Recycling Problems and Modernizing the Solution: Doing Institutional Maintenance Work on Swedish Public Service Television

Institutions as Solutions to Collective Problems

The idea of institutions as solutions to problems is not new. Already Berger and Luckmann (1967, p. 53) noted that institutions free the individual from the burden of “all those decisions,” as for most problems an already institutionalized solution is at hand. Tolbert and Zucker (1996) write that institutions as a form of habitualized action “refers to the behaviours that have been developed empirically and adopted by an actor or set of actors in order to solve recurring problems” (p. 180). R. E. Meyer (2008) takes this discussion further:

Institutions are challenged if they cease to be seen as solutions or if the situation is no longer regarded as problematic, or, the argument turned around, if institutions persist, one can assume that they continue to reply to a societal problem, which, however, is not necessarily the original one (Soeffner in Reichertz, 2004), nor does this say anything about a “rationality” of this solution. (p. 530)

I propose that looking at institutions as solutions to collective problems can be a fruitful perspective when wanting to understand the longevity of institutions: Not only how they come to be but also how they are made durable over time. Note however that I am not seeing institutions as always “functionally and rationally designed” solutions to some clearly defined and agreed-upon problem (even though such institutions do certainly exist). Rather, institutions are understood as solutions to eclectic, vaguely defined and loosely related problems of how to collectively engage in certain practices—that possibly can solve what some perceive as problems. From this perspective, one can conceptualize the activities that actors engage in when they are doing institutional work as attempts to construct ¹ problems that fit their understandings of the world (which often coincides with what fits their interests) and connect these problems to an (often already existing) institution.

The struggle within an organizational field ² —such as the public service TV field in this study—then circles around these problems: Will they become taken for granted and accepted, or will they be rejected by the actors in the field? And once they are taken for granted and have become a rationalized myth (J. W. Meyer & Rowan, 1977), how do actors work to uphold these problems as “real” and relevant? Much like the garbage can model put forward by Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972), this perspective holds that at any point in time there are bound to be several potential “proto problems” floating about, championed by their respective field actors who are looking to make these problems perceived as valid in relation to the specific institutions that can be perceived to solve them. Streeck and Thelen (2005) argue that one way in which institutions transform, what they call conversion, is by existing institutions being adapted to service new goals—problems in this article’s terminology—or to fit the interests of new actors. The authors argue that this makes sense as it is easier to “try to accomplish new goals with old institutions. Put otherwise, the number of goals in a society seems to be larger and less stable than the number of institutions available for use” (p. 38). Take Zilber’s (2002) influential study of an Israeli rape crisis center as an example of a process where an old institution changes from being a perceived solution to one certain problem to becoming the perceived solution to a somewhat different problem. In her study, Zilber describes how the Orot rape crisis center was established by feminists who saw rape as a symptom of a patriarchal society and the center as a place where women shared their experiences of being victimized as women in this system. However, over time, new members working for the center introduced therapeutic meanings and understandings of the center’s activities—which were also more in line with the contemporary rationalized myths of Israeli society at that time. The perception of rape as a structural problem endemic to a patriarchal society thus slowly transformed into the perception of rape as an individualized problem that the victims had to deal with psychologically, and that the center could help treat therapeutically. The center and its practices remained intact: However, the problems that the center was perceived to solve changed. The study conducted by Zilber (2002) could hence be conceptualized as a case of institutional work where the “therapeutically minded” newcomers were indeed engaged in doing institutional work by reconceptualizing the problem of rape as a phenomenon that fits their understanding of the world as well as their professional education and background better than the previous feminist understanding of rape.

Historical studies of political institutions have thus showed that institutions over time can be transformed to “service new goals” (Streeck & Thelen, 2005), but how these transformations come about and the microdynamics of such processes are still understudied. The literature on institutional work, and institutional maintenance work more specifically, has begun to shed light on such processes of “transformative” maintenance. I now turn to this literature.

Institutional Maintenance Work

Institutions have been defined as “more or less taken-for-granted repetitive social behavior that is underpinned by normative systems and cognitive understandings that give meaning to social exchange and thus enable self-reproducing social order” (Greenwood, Oliver, Sahlin, & Suddaby, 2008, pp. 4-5). However, even though the very idea of institutions includes an understanding of permanence through self-reproduction, few institutions are so embedded in and intrinsic to cognitive and material structures that they cannot be questioned or contested (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011). Already Zucker (1988) argued that entropy (the tendency of social systems to become disorganized and dissolve) rather than inertia is really the normal state of things. Inspired by earlier work on how institutions are created, changed, and disrupted, Lawrence and colleagues (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2009, 2011) coined the term institutional work as “the purposive actions carried out by individual and collective actors to create, maintain, and disrupt institutions” (Lawrence et al., 2011, p. 52). This framework, these authors argue, can help us study the recursive relationship between institutions and actions, namely, how institutions affect action at the same time as action affects institutions.

Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) thus argue that maintenance work is something different from just stability or an absence of change; rather, institutional maintenance work requires considerable effort and often comes about as an effect of changes in the organizational field or in institutional pressures, like when new actors are entering an organization or a field, or when new technology is introduced. Following the call that institutional theorists ought to study what Lawrence (2008) calls the “janitors and mechanics in institutional theory”—the actors whose work it is to maintain institutions—several recent studies have explicitly focused on the work of maintaining an institutional order in such varied contexts as the English national health system (Currie et al., 2012); formal dining (Dacin et al., 2010) and the boat club (Lok & de Rond, 2013) in Cambridge; a business newspaper (Raviola & Norbäck, 2013) and the legal profession in Italy (Micelotta & Washington, 2013); business school accreditation (Quinn Trank & Washington, 2009); the Dutch construction industry (Sminia, 2011); forestry (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010) and the petroleum industries in Canada (Lefsrud & Meyer, 2012); and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) ministers in the United States (Creed et al., 2010). Micelotta and Washington (2013) review the recent studies published under the banner of institutional maintenance and differentiate between two streams of such studies: those that depict work aimed at “preserving and reinforcing existing institutional arrangements” and those that describe work aimed at “adjusting and adapting to inflected institutional arrangements.” The difference between the two types of maintenance work described and discussed in these studies shows how maintenance work is not only undertaken as a “preventive” measure to hinder change and disruption, but it is also about working dedicatedly to shaping change in a preferred way as it unfolds so that certain aspects of an institutional order are maintained.

Some of the studies that show how maintenance of institutions unfolds also point to the fact that certain institutions that are maintained over a long period of time tend to transform to “keep up with the times”; in effect, they seem to change to remain. For example is the formal dining tradition at the elite Cambridge University in the United Kingdom nowadays permitting also women, people with lower class backgrounds, and ethnic minorities to take part, which seems to make this ritual remain legitimate (Dacin et al., 2010). Creed et al. (2010) show how institutional work does not necessarily have to be aimed exclusively toward just creation, maintenance, or disruption, but as Hargrave and Van de Ven (2009) also argue, institutional work may be more effective when work is done to both change and stabilize institutions at the same time. In the case of LGBT ministers in the United States, Creed et al. (2010) show that these individuals both promote change of certain institutionalized rules while they work to preserve the overall institution of the church.

History as an Interpretative Resource

Institutions by their very nature are products of history, and thus have a historical heritage. Berger and Luckmann (1967) describe this:

Reciprocal typifications of action are built up in the course of a shared history. They cannot be created instantaneously. Institutions always have a history, of which they are the products. It is impossible to understand an institution adequately without an understanding of the historical process in which it was produced. (pp. 54-55)

Even though institutional studies ought to have the institutional context “inbuilt” into the analysis, there are surprisingly few institutional studies that have an explicit historical focus. Suddaby (2015) urges institutional researchers to take this historic and societal context seriously in institutional theory, and engage closer and more specifically with the history of the institutions that we study. Many institutional studies however tend to treat the history of the institution under study as a once and for all fixed, stable, and passive entity that is part of the institutional arrangements in a specific field. Also within the stream of institutional work, there has not yet been much focus on the historical aspects of the institutions that “are being worked at,” nor how actors can draw on and engage with history in their institutional work. Within the field of strategy on the other hand, there has been a growing interest in how strategists make use of history in their strategy work. Such an approach is put forward by Suddaby, Foster, and Quinn Trank (2010) who discuss how strategists can use history to their advantage. These authors, in line with many historians’ view of history (e.g., Hobsbawm, 1984; Shils, 1981; Soares, 1997), show how history can be used to frame and motivate action, and thus take a view of history as also having an interpretive function. From this perspective, history should be thought of as a construct that actors use to both make sense of events and justify action. History can therefore function as a sensemaking device that actors actively draw on when doing institutional work in an attempt to shape the future in a certain direction. History from this perspective can be powerful, because by actively drawing on an institution’s heritage, it not only creates continuity with the past but can also be used to help define what should be deemed appropriate at present (Shils, 1981). In the same vein, Soares (1997) talks about historical traditions as a “resource warehouse for the living” (p. 15) and argues that the past offers both values and solutions that can be appropriated by contemporary actors when dealing with modern-day problems. But history can not only help people of today deal with their everyday realities but can also “provide resources for continuous adjustments to contemporary challenges” (p. 13), something that may prove important for institutional work aimed at maintaining an institution in times of change in the institutional environment.

As shown in this study, the institutional work of the program makers producing programs for public service TV is embedded in both the history of the institution and the ongoing transformations of society. Thus, the maintenance work cannot be understood outside of this context, but more importantly, much of the maintenance work reported in this article draws on and, more or less consciously, engages both the history of the institution of public service TV and the contemporary political and societal context: the rationalized myths of Sweden in the early 21st century and the ongoing changes within the institutional public service TV field. As Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) argue, maintenance work becomes especially critical when new actors enter organizations or fields, when fields evolve into new and unexpected directions, and when pan-institutional factors such as technology change. The question guiding this article is therefore how do actors that inhabit and enact an institution make use of the institution’s history when justifying and making sense of new practices?

I now turn to the research context and the generated data.

Research Context: The History of Swedish Public Service Television

Public service TV has its origins in the United Kingdom where the BBC became the first public service broadcaster (Born, 2004; Küng-Shankleman, 2000), an institution that then spread to many countries over the world (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) one of which was Sweden. Here, the production and broadcasting of public service TV were entrusted to Sweden’s Television (SVT), whose operations were, and still are, regulated not only by the norms and values underpinning the institution of public service TV but also by a complex legal framework. Public service broadcasting thus became the solution to how to organize the production and broadcasting of content made possible by the new broadcasting technology. In the early 20th century when technology to transmit radio developed, it soon became clear that it could be used for more purposes than just one-to-one communication. Governments realized that this new mass medium was inherently powerful, both commercially (to advertise and promote commercial goods and services) and politically (to promote ideas and ideologies). Also, there was the problem of spectrum scarcity: As the space for transmitting radio was limited, it had to be formally organized in some way. In Sweden, the solution to these problems was to set up a public service system that would uphold a distance from both commercial and political interests.

When the technology for transmitting television on a large scale developed in the 1950s, Sweden incorporated this new technology into the already existing institution of public service broadcasting. The content broadcast were to focus on information and education (and to a lesser extent, entertainment) that would enhance, uphold, and reflect a national identity (Björkegren, 2001; Engblom & Wormbs, 2007; Gatarski, 2008; Hadenius & Weibull, 1978; Hadenius, Weibull, & Wadbring, 2008). This also meant that public service TV was entrusted the task of acting as a driver and subsidizer of Swedish film and drama. Hesmondhalgh (2007) summarizes the historical foundation and ethos of European public service broadcasting as follows: Implications for content: with rules and praxis regarding balance and impartiality in reporting, serving minority group interests, educational and informational programming; Universal service: reaching the whole population in a country and reflecting all geographical regions as well as catering to all sociodemographic groups; Addressing the audience as citizens rather than as consumers by providing a range of programs of a mixed and pluralistic nature, and assuming a responsibility for the “cultural wealth and diversity of a nation” as well as for “the health of the political process and for the quality of the public discourse generated within it” (Blumler, 1992, p. 12); and finally, Public financing by fees, where all profits are fed back into the operations.

Throughout its almost 100-year history, the public service broadcasting institution has not lacked critics and opponents (for an overview, see Blumler, 1992). However, ever since the introduction of commercial broadcasting in Europe, the idea of publicly funded media has been increasingly questioned and considered a “disturbance of ‘normal’ market relations” (Bardoel & d’Haenens, 2008, p. 340). Also, the practice of collaborative production was during the time of this study a practice that received much criticism.

Collaborative Production: A Contested Practice

The public service TV field, has—as the media sector generally—been influenced by political ideas of marketization, defined by Hesmondhalgh (2007) as “the permeation of market exchange as a social principle . . ., [which is] a long-term process taking place over many centuries, involving commodification, the increasing use of money as the basis of exchange and increasing division of labour” (p. 11). Hence, in the Swedish public service TV field at the time of this study, a number of transformations were ongoing. Program makers from the commercial realm of the field were entering into collaborations with public service program makers. Studies (e.g., von Platen, 2006) show that this new practice of collaborative production was seen as disruptive to public service TV values, not only internally at SVT but also by many external stakeholders. Collaborative production of public service TV programs was at the time of this study thusby many seen as a contested practice (R. E. Meyer & Höllerer, 2010) with political dimensions. Increased collaborative production meant that more programs were produced with commercial financing, something that would make programs more “commercially oriented,” as programs must be commercially viable in the secondhand market for the investors to recoup their investments. Hence, internally at SVT, there were many employees (supported by the unions) that claimed that the strategy of increasing collaborative production would open up a door to “commercialisation” of programs.

Study Design

The context of collaborative TV-program production provides a good opportunity to capture institutional work of what public service TV is and should be, and what problems it should be perceived to solve. Thus, collaborative productions, as new practices that were by many seen as signs of marketization and as a “threat” to the public service institution as it was then organized, are settings in which processes of negotiation of meaning (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000; R. E. Meyer & Höllerer, 2010; Suddaby, 2010) are set in motion. The studied programs were collaborations between SVT employees, commercial producers working for production companies, and commercial financers (most often the production company, but also additional external financers such as foreign broadcasters or film- and TV funds). The five productions studied were as follows: a children’s program The Record Bureau; a children’s drama series The Christmas Calendar; a documentary film about Italy Videocracy; a societal documentary series Class 9A; and a science series The Wreck Divers.

Interviews

I followed the production process of these five programs, from the idea and development stage until they were broadcast. The main method was semistructured interviews with the program makers involved in developing and producing the programs. In total, 32 program makers working in the collaborative productions in various functions were interviewed. Several of the project managers were interviewed more than once to follow the project over time. In addition, six people working with other collaborative productions were interviewed, making up 48 interviews in total. The focus was on interviewing those people involved in the creative and organizational aspects of making the programs. These are typical actors doing typical things (Berger & Luckmann, 1967) that they have been trained and specialized in doing. The interviewees’ tasks included commissioning the programs, negotiating the contracts, making the filming schedule, staffing the production, finding financers, providing financing, producing and managing the programs web platform, and marketing and promotion of the program. It also included inventing and developing the program idea and script, as well as directing and editing. Sixteen of the interviewees were working as employees or affiliated to production companies, and 22 were employed or on contract by SVT.

The interviews lasted on average from 1 to 2 hr, some even longer, and were recorded and transcribed. The interviews started by asking the program makers to describe how they became involved in the program (“Tell me the story from the beginning”). From there, their stories evolved. I encouraged their stories by asking questions about their involvement in the production, focusing on specifics in the activities of planning the production, negotiating the contract, commissioning the program, writing the script, and financing the production—all depending on what their roles in the production were. In follow-up interviews, questions were asked about what had happened since we last spoke. The purpose of the interviews was to get at what the program makers did at work, their relationships with the program makers they collaborated with, their thoughts about the programs they were making, and the context in which they were made: In Barley and Kunda’s (2001) words, “How people make sense of their work and the issues they believe are important” (p. 84).

Secondary Data and On-site Observations

There are various sources of secondary data used for this article:

Regarding on-site observations, during the production of The Christmas Calendar, I participated in the initial production meeting and on set as an extra. I also participated in a “pitch information meeting” organized by SVT where production companies were invited to participate in discussions about how SVT should organize its commissioning practices of collaborative programs.

Data Analysis: The Rhetorical Strategies Used to Construct and Justify Meanings and Interpretations of Public Service TV

In the interviews, program makers talked about what they did when they produced public service TV programs in collaborative settings. They described the process in detail, as well as gave justifications and explanations why they did certain things. They talked about phases in the production projects when there were conflicts and arguments concerning the collaborative work such as financing, division of rights, and responsibility, and issues regarding the content of the programs and control over content. Even though most scholars would argue that all interviews are settings where justification and political rhetoric play an inevitable role, and that researchers thus must have a reflexive approach to interview data (Alvesson, 2003), in this article the main focus is precisely on the rhetorical strategies of the program makers, as they construct and justify meanings and interpretations of public service TV. More specifically, I focus on the institutional work of actors, where they aim to “leverage their positions through the construction of persuasive arguments” (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 240) and how this work has an intended impact on the meanings ascribed to public service TV. The idea that institutions have a strong discursive component has been underscored by many institutional researchers (Creed, Scully, & Austin, 2002; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Symon, Buehring, Johnson, & Cassell, 2008), already Berger and Luckmann (1967) argued that “institutions are built upon language” (p. 64). In this article, this component of institutions is highlighted together with the aspect of how history can be used by actors in their rhetorical work. When analyzing the rhetoric of the program makers in this study as institutional work, I will especially focus on how they use history as rhetorical “resource” and how history can be used as leverage when accounting and making justifications for what they do and think, in line with the idea of “rhetorical history” put forward by Suddaby et al. (2010). The empirical material is thus analyzed from the perspective that the program makers try to reify and construct certain meanings of public service TV, by connecting them to the history of the institution at the same time as they work to make a connection to contemporary problems that the institution may be perceived to solve, which also underscores the idea that meaning making and interpretation are not a passive activity but should be thought of as both “active” and political (Symon et al., 2008; Zilber, 2002).

The first analytical theme is called “Recycled problems: Public service TV as an antidote to bad commercial media and a cohesive force in fragmented times” and consists of program makers’ discussion of the purpose of making public service TV programs. Here is shown how program makers recycle and modify historical meanings attached to the institution of public service TV to fit the current context of public service TV production in Sweden in the beginning of the 21st century. Here, the two main “collective problems” identified in the program makers’ discussion of their practices of making public service programming were “commercial TV programs” and “a fragmented audience.” The first problem deals with rhetoric about how content in advertising-funded TV are fundamentally produced to create an audience that the channels can sell to advertisers. This was seen as highly problematic as content should first and foremost be created for the benefit of the viewer citizen and not for the viewer as a consumer. Here, I conceptualized three different but interrelated rhetorical arguments: Accentuating differences, where the difference between public service TV and commercial TV was underlined and emphasized; Equating commercial TV with commercial interests, where commercial TV was linked together with producers of products of various sorts; and Clarifying purpose, where the reason for making public service TV was portrayed as different from the reasons behind commercial TV. The second identified problem deals with the idea that in the contemporary media landscape the Swedish people seldom get to share the same cultural experiences, thus causing fragmentation and groups of people being isolated from each other, making a sense of shared identity increasingly difficult. I conceptualize the rhetorical argument used to make this point as Uniting the nation, where shared experiences generated via public service programs are discussed.

The second analytical theme is called “A modernized solution: collaborative production and other business-like practices” and deals with how program makers describe how they go about producing programs collaboratively and what issues they find important when doing so. Here, I was interested in how the institution of public service TV was enacted in these settings, and how the consequences of these new practices were handled rhetorically by the program makers. In this theme, I conceptualized these practices as a way to modernize the old solution of public service TV. Here, three ways that the solution is modernized are distinguished: Measuring audiences, where audience ratings can be used as a proxy for if a program should be thought of as good public service TV or not, but the same time is a practice that is argued to be ill suited for many genres of public service TV programs; Engaging in collaborative production, where the very practice of producing public service TV collaboratively is rhetorically constructed as a way to enable “real” public service TV to be made; and Marketing and promotion, where practices that originate in a commercial setting are imported into a public service TV setting and are in the program makers’ rhetoric made “different” from when commercial TV engages in such practices. Examples of illustrative statements from the empirical data are displayed in Table 1, where there are representative excerpts for each of the analytical themes above.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Analytical Themes and Representative Data Excerpts.

Analytical theme	Representative data
Recycled problems: Bad commercial TV and a divided nation
Accentuating differences: Statements that compare programs made by commercial channels and programs made by public service TV	“And it is also important for me that I can motivate why, and not just be a no Advocate (and decline the use of product placements), but have reasons for what I say. Because otherwise I don’t like myself if I am just to sit and say no. So, it is important to create this understanding in the other party why it has to be in a certain way. Why these small short-film makers cannot thank Mio furniture in the credits. That is not public service, we have rules against that.” (SVT contract negotiator explaining that public service programs cannot feature product placement in their programs like the commercial TV can) “And then they all were going sailing in a clip I saw, and then everybody put on identical jackets with the same logo: it was so ugly, it was so ugly, it was against everything that SVT should stand for in a way! / . . . / It is a constant wrestling match when it comes to the production companies’ commercial situations and our public service mission, and no matter whether we like it or not we have to follow these rules, because it is our broadcasting charter, it is the radio- and TV-act. That you always have to make clear.” (SVT contract negotiator about a product placement scandal in one of SVT’s collaboratively produced programs) “It can absolutely be new and fresh, but we cannot stray from our public service, our policy and our values. That is important, and then there is a competence that we have that is important. But it can certainly be new and it can be as new and all that, but we cannot talk over the heads of children, we cannot have a level where we miss the child and flirt with somebody else.” (SVT commissioning editor of children’s programs talks about how public service programs can be new and innovative as long as they are made for the children who watch, and how other broadcasters air children’s programs that are aimed more toward older audiences because of the strict marketing laws in Sweden where one cannot advertise aimed at children)
Equating commercial TV with commercial interests: Statements about how commercial interests influence content in commercial channels	“Because a commercial TV-channel they have as a purpose to sell advertising space, that is how they make money, revenue from ad sales. And then they make programs that make people sit put and watch these ads. We don’t have that, we make programs to make the best TV programs. So we don’t have that mindset.” (SVT Sales responsible) “Public service TV cannot publish the same things as [commercial channel] TV4, TV4 can relate to subjects that we cannot. Imagine if we had made ‘Strictly come dancing’, it would have been really bad. Because we cannot, it is not in our line of business, it is not our business idea to make garbage. ‘Let’s make a TV show that lasts a whole evening, one shall call in thirty times and nobody in this show will ever have made any value for anybody’. Nobody at SVT would like to do that. Because it is just idiot-TV in a way, the only purpose is to make money. And that I don’t think we should do. / . . . / People expect certain things from us [at SVT] and something else from another channel.” (SVT project manager)
Clarifying purpose: Statements about the purpose of public service TV programs	“And then it was about taking this complex, structurally driven school world and put some kind of TV filter on which makes it possible to understand and relate to this. So it was lucky that we fought there and not just said: ‘Well, then it is too difficult to talk about the school system’. Because we cannot have that attitude, it is like saying that it is too difficult to talk about democracy, so we shouldn’t do it, it is too complex.” (SVT project manager talks about how they worked a long time to make the school series “Class 9A” possible) “I think it was Thompson who is a high manager at BBC, she was talking during one of the public service days and she said that the purpose of public service is ‘to make the popular good and the good popular’. And it is sort of about that, if you take the Eurovision song contest and Class 9A as two productions, they are after all both public service and which I think all working with public service think are important. In the case of Eurovision we do something that is extremely popular but we do it in a way that is respectful in many ways, and we do it very well. We do it so well that half of the population want to join us and watch this spectacle. And then we can match it even schedule-wise with a series like Class 9A that is incredibly good, it is a very high quality production, but we have done it in a way that speaks to a lot of people. So that is the difficulty, it is possible to make TV about something incredibly interesting utterly uninteresting. And I think that what we have succeeded with in Class 9A is to make a series about something that is darn important for a lot of people. But we have done it in a way that is accessible. You can sort of as a viewer follow this series because you get a commitment, you commit to these people’s lives. And then I think . . . it is far too seldom that we succeed with that but that is the absolute core of public service.” (SVT project manager) “We believe in this, we believe that this is part of our mission, which is to both entertain and educate you know, but it is hard give any parameters for it.” (SVT Commissioning editor for children’s programs about how it is difficult to put such overarching ideas into a contract in collaborative productions)
Uniting the nation: Statements about what role public service programs play for Sweden and it’s people	“Our employers are, I would like to claim, not the viewers but the citizens. It is a service for the Swedish people just like you can say that the opera or the theater are there not for those that attend the opera or the theater, but they are there because it is important for us as a nation to have such a high class cultural production. And then it is important for the Swedish people regardless if you what SVT or not, it is important for our country to have a non-commercial alternative that is able to discuss issues that [commercial] Channel 5 doesn’t give a shit about, since Channel 5 is a pure entertainment channel.” (SVT project manager) “What kind of tone the program should have. And what kind of records, and what age would watch it, and that we wanted all of Sweden’s children to participate. / . . . / There are certain values that are important, that there is a diversity in the program, that we really work on that, that there are all sorts of children you know, both ethnically and gender and throughout the country, so that you feel that all are represented.” (SVT project manager for The Record Bureau talks about how they envisioned the program and the children who would participate)
A modernized solution: Collaborative production and other “business-like” practices
Measuring audiences: Statements about audience ratings and how to evaluate them	“Partly one can look at the ratings, those are important. It is like that, that if the children aren’t watching, we are not hitting the right target. That is the way it is, sort of.” (SVT commissioning editor for children’s programs) “Audience ratings you can always discuss, I mean take a program that is a spectacle, that gets much press in the evening papers, they get unnecessarily many viewers even though it is a bad program. / . . . / I mean of course one can think that it is entertaining to watch people make a fool of themselves on TV, but on account of that one cannot say that because 750 000 people are watching it is a good program. I mean, The Wreck Divers reached almost 700 000 in several episodes, and there people get an experience, it is not just disability humour like when you watch people make fools of themselves. / . . . / So audience ratings are very tricky.” (SVT project manager for The Wreck Divers)
Engaging in collaborative production: Statements about why public service TV engages in collaborative production	“And that I think that Strix [the commercial production company collaborator] have contributed to [making the program more accessible], they produce mostly commercial television, and they are more skillful at that. It hurts to say it, but we [at SVT] are not really as accessible in the same way as many of the commercial channels are. Because we can sort of afford to be a bit difficult. / . . . / And I think it is good to get those reflections from the outside, so that has been really good.” (SVT project manager talks about what the commercial production company has contributed to the collaborative production of Class 9A) “You know, the point with collaborative production it is that for a smaller amount of money you get a bigger offering [of programs]. That SVT should not have to pay for the whole production. / . . . / I see collaborative productions as an increased possibility to get financing for more good things.” (SVT project manager) “On Monday night, I was at this debate at the journalist club where I was on the panel, and some people went on and on about how terrible it is that we [SVT] work with production companies. But it depends on how you do it! I think that Class 9A is an excellent example of how we can make damn good modern public service TV together with production companies. For me, it is one of the best examples of that actually. Nobody can say that Class 9A is not public service. There is not a single person who with trustworthiness can claim that. And we have done it together with Strix. Great!” (SVT commissioning editor)
Marketing and promotion: Statements about practices of engaging in marketing and promotion activities	“And this other part, that it becomes a product that we can sell: I separate these parts very much. And that is how we work all the time, all the time that we have a strong integrity between the program side and my own department which is a side business.” (SVT sales employee working to sell side-products for The Christmas Calendar talks about this) “SVT informs and attracts interest for its programs in many different ways. One of the more effective is the trailers on its own channels. Captivating drama should arouse the viewer’s curiosity. -Our aim is always to market each program as tempting as possible for the audience. Our task is to convey a feeling, the idea of the programs, which builds and supports the trademark SVT and all its channels, says the trailer editor Ingrid Petersson. She says that SVT, just like in advertising, sells a product. But we cannot exaggerate or distort too much, as we are careful with our trustworthiness. The viewers have to trust us. Fredrik Marklund, head of the trailer and profile department, agrees that it is hard not to draw parallels between trailers and advertising, but points out that there are also important differences. Advertising is often about building a brand that can live over a long period of time. The program trailer should over a short period plant the program as a brand and create a high awareness about it, he says.” (Reportage about how SVT uses program trailers taken from the internal SVT magazine ViPåTV, 2009-03-20, pp. 9-11) “Then I return to this word integrity, if you want this job and if you want to take on this role, to work with commercial issues within the frame of public service, you have to . . . It would be very difficult if you had worked and sold toothpaste or beer or something like that before. None of us who have this job have that background, but we have come in from other directions and with other, other initial values so to speak. So that issue, I understand it and when we go through our budget and sales figures, of course I can think the thought, that if we had sold toothpaste then for example then perhaps we had done it differently. But we don’t do that, I mean when I meet friends who work in sales, it feels like we have very little to talk about, we don’t have the same jobs.” (SVT sales responsible talks about how it is to work with sales within the frames of public service TV)

Note. SVT = Sweden’s Television.

Recycled Problems: Public Service TV as an Antidote to Bad Commercial Media and a Cohesive Force in Fragmented Times

Measuring Audiences

The concept of ratings, a measurement used by commercial TV to sell audiences to advertisers, has according to the interviewed program makers become increasingly important also for public service TV. But it is by no means an unproblematic concept in this setting. On one hand, it can be used as an argument that a program is relevant to the viewers, in line with how the SVT Wreck Divers project manager answers the question of how she knows if she has made a good program or not:

I think ratings show quite a lot. And it is not about maximizing ratings; rather it is about having people’s support. That people who sit with the remote control choose a popular-history program instead of a pure entertainment program on [commercial] TV3 or TV5. And it is for me one of the most important driving forces that I have in my job, to communicate, spread knowledge and science to more categories that those already convinced. It is a purely democratic aspiration; I almost get a bit religious when I talk about it! (laugh) And then it is not about making only highbrow, narrow science programs which reach the educated public, but really make science and knowledge relevant for broad groups. And that is why I like high ratings.

In the old days when SVT had a monopoly on television in Sweden, audience ratings did not make that much sense for SVT: either one watched SVT or one did not watch TV at all. In the advertising-funded part of the TV industry however, audience ratings are the currency of choice: Audiences are the commodity that is being produced and sold (Bourdieu, 1998; Napoli, 2003). Seen from this perspective, TV programs are merely by-products in the manufacturing of audiences. In the light of this, it may seem strange that the public service TV program makers are paying so much attention to ratings—after all, they have repeatedly stated that they are not producing audiences to sell to advertisers. One explanation to this paradox is that audience ratings during the travel from the commercial TV industry into the public service TV field have been translated into a currency of legitimacy. As the project manager for Class 9A puts it,

When it comes down to it, I am an idealist, I work at SVT because I think what we do is important, and in some cases we can measure it through that there are a lot of people watching.

In the contemporary public service TV field, having high ratings for public service programs can thus become evidence of their importance, and programs that are being watched become legitimate (Engblom & Wormbs, 2007). A public service TV system that has a large spread among people, and not only caters to certain age or social groups (as in the United States where public service TV is a concern mainly for certain small elite groups), has a legitimate reason to exist. The practice of measuring audiences is thus transformed into a public service TV practice when the public service TV program makers are using ratings to justify what they do is good public service TV. To have their programs watched by a large number of people becomes important as it provides a foundation for their operations (e.g., What is the point of making good public service programs if nobody watches them?). The practice of measuring viewers thus provides an easily accessible argument for the makers of public service programming, at least for the makers of those genres that appeal to the masses.

However, for program makers of genres who do not have a tendency to appeal to a lot of people, like documentary and art films, rating is a much more problematic concept. As one of the project managers for the film Videocracy said earlier, a common saying is that you should “either have ratings or impact,” where impact could not be measured by how many people watched a program but rather by what kind of effect the program had on public debate and discourse. The impact argument, which echoes the historical public service mission to “inform and educate,” is by a commissioner of art films contrasted with ratings:

Well, unfortunately [audience ratings] are very important for TV. And you could say that we have a tendency to measure our success with an instrument that is concretely applicably designed for a totally different part of the industry, the advertising funded industry where audience ratings really is about to give viewers to the advertisers. It has nothing to do with the programs, really. What we really would like to know is what do our programs and films tell the Swedish people? And that is much more difficult to find out. So one could say that SVT is too occupied with audience ratings.

Interestingly, it seems that both those program makers who argue that ratings are important and those who argue for a more “impact”-oriented understanding base their argumentation in the historical values and mission of public service TV. The program makers who argue that ratings can be useful talk about democracy and idealism, the interviewee who talks about impact mentions what the programs actually tell the Swedish people. The historical legacy of public service TV proves useful in both instances, as it indeed seems to be useful as a “warehouse for the living” as Soares (1997) puts it, by being “open” enough, so that both arguments can draw on it as an interpretative resource.

Engaging in Collaborative Production

Many program makers argued that the new practice of collaborative production where external actors (production companies and others) finance the programs was in fact a way to make sure that “true public service TV” could be produced. One commissioner and project manager of science programs at SVT explained,

Generally, we look very positively at all kinds of collaborations and co-productions. This is a costly genre, it costs a lot of money to make science documentaries. Internationally, it is said that science documentaries are among the most expensive documentaries you can make. And we often need expensive graphics and we need to travel a lot and often follow events over a long time. So, it is costly to make and the more actors who can share these ideas the better.

The program makers collectively talked about a scenario of the past 10 or 15 years when programs had been produced on tighter and tighter budgets and costs had risen (Lowe, 2009). In their rhetoric, collaborative production was therefore a way to maintain the high ambition of making costly programs in genres such as drama and documentaries—genres that are both notoriously expensive at the same time as they are what most program makers argued was the very core of public service TV. In this reasoning, engaging in collaborative production was a way to enable the production of proper public service TV.

Collaborative production of public service TV programming was also construed as a way in which public service TV could in fact solve another problem which had been discussed historically in relation to Swedish public service TV (Lowe & Nissen, 2011): that of endorsing and being an engine of Swedish cultural production. By producing public service TV programs together with external producers, one was able to try out new talents and voices that could come to be important for the production of Swedish audiovisual culture in the future. Collaborative production, where program ideas from outside of SVT were produced, thus made it possible for public service TV to fulfill its role as an incubator for young promising TV and filmmakers. One project manager working with cultural documentaries explained,

. . . just like with music or other art, it is so that if you only buy art by the same painter you miss those coming up from below. So, I think it is absolutely necessary for us in all genres in the TV world to be looking for new talents. That is the way to develop.

Hence, collaborative production was a new way in which public service TV could be enacted; a way that also resonated with institutionalized ideas in society at large (Friedland & Alford, 1991) of how public services in general should become more like commercial operators and engage in partnerships with commercial actors. Next to the business-oriented practice of going to the market and finding financers that were willing to invest in programs with the ambition of getting return on their investment, there were also other business-oriented practices of enacting the public service TV institution. Many of the program makers working for SVT talked about the increased pressure on them to behave “business-like” in their daily practices of commissioning and producing programs. This new mind-set involved thinking about the license fee money as something that is entrusted to SVT by the license fee payers who should get “value for their money.”

Discussion: A Modernized Solution

Previously, I discussed how the program makers rhetorically were “recycling” problems that public service TV can solve and how these problems were justified in light of the historical legacy of the institution. I now focus on the solution of public service TV, and how it is in part modernized by incorporating new practices. According to the program makers, an important way of enacting public service TV properly was to make the kind of programming that embodied some of the historical reasons to why public service was invented in the first place: to do high-quality drama in the Swedish language, and to educate and inform the public about what they need to know to be well-informed citizens through public affairs and documentary programming. When it came to the new practice of collaborative production, this was relatively unproblematic for the program makers. As this form of production made additional funding from the outside available, which in turn made more public service programming in important genres possible, it was perceived to be in accordance with the inherent values of public service TV.

However, the new practices of increased reliance on audience ratings, as well as the increased importance of marketing and promotion, created more conflicting understandings within the group of program makers. Here, the program makers had to deal with a contradiction: They made programs that, in accordance with public service TV’s raison d’être, were constructed as the opposite of commercial TV, at the same time as they engaged in practices that originated in commercial TV. This creates a somewhat tricky situation for many program makers, where they have to engage in contradictory practices in their everyday work. When they have to make sense of what they do and are asked to justify the practices that they are involved in, the historical legacy of the institution which they inhabit and enact can be of use. The historical mission and ideology of public service TV is then a backdrop for their rhetorical work, sometimes explicitly, but often times more implicitly. Then, for example, ratings can be interpreted as a sign that their “idealist” reasons and “democratic aspirations,” as one interviewee phrased it, for making public service TV are being fulfilled.

History as an Interpretative Resource

This study has shown how the program makers that make public service TV use their historical heritage as a framework for making sense of ongoing changes and new practices. It seems as when actors inhabit and enact an institution that has a strong normative history and ideology, in the work to maintain the institution (on a macrolevel) and make sense of their practices (on a micro, everyday level) the history and heritage becomes a resource that can help make new practices meaningful. It is this “meaningfulness” that is important for the longevity of an institution (R. E. Meyer, 2008) as institutions that are meaningful to the actors that enact them also become legitimate from a longer time perspective. This highlights an aspect of institutions that are often taken for granted, and therefore often not paid enough attention in institutional studies: Institutions are context dependent. They make sense and infuse action with a purpose in a specific time and place. As Soeffner (cited in R.E Meyer, 2008) states, “[Institutions] are all historical plants that owe their appearance to the cultural landscapes and regions in which they have grown. Their soil and their nourishment are the particular problems of concrete societies, times and situations” (p. 530). Public service TV as it is enacted in Sweden is thus a locally grown solution to local problems in a specific time and place. This study has shown how this particular historical heritage is evoked and “replanted” into contemporary soil by actors that enact the institution. This can prevent it from falling into oblivion as well as provide actors with resources for making sense of contemporary practices.

As this study of rhetorical work has shown, history can thus be more than just a context for institutional work—in fact, it can be used to infuse practices with meaning. The problems that the program makers are rhetorically working to make into “real” problems become relevant as they are justified in relation to the historical origins of the public service institution. When the program makers do maintenance work on public service TV, they have a history of almost a century to draw on and recycle. To recycle historical problems as well as make sense of new practices by drawing on history enables institutional work, as the “ground work” in a sense is already done. As R. E. Meyer (2008) writes, institutions by their very nature have such theorizations that can function as resources for institutional work: “. . . accounts that actors do not have to invent anew when trying to legitimate their proceeding, but that come ‘ready-made’ with the theorization of the concepts in question.”(p.532) This means, for example, if a problem is already perceived to be associated with public service TV, there is less effort needed by institutional workers to remind relevant actors of this association in contrast to the work it would entail to connect a totally “new” and unrelated problem to the institution.

However, when the program makers evoke history in this study, it does not necessarily have to be explicitly or with a “strategic intent” to achieve certain things. It can also be, as this study shows, much less explicitly and intently used by people inhabiting and enacting the institution. For the makers of public service TV, the historical heritage is hinted at when they, for example, describe why they want to make public service TV programs, or when they are justifying and discussing new practices. Here, the history serves as an interpretative resource that ground current activities in a long and normative tradition which serves to guide proper conduct in the now. As such, the historical dimension is traceable in their argumentation, even if it is used more to make sense of and justify current practices than it is to achieve a more purposive goal or outcome.

The Meaning of the Institution Is Transformed

As we observed in this study, there was an interesting contradiction in the rhetoric of the program makers. On one hand, the program makers were rhetorically constructing the image of what they do when making public service TV programs as something different from commercial TV. This difference is created by contrasting public service TV to commercial TV and pointing out the differences. On the other hand, the program makers are trying to make sense of and justify practices that could be described as “commercial”: collaborative production, measuring audiences and engaging in advertising and promotion. One way in which they do this is by arguing that these new practices can help public service TV to better fulfill its problem-solving function, and thus help maintain “true” public service. This indicates that the meaning (Zilber, 2008) ascribed to the public service TV institution not only incorporates the more traditional understandings of public service TV as the opposite to commercial TV, but also, it is made more similar to commercial TV in certain aspects.

This paradox is made evident when the recycled problems are paired together with the modernized solution and means that the program makers have to engage in rhetorical practices that undermine commercial TV while justifying the use of commercial TV practices. That practices of undermining and justifying are complementary has been shown in previous studies of rhetorical institutional work (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Symon et al., 2008; Vaara, Tienari, & Laurila, 2006). The way in which the program makers in this study both undermine and justify these “commercial” practices is by underlining the purpose of why they do something. As long as the program makers can convincingly argue that the purpose of doing something is fundamentally different than the purpose of making commercial TV, then what the actual outcome of that practice is (TV programs, contracts, advertising, or any other outcome) becomes secondary. By addressing the viewer as essentially a citizen and not a consumer, also actions that seem contradictory to traditional public service TV practices can be rhetorically justified. This “manipulation of contradictory meanings” (Symon et al., 2008) is in line with Lok and de Rond’s (2013) discussion of the plasticity of institutions, which makes an institution able to encompass practices that may seem directly divergent to that institution, as long as these practices in the long run function to maintain the institution as a whole. The practices described in this study, that at a first glimpse seem contradictory to the maintenance of the institution, may then possibly prove to maintain it in the long run by being perceived to be in tune with those contemporary institutionalized myths (J. W. Meyer & Rowan, 1977) that have been sweeping through public sector organizations, with an emphasis on accountability, internal competition, and value for public money (see, for example, Christensen & Laegreid, 2001). As other studies of institutional maintenance work have shown (e.g., Currie et al., 2012; Lok & de Rond, 2013), much institutional work is about adjusting and adapting to changing conditions and context. By doing so, institutional workers are making sure that the institutions continue to be perceived as a legitimate solution (R. E. Meyer, 2008) by those stakeholders who are relevant for the survival of that institution.