Co-operation Between Representatives and Officials. Theoretical Starting Points for a Study of Interaction in Finnish Municipal Committees
Juha Klemelä
This work is about the co-operation between the elected representatives and the leading office-holders in the committees in Finnish local government. The aim is to deepen the theoretical comprehension of the actor groups’ interaction. The point of view taken is micro sociological and symbolic interactionist.
Actors in the two positions are supposed to work in concert for the good of the municipality. Their interaction is not trouble-free, however. The representatives are the formal leaders, but the office-holders seem to have a disproportionate amount of say. The elected representatives’ significance and the functioning of the municipal democracy in general have been questioned.
The two actor-categories are differentiated. There is a set division of labor between them and they have differences in background and perspective. These factors affect the approaches that they take to municipal tasks. The differentiation produces the actors’ municipal selves, that is, their local government role-identity sets. Incumbents in both position-roles may claim party political, professional, and administrative sub-roles, though with different emphases.
The municipal actors’ efforts to maintain and enhance self-esteem and to get rewards guide their action. The resulting process of organizationally political interaction between the representatives and officials on the committee arena is studied as negotiated order.
Besides studying the dynamics, a normative model of co-operation applicable to the relationship between the two types of municipal selves is presented in the thesis. Co-operation is not just about consensus, but there can be beneficial dissentient elements in succesful interaction also. Co-operation is comprehended as including the elements of task(s), means, opportunities, and the motivating relations of complementarity and supportiveness. The force behind these relations is the quest for power and status.
An empirical tasks is to find out, how the municipal selves, the tasks, and the opportunities are negotiated in the process of interaction, and to establish, if the elected representatives and the leading office-holders experience their co-operation as functional and beneficial for the municipality as a whole and for the actors themselves. This will be taken up in a doctoral thesis later on.
Keywords: co-operation, committees, elected representatives, municipal office-holders, municipal self