AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The concept of line-staff has had a very big impact of how organizations are governed and how they are built up. Few recognize the immense influence of Fayol´s perspective on daily work within organizations and the perspective of line-staff is seldom brought to discussion. (Holmblad Brunsson 2007, Drucker 1998, FISCH 1961, Wren 2005) With the County of Norrbotten as empirical context an exploratory case study was performed to find out: “How the concept of line-staff is perceived within an organization with the County of Norrbotten as a model?” Fourteen semi-structured interviews were performed among six different groups: politicians, senior management, middle management within administration, middle management within a clinical setting, staff work without a management position or clinical work with subsidiary activities and productive work without administrative duties. The results from the interviews showed that the issue of line-staff is well known and is described as vital for the organization. The classical notion of line-staff consists of traits from machine bureaucracy (Wren 2005) and attributes related to a machine bureaucracy was also described within all groups interviewed. However, the notion of a professional bureaucracy was also brought forward; many times perceived as existing in parallel with the machine bureaucracy. Even if many of the images related to the classical view of line-staff; some of the perceptions were in practice contradictory such as how far responsibilities of staffs are stretched. This is an exploratory case study and the practical image of line-staff was studied for an increased understanding of the concept. The findings could be used to better understand for example tensions and coordination issues within different groups in an organization in relation to the concept of line-staff. In addition, the perception from this study could build a framework for further research in for example a survey study.