One of the strategies of the modernization of public services is the decentralization of responsibilities and organizing work in autonomous cooperative teams with varied tasks. The empowerment of the public service workers in the front line is therefore a strategy in local government in Norway today. Under the assumption that women have 'natural' skills in caring, workers on the lowest levels are given responsibility for care and nursing. A study of the decentralization of public care for the elderly in their homes showed that being given interesting tasks and increased responsibility mobilized the efforts of the care workers. However, since the power of resources has been centralized, this has led to an intensification of work. In gendering the relevant discourses by explaining women's experiences of an over-heavy workload as a result of their 'mothering' and their inability to set limits, women care workers were constructed by their managers as unprofessional and not to be taken seriously. This has made the public care organization a greedy organization for the women care workers.

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The article looks into the consequences for recruitment of Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's recommendations that universities should manage their resources strategically to foster excellence. Using institutional ethnography as described by Dorothy Smith in a sociology department in Norway, it shows how strategic recruiting for excellence resulted in nominating candidates who were not able to teach the sociology program. Operationalizing potential for excellence as the number of (international) publications in the last 5 years resulted in nominating candidates with narrow fields of expertise who had been offered favorable conditions to publish internationally. When academic quality is translated into the number of international publications in the last 5 years, it undermines the policy of gender equity in academia by ruling out women who use paid parental leave to have children during their PhD period. The focus on publications in English also threatens to marginalize sociology's contribution to public debate and national policy.