ODA seminar by Morten Møller Poulsen, BTECH

The ODA Section invites you to a seminar where Morten Møller Poulsen, Department of Business Development and Technology, Herning, will give the following presentation:

The logics of performance funding: Alluring pressures and situated tensions in basic education

Abstract
This paper applies institutional logics to examine the implementation of a performance-funding programme for Danish public schools. The programme introduced a potential bonus aimed at incentivising improved educational outcomes for academically low-performing students, thereby creating an alluring pressure. We investigate the implementation of the programme through compromising and differentiation between an incumbent educational logic and the programme’s intruding economic logic, drawing on a qualitative study of a Danish municipality’s responses using semi-structured interviews with administrators, school managers and teachers. The findings demonstrate how alluring pressure creates tensions between educational and economic logics, where solving some tensions induces new ones. The paper contributes by highlighting different enactments of responses to alluring pressures based on divergent interpretations of accounting technologies and institutional logics. It shows how an accounting technology goes through different translations from policy to influencing front-line personnel, and how responses to allure can involve compromising and manipulation, while also demonstrating the potency of alluring pressures through unsuccessful decoupling.

Everyone is welcome!