Management of nursing homes for the elderly. Arrangements between external and internal tensions

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Hermann Brandenburg; Professor Dr. Werner Vogd
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 510801128

Demographic change, privatisation and growing staff shortages are the structural conditions that determine the sector of care for the elderly. Economic shortages have also become characteristic of the nursing home environment. Nevertheless, it would be too short-sighted only to criticise 'economisation' in a general way. Although the situation is not easy, it does provide the individual homes with opportunities where there were none before. Nevertheless, we know practically nothing about the different ways in which nursing homes deal with economic, ethical, nursing and administrative requirements and the problems that the homes have to deal with as a result. This research gap is so significant, because there are now over 15,000 homes caring for nearly one million elderly, multimorbid and dying people. It is precisely this gap that the proposed project aims to fill and to illustrate the different strategies and practices that homes use to position themselves in the market and to establish themselves (more or less successfully). This is based on the assumption that the respective internal and external tensions of the organisation (Rohde 1974) are reflected in the management of the homes and are reintroduced into the organisation as a form of distinction. In the project that has been applied for, the management practices of various homes are to be reconstructed in this way. Specifically, the following questions will be addressed: How does management practice in nursing homes for the elderly respond to the changed conditions - for example, the so-called quasi-markets of a welfare-state control system based on New Public Management? How does management handle the internal and external tensions with which it is confronted? How are the accompanying experiences of discrepancy dealt with? And finally: Under which circumstances do different forms of arrangement occur and how should they be evaluated in terms of practicality, professional ethical criteria and residents' needs by means of an equivalence-functionalist approach? A comparative case selection will include 20 institutions in which 120 expert interviews with employees from different hierarchical levels (including top management) will be conducted. The evaluation of the data will be based on the documentary method in reference to recent developments in the field of organisational research, which pays particular attention to all those areas of tension that arise from the different modes of rationality and diverging operational logics of organisations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants