DYNAMIC, ENACTED INSTITUTIONS:Making Sense of Institutional Contextin Public and Private Prisons

This paper contrasts the manner in which managers in public and private sector prison establishments in the Prison Service in England and Wales (PSEW) draw upon organisational context to make sense of organisational events, and how in doing so they make sense of, and with, the institutional context in which they are embedded.The paper uses notions related to New Public Management and institutional perspectives to delineate the nature and extent of the organisational context and to facilitate discussion of the two case studies, one of a privately managed, and one of a publicly managed, prison. In parallel it considers work on enactment, organising and sensemaking to theorise about the manner in which managers enact and re-enact the organisational and institutional context in which they are embedded.[...]