Shadow Management: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democratic Legitimacy through Ombudsmen with Case Studies from Swedish Higher Education
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to review this paper. The topic is of great importance in NPM literature. However, I found a theoretical weakness as to how the author develops the research gap. The research question is not clear. The research gap should be constructed through the discussion in the literature review and/or theoretical rationales. However, I would like to see the authors strengthen the motivation for the paper. This could help the authors to highlight the contribution of the paper. The topic is very interesting but the authors failed to report what we know about this topic and how the paper contributes to research. However, in the paper various aspects are not supported by literature, for example:
While this export idea has come under pressure from an emerging actually existing alternative with China’s growing role in development, the conception has remained that it provides the bedrock of a well-functioning and transparent state and crucial to democratic development. Indeed, it provides the core for much of what remains of liberal development theory and practice. This affirmation has to be supported by the literature.
However, in this material we also observed and we infer and describe the phenomenon we call ‘shadow management’. The concept of shadow management is not elaborated by the authors, the authors use the concept to interpret phenomena within Swedish university.
I recommend the author to read the paper and to give support to various affirmations reported.
The analysis of the case study is adequate. Furthermore, I want to know more about how the outcome of the research contributes to existing literature. However, implications for practitioners are not indicated.
Author Response
Reviewer #1
The reviewer wrote:
“I read with great interest the proposed article. It extends older public management debates on New Public Management (NPM) and the need to re-value traditional models (see New Weberianism) or create new models (see New Public Governance, etc.). In this article I note the depth of the analyzes regarding the interference between neoliberalism and the NPM, on the one hand, and between the NPM and public law, on the other. The last of these is based on the apparent legality and the modalities of its concealment through practices that are part of the so-called "shadow management". I appreciate that the proposed article fits in the profile of the magazine and will arouse a high interest from the readers.”
While the reviewer thought that the conclusions were clearly presented and supported by the results, s/he indicated that the references and design could be improved. S/he also indicated that the description of the method must be improved. However, it was difficult to react to this information since the reviewer did not suggest any concrete changes that need to be made. We hope that the changes we made in response to similar objections by the other reviewers (see below) also addresses this reviewer’s remaining concerns.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
I read with great interest the proposed article. It extends older public management debates on New Public Management (NPM) and the need to re-value traditional models (see New Weberianism) or create new models (see New Public Governance, etc.).
In this article I note the depth of the analyzes regarding the interference between neoliberalism and the NPM, on the one hand, and between the NPM and public law, on the other.
The last of these is based on the apparent legality and the modalities of its concealment through practices that are part of the so-called "shadow management".
I appreciate that the proposed article fits in the profile of the magazine and will arouse a high interest from the readers
Author Response
Reviewer #2
The reviewer wrote:
“The study is an interesting contribution to the discussion on shadow management in Sweden. In my opinion, the authors should signal the limitations of their research and provide recommendations for the future for decision makers in their countries.
In the part of references, please provide doi articles (if any) and justify the text.”
Contrary to reviewer #1, reviewer #2 considered the background/references and research design to be fully appropriate. (Reviewer #1 thought they could be approved, though without indicating how.) Reviewer #2 agreed with reviewer #1 that the conclusions are clearly described but that the description of the method could be improved.
Apart from fixing the typographical imperfect and adding links were possible, we addressed the two concrete suggestions made by reviewer #2 as indicated below.
Concerning “the authors should signal the limitations of their research”, we added the following:
Line 507-510: “While our case study came from the Swedish higher education sector, we conjecture that the phenomena identified are general in nature. However, further research from other sectors and countries would be needed to establish this general claim.”
Concerning “authors should … provide recommendations for the future for decision makers in their countries”, we added the following:
Line 543-546: “While it is not the purpose of this article to provide policy recommendations, we would conclude that the market principles inherent in NPM are highly unsuited to many parts of the public sector, including higher education.”
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The study is an interesting contribution to the discussion on shadow management in Sweden. In my opinion, the authors should signal the limitations of their research and provide recommendations for the future for decision makers in their countries.
In the part of references, please provide doi articles (if any) and justify the text.
Author Response
Reviewer #3 wrote:
“Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to review this paper. The topic is of great importance in NPM literature. However, I found a theoretical weakness as to how the author develops the research gap. The research question is not clear. The research gap should be constructed through the discussion in the literature review and/or theoretical rationales. However, I would like to see the authors strengthen the motivation for the paper. This could help the authors to highlight the contribution of the paper. The topic is very interesting but the authors failed to report what we know about this topic and how the paper contributes to research. However, in the paper various aspects are not supported by literature, for example:
While this export idea has come under pressure from an emerging actually existing alternative with China’s growing role in development, the conception has remained that it provides the bedrock of a well-functioning and transparent state and crucial to democratic development. Indeed, it provides the core for much of what remains of liberal development theory and practice. This affirmation has to be supported by the literature.
However, in this material we also observed and we infer and describe the phenomenon we call ‘shadow management’. The concept of shadow management is not elaborated by the authors, the authors use the concept to interpret phenomena within Swedish university.
I recommend the author to read the paper and to give support to various affirmations reported. The analysis of the case study is adequate. Furthermore, I want to know more about how the outcome of the research contributes to existing literature. However, implications for practitioners are not indicated.”
Contrary to the other two reviewers, reviewer #3 considered the description of the method fully adequate, but saw imperfections in the background/references and (unlike reviewer #1) in the presentations of the results.
We have reacted to the concrete suggestions by reviewer #3 as indicated below.
In the paper, we wrote:
“A crucial finding concerns how those legal institutions introduced to safeguard the constitution, rule of law and democracy fail to fulfil their purpose and instead operate to undermine and strategically reinterpret the NPM values.
We added the following to further motivate our research and research question (lines 96-202: “While there have been indications that NPM leads to more complaints to Ombudsmen and a decline in the percentage of complains that are actually investigated (Hood and Dixson, 2015, Ch. 6), to our knowledge the dilemmas and complex choices facing Ombudsmen and other officials under neoliberalism have not been fully appreciated. For the positioning of our research in relation to other work on and criticism of the institution of ombudsmen, we refer to section 7 below.”
We added the following references to support the above quote:
Footnote 1: ” This connection has been regularly repeated in numerous international documents on development, for example by the World Bank.”
We have added, as footnote 8, the following text on the limited literature on “shadow management”:
“The fact that an organization can have a ‘shadow’ hidden from and in complete or partial conflict with the official image of the organization has been observed by several authors. According to Bowles (1991), p. 387, for example, “Organization Shadow is understood as facts which organizations wish to deny about themselves, due to the threat posed to self-image and self-understanding and, more generally, the need to be viewed in a favourable light by others”. In the few works in which the term ‘shadow management’ has been used before (e.g. Wong, 1996, and Burdus, 2011), it signifies a situation in which someone other than those formally in charge are actually managing an organization. As should be clear from how we define the term, this is not the meaning intended here.”
We also added the corresponding references to the reference list (i.e. to the papers by Bowles, Wong and Burdus).
It was unclear to us what paper the reviewer explicitly asked us to read. The reference was not disclosed in the summary of the reviews that we obtained from the journal office. Hopefully, the literature we refer to above is sufficient to address the reviewer’s concern.
Additional changes
Apart from the changes occasioned by the comments made by the reviewers, we have made a number of other smaller linguistic changes. They have all been marked in the manuscript using the MSWord tracking function. A more substantial change we made concerns the subtitle of the paper in an effort to make the paper more searchable by including more relevant search terms and also highlight the generality of our results which go beyond Swedish higher education although the case studies come from that latter.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
