Management tools, organisational culture and leadership: an explorative study

Abstract

Purpose – There are two main purposes in this paper. The first is to explore possible relationships between adoption of management tools in a broad sense, the organisational culture and the character of leadership in libraries. This is a very important area because management tools are diffused, interpreted, translated and implemented in many other ways than intended. The second purpose is to present some major findings of nation‐wide studies done on these topics to raise awareness about the complex relationships and context that influence chance processes in libraries. Connected to these purposes is also the intention to introduce elements of some institutional theories that have been rather neglected in the more rationalistic literature on, for example, performance measurement.