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Walter Powell, Achim Oberg, Valeska Korff, Carrie Oelberger and Karina Kloos deal with the processes and mechanisms of organizational change and field transformation. On the one hand, this is a classical topic of neo-institutional theory and research, and the authors make use of an impressive array of knowledge from previous studies here. On the other hand, and based on that ‘intellectual history’ as the authors call it, they conduct a highly innovative study by focusing on new organizational forms and field transformation in the nonprofit sector. To underline innovativeness, the authors have developed a web crawler in order to determine change by analyzing organizations’ websites and their references to other organizations through hyperlinks. By doing so, they identify the diversity and dynamics of organizational fields whose boundaries are becoming increasingly porous.

Achim Oberg und Valeska Korff zeigen in diesem Beitrag auf, was relationales Denken ist und welche Formen es im Neo-Institutionalismus annimmt, da sie überzeugt sind, dass relationale Ideen die theoretische und empirische Weiterentwicklung dieses Ansatzes unterstützen können. Ihr Ausgangspunkt liegt in der allgemeinen Annahme, dass sich ein Phänomen in seine Elemente und Beziehungen zerlegen lässt. Auf diese Weise wird es möglich, danach zu fragen, inwieweit die Eigenschaften der Elemente und die Komposition der Beziehungen zwischen den Elementen etwas zum Verständnis oder gar zur Erklärung des Phänomens beitragen. Durch die Betonung der Bedeutung von Beziehungen bilden Eigenschaften von Elementen wie zum Beispiel Charakteristika, Motive und Handlungen von Akteuren nicht mehr den alleinigen Fokus der Überlegungen und Analysen. Vielmehr werden deren Verhältnis zueinander, d.h. die Beziehungsgefüge, in denen z.B. Akteure stehen, und die sich daraus ergebenden Strukturen und Dynamiken berücksichtigt.

Introducing the forum section, this article explores how public organizations cope with wicked problems. Though many of the most pressing policy problems today such as counter-terrorism or migration require comprehensive and multi-dimensional responses, much of the public administration literature still focuses on single dimensions of public tasks and selected organizational responses such as centralization. This article argues that coping with wicked problems requires addressing issues of knowledge, coordination and strategy. The article focuses on those three core areas of organizational activity and asks what role they play in the organizational responses of contested public administration. Keywords: public organizations, wicked problems, knowledge, coordination, strategy ----- Herausgeforderte offentliche Verwaltungen: Wissen, Koordination, Strategie Zusammenfassung Als Einfuhrung des Themenschwerpunkts untersucht dieser Beitrag wie offentliche Organisationen mit vertrackten Problemen umgehen. Obgleich viele drangende Policy-Probleme wie die Bekampfung des Terrorismus oder Migration umfassende, sektor- und ebenenubergreifende administrative Bearbeitung erfordern, konzentriert sich die verwaltungswissenschaftliche Literatur nach wie vor auf einzelne Dimensionen offentlicher Aufgaben und ausgewahlte organisationale Antworten wie etwa die Zentralisierung von Kompetenzen. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass Fragen von Koordination, Wissen und Strategiebildung zentral sind, um den Herausforderungen durch vertrackte Probleme zu begegnen. Der Beitrag ruckt diese drei Kernbereiche organisationaler Aktivitaten in den Mittelpunkt und fragt nach deren Rolle in der Bearbeitung vertrackter Probleme in der offentlichen Verwaltung. Schlagworte: Offentliche Verwaltung, vertrackte Probleme, Wissen, Koordination, Strategie ----- Bibliographie: Daviter, Falk/Hustedt, Thurid/Korff, Valeska: Contested Public Organizations: Knowledge, Coordination, Strategy, dms, 1-2016, S. 3-14. https://doi.org/10.3224/dms.v9i1.23637

EDITOR'S SUMMARY A novel approach to evaluating the impact of nonprofit organizations is proposed, combining social network and linguistic analysis. The authors examined data from nonprofit organizations' websites and site hyperlinks to other organizations. They identified 369 sites of organizations that measure social impact and captured inbound and outbound weblinks to construct a relational structure. Keywords from the sites were categorized as reflecting scientific, civil society or managerial domains and located the entity in a triangular semantic space. While most organizations fell into one of the three communities, some were in an interstitial space spanning these domains. The interstitial organizations used a mix of terminology, were densely interconnected and connected extensively to organizations across domains, but there were few direct connections among the three domains. The resulting map integrates cultural and relational dimensions and reveals hidden patterns and clusters. The approach can be used with other social systems combining rich text with relational data.

Organizational fields are shaped by both the relations that organizations forge and the language they express. The structure and discourse of organizational fields have been studied before, but seldom in combination. We offer a methodological approach that integrates relations and expressions into a comprehensive visualization. By mapping networks and discourse as co-constitutive, the method illuminates the mechanisms active in organizational fields. We utilize social impact evaluation as an issue field shaped by the presence of an interstitial community, and compare this structure with simulated alternative field configurations. The simulations reveal that variation in organizations’ openness to adopting concepts from adjacent meaning systems alters field configurations: differentiation manifests under conditions of low overall openness, whereas moderate receptivity produces hybridizations of discourses and sometimes the emergence of an interstitial community that bridges domains. If certain organizations are open while others remain focused on their original discourse, then we observe integration in the discursive domain of the invariant organizations. The observations from the simulations are represented by visualizing organizational fields as topographies of meaning, onto which interorganizational relations are layered. This representation localizes organizations and their interactions in a cultural space while emphasizing how meanings of relationships and organizational expressions vary with different field configurations. By adding meaning to network data, the resulting maps open new perspectives for institutional research on the adaptation, translation, and diffusion of concepts.

Different strategies exist to exert influence in the context of networked social structures: brokers regulate flows of information; social movements create frames for mobilization; and high-tech clusters form linkages to advance innovation. This paper introduces interstitial communities as a fourth form of networked governance that brings together a composite of such strategies. As collectives of organizations that have access to multiple cultural repertoires, are internally integrated, and have an external reach into adjoining domains, interstitial communities can exert substantial influence over discourses and relational structures. A web-based empirical analysis of the debate on social impact evaluation illustrates how organizations at the interstice between science, management, and civil society reassemble cultural content and facilitate flows of ideas across domain boundaries.

This paper compares the ethnic (indigenous) movements in northern Thailand with the violent conflict in the southernmost provinces of the country, and considers how these movements relate to both the state and the local population. The construction of the nation as an 'imagined community' is a project of the national political elites. Similarly, the construction of an ethnic identity emerges from the local elites. This implies that national integration and minority formation are simultaneous processes, in which national elites enforcing a national identity confront local elites constructing minority identities. The potential conflict is reduced through co-opting the local elites into the ruling system. This has not been the case for the ethnic minorities of the north. There they either define themselves as representatives of the minorities, or monopolise administrative positions established through decentralisation policies. In the south the conflict in which the local elites lost their power positions dates back decades, if not centuries. There too co-optation did not take place until the 1980s. Then a relative pacification set in, when possibilities for political participation for these elites improved. The conflict escalated again when these possibilities were reduced after the election in 2001 with a new government policy.

High employee turnover rates constitute a major challenge to effective aid provision. This study examines how features of humanitarian work and aid workers' individual characteristics affect retention within one humanitarian organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Holland. The study extends existing research by providing new theoretical explanations of employment opportunities and constraints and by engaging in the first large-scale quantitative analysis of aid worker retention. Using a database of field staff (N=1,955), a logistic regression is performed of the likelihood of reenlistment after a first mission. The findings demonstrate that only 40 per cent of employees reenlist for a second mission with MSF Holland, and that workplace location and security situation, age, and gender have no significant effect. Individuals are less likely to reenlist if they returned early from the first mission for a personal reason, are in a relationship, are medical doctors, or if they come from highly developed countries. The paper reflects on the findings in the light of policy.