Living under harsh conditions - finding your way as a public sector manager

Abstract Harsh conditions for executing management can be a sensible interpretation of the daily managerial work for many public sector managers. This is an argument we, based on teaching and research, rely on from talking with a considerable number of managers in Danish municipalities, regions, state, universities and hospitals.
The paper is based on four personal, micro-level stories told by managers in hospitals. The stories revolve around how they in their daily working ´inner life´ try to understand, cope with, and develop new ways to improve their work under what they in general see as increasingly harsh conditions created by a stream of structural changes and budget cuts.
It is about how managers handle daily tasks and experiment with ways to match the ongoing or-ganizational and structural changes in hospitals, and how this inspires the way they experience the actual conditions as managers and the organizational and institutional framework they work within.
The theoretical inspiration is drawn from research on management: Mintzberg and Pettigrew, from strategy-in-practice: Chia and Holt, and from relational leadership: Cunliffe, Hosking, Shotter, and Gergen. The purpose of the paper is to create micro and practice-based pictures of ´the inner life´ of public management of today, and how middle managers in Danish public hospitals handle structural change.