CONCLUSION
The results of this study show that the authority of the MA rests not only on decentralization (Järvenpää, 2007) and the proximity of MAs to managers (Burns & Baldvinsdottir, 2005), but more specifically on a definitional and a moral prerogative that may or may not be awarded to MAs enabling or disabling them to act as managers. Moreover, our study provides an example of how decentralization, if taken far enough, can lead to loss of authority among MAs. Finally, the results of this study show that the development of the MA's role need not necessarily be incremental or unidirectional, because the authority bestowed upon regional and local MAs at the SIA, which increased during NPM-influenced reforms (Paulsson, 2012), has now decreased as a consequence of the Lean-influenced reform. A deterministic development of the role of the MA from bean counter to business partner to helpdesk advisor is, however, not proposed. Instead, the role of the MA is viewed as a malleable concept, an idea that is already latent in the notions of expansion and hybridization (Burns & Baldvinsdottir, 2005, 2007; Burns et al., 1999) if contraction and de-hybridization are included as implicit conceptual possibilities of such developments. Consequently, the number of roles that an MA can take on is multiple and variable in the sense that, in time, the MA's role may not only expand and hybridize, but also contract and de-hybridize, through the appropriation and expropriation of tasks.
