| 1. |
- Jørgensen, Sveinung, 1973-
(författare)
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What’s the Problem? Reformulating the Problem for Balanced-Strategy Creation
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- By asking “What’s the problem?” this thesis addresses the crucial relationship between how strategic decision-makers formulate organizational problems and how the relevant actors attempt to solve these problems. This thesis holds that the creation of strategy can be conceived of as a decision-making process in which the strategists find, formulate and attempt to solve problems by choosing a set of means to reduce the perceived gap between the current state and the desired state of the organization. The thesis particularly explores and postulates what is refered to as the means-end fallacy in which end-problems are treated as means-problems. In effect the decision-makers take the ends of the organization for granted and only ask “How can we fix it?” instead of critically examining the purpose of the organization by asking “What should we fix and why?” The purpose of this thesis is twofold. First, it is to explore the dysfunctional consequences of the means-end fallacy in organizational decision-making and creation of strategy. Secondly, it is to illuminate the implications of applying the problem-formulation perspective in the creation of organizational strategies. To achieve these purposes the problem-formulation phenomenon is explored in five appended papers. Paper I discusses the paradox of profitability and responsibility and the means-end fallacy in the context of strategic theory and practice. Papers II, III and IV explore the relationship between how a problem is formulated and how different actors attempt to solve it. This is done with a comprehensive case study of the substance-abuse problem and the different organizational strategies that are implemented to resolve it. Paper V offers a concrete discussion of how inappropriate formulations of organizational problems undermine the intended ends, particularly with regard to the paradox of profitability and responsibility. This thesis argues that the strategic decision-makers need both to be more problem-oriented; that they should balance the different dimensions of the problem; and, thus, that they should recognize that decision-making is an art of balance. Moreover, it suggests that the problem-formulation perspective can contribute with an insight into the black box of strategy creation, and that this can be achieved by looking back or rewinding from the organization’s strategy to the initial formulation of the organization’s problems. As a mirror image it suggests that strategic decision-makers can avoid the means-end fallacy by forwarding from an appropriate formulation of the problem to a balanced strategy.
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| 2. |
- Jakobsson, Niklas
(författare)
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Laws, Attitudes and Public Policy
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Paper 1: Do laws affect attitudes? An assessment of the Norwegian prostitution law using longitudinal data The question of whether laws affect attitudes has inspired scholars across many disciplines, but empirical knowledge is sparse. Using longitudinal survey data from Norway and Sweden, collected before and after the implementation of a Norwegian law criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, we assess the short-run effects on attitudes using a difference-indifferences approach. In the general population, the law did not affect moral attitudes toward prostitution. However, in the Norwegian capital, where prostitution was more visible before the reform, the law made people more negative toward buying sex. This supports the claim that proximity and visibility are important factors for the internalization of legal norms. Paper 2: Gender and overconfidence: are girls really overconfident? Previous research finds that people are overconfident and that men are more overconfident than women. Using a very precise confidence measure, this article shows, however, that whereas boys are overconfident, girls are actually underconfident regarding their mathematics performance. We conducted a survey where 14-year-old high school students were asked what grade they thought they would get in a mathematics test a week later. These results were then compared with their actual grade. Boys were overconfident about their grades, whereas girls were underconfident. Forthcoming in Applied Economics Letters. Paper 3: A field experiment of discrimination in the Norwegian housing market: sex, class, and ethnicity We test for gender, class, and ethnical discrimination in the Norwegian rental housing market, using fake application letters. Females, individuals with high job status, and ethnical Norwegians are more likely to receive positive call-backs. For example, being an Arabic man, working in a warehouse is associated with a 25 percentage points lower probability of receiving a positive response when showing interest in an apartment as compared to an ethnically Norwegian female economist. We conclude that gender, class, and ethnic discrimination exist in the Norwegian rental housing market, and ethnic discrimination seems to be most prevalent. Paper 4: What explains attitudes toward prostitution? We assess people’s attitudes toward prostitution in Norway and Sweden, two countries that have made it illegal to buy sex. The laws were, however, put in place in different time-periods and embedded in different market structures and discourses. Compared to previous research, the present study is the first to use methods that can shed light on attitudes toward various aspects of prostitution while controlling for other factors. We find that men and sexual liberals are more positive toward prostitution, and that conservatives and those who support gender equality are more negative. Holding anti-immigration views is correlated with more positive attitudes toward buying, but not toward selling, sex. Norwegians are more positive than Swedes toward prostitution. It is also found that supporting gender equality has more explanatory power in Sweden than in Norway, and it is argued that this may be due to the gender equality framing of the Swedish debate. Forthcoming in Feminist Economics. Paper 5: Why do you want lower taxes? Preferences regarding municipal income tax rates The factors shaping people's references for municipal labor income tax rates in Sweden are assessed using survey data. The tax rate actually faced by the respondents has explanatory power for their attitudes toward the tax rate only when a few socio-demographic explanatory variables are included. When a richer set of variables are included, the association disappears. The hypothesis that this small or nonexistent effect of the actual tax rate is caused by a Tiebout bias finds no support, yet IV-estimations indicate that the actual municipal tax rate may be of importance for attitudes toward the tax rate. Paper 6: Intergovernmental grants and fiscal competition This theoretical paper shows how a central government can induce a policy concerning a municipal matter through a package of a policy requirement and a grant. We find that, due to fiscal competition and the possibility for citizens to move between municipalities, the central government can make the municipalities adopt the policy requirement although the municipalities make a loss from doing so. We apply this model to a recent Swedish child-care fee reform and can explain why all Swedish municipalities implemented the maximum childcare fee although it had a negative impact on many municipalities' finances.
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| 3. |
- Camén, Carolina, 1975-
(författare)
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Using contracts to manage services : A study of contracts in public transport
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Contracts play a key role in many business to business relationships. Service organisations are no exception. Despite a growing interest of services and how services are managed, research on how to use contracts to manage services has been surprisingly sparse in service research. The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to a deeper understanding of using contracts to manage services in business-to-business relationships. Contract theories together with concepts from service research are used to enrich and understand how contracts are used to manage services and thus make contributions to service research. The thesis will give an empirically grounded understanding of managing services through contracts. The thesis consists of six separate papers, all based on data gathered from contractual relationships between contractors and service providers. The results are based on studies of authentic contracts which are not the case in most previous studies. The methods used for gathering and analysing data involve case studies, content analysis of authentic contracts, interviews and document studies of the public transport sector in Sweden which is an empirically rich area for studying contracts. The three main contributions of this dissertation are; firstly, an extended understanding of how contracts are used to manage the prerequisites for service quality for the parties involved. It was found that the concept service quality is brought forward on three interdependent managerial levels; from a detailed operational level, to a systemic oriented strategic level, and also a visionary rhetorical level each specifying the prerequisite for the services. To manage the prerequisites, the contracts rely on three identified means; laws and regulations, standards and measurements and economical incentives. Secondly, the detailed contents and rigidity of the contracts bring forward an inflexible and asymmetric relationship, where the parties are restricted in their activities. Here the contracts become a substitute for trust and commitment instead of supporting the development of trust and commitment. Finally, the thesis deepen the understanding of the role of contracts in governing services, from being a static abbreviator to a dyadic market based relationship, to becoming a dynamic tool for developing and sustaining a value creating and value driven collaborative network.
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| 4. |
- Slåtten, Terje
(författare)
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Emotions in service encounters from the perspectives of employees and customers
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to deepening and extending our understanding and knowledge of emotions in service encounters by studying it from the two most central human actors in service encounter: (i) the service firm’s employees and (ii) the customer of this firm. This dissertation consist of five separate papers that conceptualize and empirically investigate how different appraisals by employees and customers generate positive and negative emotions, and how types of emotions in service encounters are linked to patterns of behavioural responses. The methods used for gathering data involved interviews and questionnaire studies of various service firms. This dissertation has sought to offer two main contributions. First, this thesis presents an extended understanding of employees’ emotions in service encounter and their effect on employees’ perceptions of service quality. One of the chief findings is that work-related conditions such as employees’ perception of their working role and managerial practices are related to both positive and negative emotions in service encounters. Moreover, the findings indicate that there exists a spill-over effect between employees’ experiences of emotions and employees’ perceptions of the delivery of service quality in service encounters. Secondly, this thesis also contributes to furthering our understanding of the customer’s appraisal of service quality with respect to customers’ positive emotions in service encounters as well as to deepening our understanding of negative emotions when customers experience a negative service encounter. Specifically, it was found that both human and non-human service-quality factors are able to trigger customer’s positive emotions in service encounters. Positive emotions were strongly related to behavioural responses such as customer loyalty. When a customer experiences negative emotions in service encounters as a result of negative experience, the findings point to three sources of these negative emotions: (i) ‘self’ (the customer’s own fault), (ii) ‘other’ (the fault of the company), and (iii) ‘situational’ (the fault is beyond the customer’s and company’s control). Another finding is that customers’ negative emotions in service encounters tend diminish but only to some extent, even after the service firm has set into motion a process of service recovery. In summary, this thesis contributes to our understanding of emotions in service encounters and contributes to the ongoing debate and discussion in service research about the role of emotions in this context.
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| 5. |
- Sebhatu, Samuel Petros, 1972-
(författare)
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Corporate Social Responsibility for Sustainable Service Dominant Logic
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The process of globalization over the past five decades has given impetus to drivensustainability and related thinking in business. It is also observed that there areunprecedented trends in corporate strategy towards sustainable thinking - the emergenceof sustainability as corporate strategy and the concern of business for ecology and society.This forces companies to rethink their standard business models and increase theirinterest in innovating products and services based on the challenges of global sustainabledevelopment. The pressure from external stakeholders, mainly non-governmentalorganizations (NGOs), as drivers of change may also contribute strongly to thisendeavour. This substantial change pressure clearly reflects companies’ recognition of themounting pressures for social responsibility and governance. The overall aim of this thesisis to describe and understand how social responsibility and value-creation of customers’influence the overall service quality of companies in developing a sustainable servicebusiness. The theoretical and conceptual frame of reference finds its stimulation from the researchin sustainable development – corporate social responsibility, service research and qualitymanagement. In this way it attempts to bridge the gap between business and socialresponsibility. Theoretically and conceptually, the thesis amalgamates sustainabilitythinking and the service logic. Here, value creation and co-creation of Service DominantLogic (S-D logic) approach expands to integrate the values based approach of CorporateSocial Responsibility (CSR) in management thinking and have created the prevailingbusiness practices and service quality (SQ) improvement. This thesis is a compilation offive different papers that follow an interpretative case study approach. The empiricalstudy developed from the cases of multinational companies, small and mediumenterprises, smallholders and NGOs. In this thesis, ‘Sustainable Service Dominant Logic’ (SSDL) was labelled to argue thatvalue-based co-creation of the S-D logic framework can be used to create values-basedservices for sustainable business by examining the link between CSR and S-D logic basedon value, values and service quality for sustainable business. This is this thesis’scontribution to the ongoing discussion of the paradigm shift in service research. Theframework is of the integration of CSR thinking into service business to create sustainablebusiness thinking. This signifies the new thinking of incorporating different managementsystems in creating the organizational change process, sustainability and finally SQimprovement. This counters the critique against S-D logic by expanding the societal andethical dimensions by using CSR, and showing real business cases. This depends on theintegration of different change pressures for value creation, whether related to economicand social resource integration. This involves the shift of the focus of managerial controlfrom a preoccupation with financial issues to a wider awareness of CSR thinking. Theseissues are also explored by demonstrating, based on cases, how the adoption of thisperspective can also enable the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) framework to become animportant aspect of value creation. Finally, the paradigm shift can be generalized to newthinking in S-D logic and the social responsibility of businesses as the major phenomenonof the changing and globalizing business environment; time for the CSR framework to permeate S-D logic.
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| 6. |
- Åkesson, Maria, 1979-
(författare)
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Role constellations in value co-creation : a study of resource integration in an e-government context
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The contribution of the present thesis is describing and explaining how value is co-created by addressing customer-employee role constellations during service encounters. There is a specific focus on customers’ and employees’ resource integration when co-creating value. The thesis consists of five separate papers, one of which is a literature review and four are empirical papers. The empirical papers are based on data from the public employment service and the customs service inSweden. The thesis offers two main contributions; the first of which is to service research by expanding knowledge of resource integration and value co-creation using e-government as the empirical context for outlining customers’ and employees’ value co-creation. The second contribution concerns which roles customers and employees enact during resource integration when value is being co-created. It was found that the roles of the employees were; interactor; customer oriented party, co-creator, and empowered party, while a customer can have the role of information integrator, accessibility needer, dialogue keeper, and/or knowledge transferee. Based on these two contributions, the thesis outlines understandings regarding role constellations in value co-creation. The role constellations suggest that customers and employees enact roles that impact how their resources are integrated. Finally, the thesis contributes towards building a theory of value co-creation by proposing that the ten foundational premises of S-D logic, together with the four theoretical propositions and the role constellations presented in this thesis, should be seen as an approach to building a theory of value co-creation. Together, these three building blocks offer the following explanation as to what occurs when a customer and an employee co-create value: (1) The ten foundational premises focus on resource integration and value co-creation. (2) The four theoretical propositions offer the explanation that resource integration occurs in the context of roles since a role decides how to use the knowledge and skills. (3) The role constellations give concrete examples of how customers and employees integrate their resources to co-create value.
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