Competing Logics in a Hybrid Organisation: ICT service provision in the Italian health care sector

Seminar abstract

The Global Financial Crisis engulfed Europe in 2008 onwards created shocks that impacted widely on health systems and other public service funding.

This seminar presents a paper that reports an investigation of a hybrid ex-state-owned enterprise (ex-SOE) providing ICT (Information and Communication Technology) services in the Italian healthcare sector (in-house provision).

The aim of the presentation is to offer a framing that reflects the concerns expressed in the interdisciplinary literature on hybrid SOEs from management, public administration and, more recently, accounting.

This study operationalises Besharov and Smith's (2014) theoretical model on multiple logics to analyse governance and outcomes of ICT in-house provider. On that, it helps to disentangle notions of centrality and compatibility, which are key elements of the model.

This work builds on extensive textual analysis of regulatory, archival, survey and interview data.

The results show that the combination of hybridity in the form of layering of multiple logics in the healthcare sector (Polzer et al., 2016) create problems for the effectiveness of ICT provision.

This study adds to the debate on hybrid organisations in the case of ex-SOEs and facilitate the understanding and management of hybrids in the public sector.

It is noted that policy-making implications, providing cautionary tales around institutional reorganisation regarding the layered synthesis of logics with these organisations.

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Speaker bio

Laura Maran is an Associate Professor in Management Accounting at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia).

Her research interests are in public sector management and accounting history. Her research seeks to contextualise contemporary public sector management practices by using accounting history to identify the legacy of earlier reforms.

In 2020, she was named as Australia's 'Research Leader in Economic History' by The Australian.

In addition to international collaborations and co-authorships, Laura has externally funded research projects on accounting professionalisation, scenario analysis in disclosure of climate-related risk and opportunities and visualisation in accounting. 

Laura has written several publications, both in English and Italian, most of which are in ERA and 2019-ABDC high ranked journals and 2019-Scimago Quartile: Q1, such as;

• Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal
• Critical Perspectives on Accounting
• British Accounting Review
• Financial Accountability and Management 
• Accounting History

Laura is joint editor of Accounting History, and editorial board member of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal.

She is co-guest editor of the Accounting History 2020 Special Issue, Histories of accounting in educational institutions. and of the upcoming special issue of Critical Perspectives on Accounting Critical Perspective in Italian.

She is also member of the Asia-Pacific Critical Accounting Research Network, and senior member the Italian scholarly bodies that are involved in accounting journal ranking and research guidelines at the ministerial level.

This international engagement led her to the role of co-Deputy Head of Research and Innovation in the School of Accounting, RMIT University in 2018.

Since 2014, she has led the enhancement of professionally accredited higher education programmes such as the Master of Professional Accounting (MPA), which uses work-integrated learning to build students' confidence and initiative.

For her leadership and innovation in teaching and learning she has also received several College of Business teaching recognition awards and the University teaching award in 2017.