Organizational structures in social district teams

Abstract

In this research, we have tried to find out how social district teams are currently organized and how their design could be improved based on organizational design literature. We found that social district teams already conform well to the normative theories, however some improvements can still be made. Due to the nature of governmental organizations with democratically elected bodies, these normative theories are hard to completely apply to social district teams, however some room is available. These improvements are mostly centered around the control structure of social district teams. We also found that in practice municipalities made use of pre-existing organizational models which were advised before the decentralizations, but that they were barely directly applied without changes. This implies that municipalities have actively tried to alter these models to fit their local situation, one of the main drivers behind the decentralizations. In the Discussion we have suggested possible future alleys of research which we find add valuable knowledge to the field.