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Sardiello, Tiziana, 1965-
(author)
Playing the Matching Game : An Institutional Analysis of Executive Recruitment and Selection in Software Start-ups: Silicon Valley and Stockholm
2011
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
Software start-ups make media headlines daily, suggesting that it may take only a garage and two engineering students to begin such companies, and that these same people will constitute the core of the executive team until these organizations become multinational giants. Despite these spontaneous starts, newly formed entrepreneurial ventures have many obstacles to overcome in their resource and cultural environments when establishing their practices. These obstacles vary depending on the local institutional contexts and can exert relevant pressures on how, where and why start-ups recruit and select certain candidates for their executive teams.Based on interviews conducted in Silicon Valley and Stockholm with 40 key hiring and intermediary actors – entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, board directors, CEOs and executive recruiters - the general aim of this work is that of disclosing step-by-step the process of executive recruitment and selection in start-ups. At the same time, this study seeks to analyze how institutional environments, through the actions of states, governments, universities, professional associations and society in general, shape start-up practices. Finally, the work aims at testing the explanatory power of institutional theories in sociology.The analysis of the interviews shows that different local institutional environments differently and crucially shape organizational actors' interests, roles and patterns of behavior when constructing their practices. Two distinct ideal-typical dominant logics surface among key actors in the two geographical contexts. On one side, Silicon Valley actors recruit and select their executives by using a business logic based on an efficiency rationale. On the other side, Stockholm actors make use of a personal logic based on a rationale of cultural fit when calculating which specific candidate better matches a certain executive position.
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Aytar, Osman, 1960-
(author)
Mångfaldens organisering : Om integration, organisationer och interetniska relationer i Sverige
2007
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to examine inter-ethnic relations between organizationally active people with different ethnic backgrounds. I focus on relations that are based on a mutual interdependence between parties, mutual respect, common procedural rules, real opportunities that expressly approve or reject a proposal in a decision or deliberation situation free from compulsion, where people, who have different ethnic backgrounds, strive after insight and understanding in their relations.In this dissertation I present three empirical cases about cooperation, consultation and participation as forms of inter-ethnic relations from the organizational fields in the society. These cases are examples of what I characterize as “organizing inter-ethnicity”, or organizing people with different ethnic backgrounds around common concerns. Organizing inter-ethnicity is in turn a part of organizing and integrating diversity in society. Drawing on the results of three case studies, I distinguish between opportunities and barriers.My case studies clearly illustrate that the tensions that influence the patterns of and variation in opportunities and barriers have sources that reach well beyond ethnicity. Tensions between old and new organizations, between working immigrant organizations and refugee organizations, between organizations from same group or between organizations that have conflicts from their members’ countries of origin provide some examples of the difficulties that generate barriers to broad interest constellations between organizations.
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Bergman Blix, Stina, 1971-
(author)
Rehearsing Emotions : The Process of Creating a Role for the Stage
2010
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
This thesis takes as its starting point the dramaturgical metaphor of the world as a stage, which is used in sociological role theories. These theories often presume what stage acting is about in order to use it as a simile for every day acting. My intention is to investigate how stage actors actually work with their roles, in particular how they work with emotions, and how it affects their private emotions.The thesis draws on participant observation and interviews with actors during the rehearsal phase of two productions at a large theatre in Sweden. The results show that the inhabiting of a role for the stage is more difficult and painstaking than has been assumed in role theories so far. Shame and insecurity are common, particularly in the start up phase of the rehearsals. Interestingly, these emotions do not disappear with growing experience, but instead become recognized and accepted as part of the work process.The primary focus is the interplay between the actors' experience and expression of emotions, often described in terms of surface and deep acting, concepts which are elaborated and put into a process perspective. Analysis of the rehearsal process revealed that actors gradually decouple the privately derived emotional experiences that they use to find their way into their characters from the emotions that they express on the stage. Thus private experiences are converted to professional emotional experiences and expressions, triggered by situational cues. When the experience has been expressed the physical manifestation can be repeated with a weaker base in a simultaneous experience, since the body remembers the expression. It is important though, that the emotional expression is not completely decoupled from a concomitant experience; then the expression looses its vitality. The ability to professionalize emotions makes the transitions in and out of emotions less strenuous but can infiltrate and cause problems in the actors' intimate relations.
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Bildtgård, Torbjörn, 1970-
(author)
Hur maten blev en risk: Medicinens bidrag till regleringen av det svenska ätandet
2002
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to historically study the medical and political regulation of swedish eating, with a special focus on the contribution of medicine to such a regulation. In a first theoretical part the study is placed within a "sociology of food" tradition. It is argued that in order to understand modern eating a historical approach needs to be taken. It is also argued that the role of medicine and politics in shaping modern eating is often overlooked in sociology. For this purpose a Foucaultian method of discourse analysis is choosen to look at how food and eating has been problematised in medical and political documents over the last two centuries and what strategies, techniques and apparatuses have been developed to solve these problems.The empirical part consists of three interrelated studies. In the first study three qualitatively different historical medico/political approaches to food and eating are identified: an economising approach, a "hygienic nourishment" approach and finally a risk-management approach. It is argued that nutritional science has been been closely involved in setting the agenda for as well as legitimising a number of political concerns for more than a century. The second empirical study looks closer at how medicine has been involved in the regulation of eating at a micro-level. This is done through a study of how overeating/obesity has been problematised within medicine and how disciplinary background effects the way in which overeating is constructed as well as the techniques developed to treat it. Finally, the third study looks closer at how risk became a central category in the medical discourse. This is done by looking closer at the hypothesis that dietary fat was an important risk factor behind atherosclerotic heart-disease and the process it had to go through in order to reach medical concensus or near-concensus.Finally it is argued that we have to understand the modern concern with food risks not as a reaction to an essential state of the modern world but as a discursive effect to a large extent generated by the medical discouse around food.
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Boström, Magnus, 1972-
(author)
Miljörörelsens mångfald
2001
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
In the thesis, the conditions, possibilities, and limitations for Swedish environmental organisations to influence other actors — state agencies, political organisations, enterprises and the Swedish public — are analysed. The focus is on their practice in the nineties, implying a context in which different actors, to a greater extent, have accepted the significance of environmental issues, demand knowledge of and solutions to environmental problems, and with new conflicts continously arising. Against this background, four main interrelated themes are developed. Firstly, focus is set on the diversity and internal relations of the movement itself. Heterogeneity, variation and internal relations are analysed through the use of concepts such as social movement, collective identity, and niche. The diversity of the movement is regarded as a source of strength even though it also produces limitations. Secondly, how environmental organisations act politically and in what political scenes they appear, are analysed through the use of concepts such as political opportunity structure, subpolitics, lifepolitics, risk definition struggle, and intermediary link. The use of combined strategies, as well as the relation between diversity and political action, are highlighted. Thirdly, the cognitive practice of environmental organisations is analysed. This entails analysing how they try to persuade other actors with the help of frames. The extensive use of frame bridgings as well as tendencies towards the use of more cooperative strategies — captured by the concept ecological modernization — provide opportunities but also imply threats against autonomy and critical distance. However, the study shows that the organisations have the capacity to preserve their cognitive autonomy. Fourthly, the importance of organisation for cognitive practice, autonomy, and resource mobilization is stressed, and variations in form are analysed. Certain organisational tendencies such as growth, routinization, and professionalization are highlighted. The study is based on intensive comparative case studies of five Swedish environmental organisations: Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, World Wide Fund for Nature, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Natural Step. Different kinds of data are used: interviews with keypersons in the organisations, analyses of different kinds of documents produced by the organisations, and different kinds of secondary litterature.
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Boye, Katarina, 1975-
(author)
Happy hour? Studies on well-being and time spent on paid and unpaid work
2008
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The present thesis focuses on causes and consequences of paid working hours and housework hours among women and men in Sweden and Europe. It consists of four studies. Study I investigates changes in the division of housework in Swedish couples when they become parents. The study shows that women adjust their housework hours to the number and age of children in the household, whereas men do not. Longer parental leave periods among fathers have the potential to counteract this change towards a more traditional division of housework. Study II explores the associations between psychological distress and paid working hours, housework hours and total role time in Sweden. The results suggest that women’s psychological distress decreases with increasing paid working hours and housework hours, but that a long total role time is associated with high levels of distress. The gender difference in time spent on housework accounts for 40 per cent of the gender difference in psychological distress. Study III asks whether hours spent on paid work and housework account for the European gender difference in well-being, and whether the associations between well-being and hours of paid work and housework is influenced by gender attitudes and social comparison. The results indicate that gender differences in time spent on paid work and housework account for a third of the gender difference in well-being. Gender attitudes and social comparison do not to any great extent influence the associations between well-being and paid work and housework, respectively. Study IV examines possible differences between European family policy models in the associations between well-being and hours of paid work and housework. Some model differences are found, and they are accounted for by experiences of work-family conflict among men, but not among women. For both women and men, work-family conflict appears to suppress positive aspects of paid working hours.
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Forsberg Kankkunen, Tina, 1969-
(author)
Två kommunala rum : Ledningsarbete i genusmärkta tekniska respektive omsorgs- och utbildningsverksamheter
2009
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The aim of this study is to describe and partially explain how management is shaped in female-dominated social care and education services and male-dominated technical services, and how this contributes to creating and reproducing a gender system in municipal organizations. This was achieved by interviewing male and female operative managers in social care and education services and technical services. The managerial work of operative managers was also problematized in relation to activities at other organizational levels – the operational versus the strategic. The theoretical fields used in the study are primarily those having to do with organization and gender. I describe how power structures like sex and gender influence the construction of management; for example, genderized environments generate managerial action patterns, resources, and organizational prerequisites. The analytical results show that managerial work in social care and education services differs in practice from managerial work in technical services. Social care and education services have poorer organizational prerequisites for social interaction among organization levels than do technical services. The discrete prerequisites for managerial work make it more difficult for operative managers in social care and education services to support and interact with staff at the operative level than it is for operative managers in technical services. Operative managers in social care and education services also find it more difficult to actively influence the decision processes than do operative managers in technical services. When operative managers in social care and education services are cut off from strategic decisions and prevented from showing and explaining their needs and activities, the gender system in municipal organizations can be reproduced in the shadows.
