes in cities have highlighted the importance of the concept of urban governance. (3) Urban governance has, first and foremost, elitist tendencies – the dogma of the entrepreneurial city has gained ground. (4) Urban governance, at the same time, brings along egalitarian tendencies – the inclusive city is the conceptual counterpart of thenentrepreneurial city. (5) Eco-social glocalization is a matter of values.
society. Their influence stems in part from their lack of accountability – they operate free from
market pressures or finding sources of funding, and they are not subject to formal democratic
systems of checks and balances such as elections or mandatory community oversight. In recent
decades, foundations have become increasingly influential in shaping public policy governing
core social services. In US education policy, for example, the influence of private foundations
has reached an unprecedented scope and scale. Although economic and electoral accountability
mechanisms are absent, foundations are aware that their elite status is rooted in a wider
acceptance of their image as promoters of the public good. They are incentivized to maintain
their role as “white hat” actors and, in balancing their policy goals with the desire to avoid social
sanctions, the ways in which they exert influence are shaped and limited by institutional
processes. Drawing on rare elite interview data and archival analyses from five leading education
funders, we observe that foundations seek to sustain their credibility by complying with legal
regulations and by drawing on cultural norms of participation and science to legitimize their
policy activities.
Public administrations are increasingly controlled via outputs and outcomes rather than by the traditional allocation of financial resources and staff. The Austrian Federal Budget Law Reform of 2013 also reflects this trend. Does the focus on the performance of public administration transform the democratic state into “Austria, Inc.”? According to the critics of management-inspired reforms in the public sector, democracy is threatened to degenerate to a post-democratic spectacle with technocratic forms of governance. In this context, the article dis- cusses the public administration reforms that took place both globally and in Austria, and presents the concept of performance orientation. Next, the “quality of democracy” is operationalized in a six-dimensional analytical framework, based on which we critically discuss the political-democratic implications of outcome orientation. The paper concludes that the outcome orientation breaks with the logic of Weberian bureaucracy to some extent; the expected effects on the legal state and the possibility of decoupling and instrumental rationalization are outlined.
Globalization involves a number of eco-social challenges for cities, which manifest themselves differently on the local level. Through their enormous economic, political and demographic significance, cities play an extraordinarily important role in the reflexive relationship between the global and the local, which Robertson (1995) describes as glocalization. In consideration of the concept of urban governance, this paper discusses the effects of global dynamics on the local eco-social problem solving capacity in cities. The paper draws five conclusions: (1) Global development goes hand in hand with isomorphic change on the local level. (2) Institutional changes in cities have highlighted the importance of the concept of urban governance. (3) Urban governance has, first and foremost, elitist tendencies – the dogma of the entrepreneurial city has gained ground. (4) Urban governance, at the same time, brings along egalitarian tendencies – the inclusive city is the conceptual counterpart of thenentrepreneurial city. (5) Eco-social glocalization is a matter of values.