Cluster Management Institutionalization: Social Authorization and Local Translation in Public-Sector Day Care

This article explores a new management form – cluster management – in Danish public sector day care. Although cluster management has been widely adopted in Danish day care at the municipality level, it has attracted only sparse research attention. We use theoretical insights from Scandinavian institutionalism together with a longitudinal case-based inquiry into how cluster management has entered and penetrated the management practices of day care in Denmark. We demonstrate how cluster management became widely adopted in the day care field not only because of its intrinsic properties but also because of how it was legitimized as a “ready-to-use” management model. Further, our account reveals how cluster management translated into considerably different local variants as it travelled into specific organizations. However, these processes have not occurred sequentially with cluster management first legitimized at the field level, then spread, and finally translated into action in the adopting organizations. Instead, we observed entangled field and organizational-level processes. Accordingly, we argue that cluster management institutionalization is most readily understood by simultaneously investigating translation activities in specific organizations, and the social construction work taking place in the broader organizational field.