Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Framing of Healthcare Performance in China’s Public Hospital Field: An Ethnographic Study

• In Event: Management Control (Mixed Methods)

Abstract

This study adopts a multi-level framing perspective to investigate the conceptions of healthcare performance emerged and evolved in response to the dynamic institutional complexity following China’s healthcare system reforms. We investigate how public hospital performance has been framed and reframed at the organizational and field level following the marketization reform in the 1990s and the retreat from such reform in the 2000s in China. Through direct observation of meetings, archive data analysis and interviews with government officials, hospital managers and doctors, our ethnographic study sheds light on how the meanings of a specific performance term, ‘Ji Xiao’(literally ‘performance’ and ‘efficiency’), first emerged within the hospitals, evolved bottom-up and eventually acquired the taken-for-granted quality of institutions at the field level. The findings contribute to institutional theory in general and institutional research on performance measurement in particular by unpacking the bottom-up and top-down processes of institutionalization of a specific conception of performance.

Authors

• Pingli Li, University of Southampton, UK

• Xuegang Cui, Beijing Normal University