Framing of Performance Measurements in China's Healthcare Field: A Multi Level Study

Seminar abstract

Responding to calls for studies on engagement between macro, structural accounts and micro interactional explanations of institutional persistence and change (e.g. Gray, Purdy and Ansari 2015). 

This study adopts a multi-level framing perspective to investigate the dynamic conceptions of performance measurement (PM) emerging in response to the dynamic institutional complexity within the context of China's healthcare system reforms.

The study investigates how public hospital's PM as a social constructed conception has been framed and re-framed following the marketisation reform in the 1990s and the retreat from such reforms in the 2000s in China.

Through direct observation of meetings, archive data analysis and interviews with government officials, hospital managers and doctors, the ethnographic study sheds light on how the meaning of a specific PM term,

Ji Xiao (performance and efficiency), first emerged at the organisational level, 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 PM in particular by unpacking how bottom-up PM framing processes are inextricably linked to macro-level institutions.

Booking

The seminar is free to attend with no need to book in advance. Please feel free to come along and bring your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Speaker bio

Dr Pingli Li joined Southampton Business School as an Associate Professor in 2014.

Her main areas of research are:

• management control systems and organisational change,
• institutionalisation of management accounting practices,
• corporate governance
• and the roles  of independent directors in listed companies

Pingli takes interest in case studies with ethnographic insights, with a particular focus on China's state-owned enterprises and healthcare sector.

She has developed strong networks from her research activities with her recent publications appearing in:

• British Journal of Management
• Management Accounting Research
• Abacus

Dr Pingli Li has also successfully completed a number of externally funded research projects.