The emergence of control archetypes: Theorization of trust-based control in the Swedish public sector

This study contributes to our understanding of how new control archetypes emerge in institutional fields. We conceptualize and explore how a competing control archetype is theorized to promote archetype change. Our empirical case illustrates how a governmental committee developed and promoted Trust-Based Control (TBC) as an alternative to New Public Management (NPM)-oriented control in the public sector field. The emerging new control archetype gained momentum through the active work of the committee (the “theorists”) in six lines of theorization: Self-recognizing, Homogenizing, Explicating, Abstracting, Refocusing, and Role-remodeling. By analyzing the role of theorization in the creation of an emerging control archetype, our study contributes to research on theorization for the emergence of field-wide accounting and control variation. Our case and conceptualization also contribute to a critical examination of NPM critics and how the committee’s theorization may enable or hinder ending the NPM era in the field in the longer term.