| 1. |
- Oghazi, Pejvak
(författare)
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Supply chain management : an empirical study on Swedish manufacturing firms' enterprise systems adoption, supply chain integration, competition capability and performance
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Today’s marketplace is more fiercely competitive than ever before. Globalization, continual technological advances, and an ever-changing customer demand for new products have brought about new managerial practices and business models. New management approaches and unique business models emerge and fade constantly as managers strive to help their companies succeed in this less-predictable business world. However, communication and information technologies are offering new opportunities for businesses to compete in the global arena with a variety of tools. One area that has benefited the most from new technologies is supply chain management (SCM). Today, SCM could be a single, integrated function that is responsible for all aspects of material flow, as well as financial and information exchange among business partners within the chain. For several years, pundits have observed that the very nature of competition is changing. Some experts have even claimed that the day is rapidly approaching when companies will no longer compete against other companies. Instead, they foresaw a world in which supply chains will compete with other supply chains for market supremacy. The possibilities in a supply chain are indeed astounding, but the challenges that lie along the path to achieve excellence in supply chain integration are equally formidable. Companies are investing in systems, tweaking measures, and looking to technology and people to find the key to more effective interorganizational cooperation. To help future managers achieve success in this arena, this PhD project articulates a support measure intended to underscore the importance of supply chain integration for the focal firm in terms of better competition capability and performance. A proposed research model and seven hypotheses were developed in this PhD project. A survey was conducted among Swedish manufacturing companies, which resulted in 422 complete and usable responses, with an effective response rate of 65.8%. The hypotheses were tested using Structural Equation Modeling. Additionally, the moderating and mediating effects were also tested in this study. The results obtained for this thesis suggest that a significant relationship exists between the perceived benefits of SCM integration and the adoption of different enterprise systems. With regard to the core issues of this thesis regarding the connection between supply chain integration, competition capability, and firm performance, the findings strongly indicate a positive and direct relationship between these constructs. Furthermore, the present study also determined that the competition capability of a firm mediates the relationship between supply chain integration and the performance of the firm. Consequently, firms that strive to achieve superior performance, and thus establish a strong position in the marketplace, should consider a genuine integration level with their supply chain partners. For this reason, the adoption of different enterprise systems facilitates the achievement of a high-level integration across the supply chain. It is also important to recognize that establishment of a high integration level is essential to achieving superior performance and a strong competition capability in the market today and in the future.
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| 2. |
- Johansson Falck, Marlene
(författare)
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Technology, Language and Thought : Extensions of Meaning in the English Lexicon
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis, the relationship between technological innovation and the development of language and thought is analysed. For this purpose, three different fields of technology are investigated: 1) the steam engine, 2) electricity, and 3) motor vehicles, roads and ways. They have all either played an extremely important part in people’s lives, or they are still essential to us. The overall aim is to find out in what ways these inventions and discoveries have helped people to develop abstract thinking and given speakers of English new possibilities to express themselves. Questions being asked are a) if the correlations in experience between the inventions and other domains have motivated new conceptual mappings? b) if the experiences that they provide people with may be used to re-experience certain conceptual mappings, and hence make them more deeply entrenched in people’s minds? and c) if the uses of them as cognitive tools have resulted in meaning extension in the English lexicon? The study is based on metaphoric and metonymic phrases collected from a number of different dictionaries. In the material a large number of metaphorical and metonymic expressions including terms connected to the inventions and discoveries that are part of this thesis are found. As is clear from the expressions, the steam engine, electricity, motor vehicles, roads and ways have all provided us with ample tools for structuring our thoughts, and for conveying our thoughts to others. Primarily, it seems to be the different functions of the discoveries and inventions, or the effects that they have on other objects that have motivated the mappings. In addition to analysing the cognitive role of the inventions that are part of this thesis, some general conclusions concerning the relationship between language, thought and world are suggested.
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| 3. |
- Vänje, Annika, Professor, 1963-
(författare)
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Knäcka Koderna : Praxis kring kön, industriell organisation och ledarskap
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The main purpose of this doctoral thesis is to describe, analyse and initiate processes of change from a gender point of view. In the present field study the focus is on gender-creating processes in and around formal and informal structures at an engineering company´s organisation. The central theme is the implication of gender in relation to industrial organisation and leadership.The aim of this thesis is i) to identify processes and praxis in the organisation that create both opportunities and obstacles for women who have made an untraditional choice of career as engineers and managers, ii) on the basis of this knowledge and together with practitioners in the organisation initiate processes of change that will increase the proportion of women managers.The doing-gender approach has been used as a theoretical tool in order to understand the processes surrounding technology, leadership and gender in the organisation. Doing gender allows us to initiate process-thinking about how gender is constructed in different social contexts, such as those in industrial organisations. From a doing-gender perspective the central question is what an individual does and not what he or she is. In other words, the focus is on actions.The methodological approach is action-oriented, using as its starting point an interactive research perspective. The interactive approach has a democratic basic outlook, it combines theoretical understanding with practical action.This doctoral thesis helps to elucidate the complexity of gender-creating structures, processes and practices in an industrial organisation. Its empirical method also shows how researchers and practitioners in the organisation can jointly launch processes of change on the basis of a gender-theoretical basis.The thesis presents a gender-theoretical model for change and analysis that is based on the so-called doing-gender approach. This model has been of importance both as an analytical tool and as a starting point for initiating processes of change. The model has four dimensions and they are dissimilar in character and are more or less demanding of time in bringing about changes. They each have an effect and affect each other in various constellations in the gender-creating processes in organisations.The viewpoints that the doing-gender approach communicates makes it possible to change existing attitudes and expectations concerning gender, since the construction of gender is a continually ongoing process that differs in different contexts.One contribution that this thesis makes is to illuminate the complexity of organisation and gender. It contributes to research by providing empirical examples of gender-creating praxis in an engineering company and by showing how we can work on processes of change from a gender perspective.
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| 4. |
- Wennergren, Ann-Christine, 1957-
(författare)
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Dialogkompetens i skolans vardag : En aktionsforskningsstudie i hörselklassmiljö
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In classes for hard-of-hearing pupils there are children and young people with different degrees of impaired hearing, all of whom need hearing aids and technical equipment inthe environment. The initial problem area of the present thesis concerned the pattern of communication in the classroom. Previous research has shown that such communication is strongly affected by the chosen technical solution. The research questions developed successively from the assumption that it is only the teachers that can change the learning environment. In order to achieve a combination of scientific results and improvement,this study has an action research study approach. The overall aim was to illuminate and describe dialogues between different actors in a national school improvement project. Actors in the context were teachers, their pupils and the researcher. The thesis is based on improvement work in which the researcher cooperated with fifty teachers from five schools located in different parts of Sweden. This work involved parallel processes of change, for the pupils in the classrooms and for the participating teachers. The thesis comprises three substudies, two of which are focused on the teachers’ dialogues and one on the pupils’ listening environments. In the last-mentioned substudy, 165 pupils were asked to draw and describe their best listening environment at school. The result showed that the listening role required different environmental conditions, such as a cleaned upsound environment, visual support, conversation rules and comfortable surroundings. A central conclusion was that pupils need to be offered opportunities to verbalise their individual needs in the school environment. The result further showed that the teachers worked in different ways to improve the learning environment and that they introduced structures to support the dialogue between pupils. This happened at the same time as the teachers were trying out tools for their own learning in order to take part in dialogues with colleagues based on confirmations and challenges. Tools used in the learning processes were a logbook, shadowing, facilitating and a net-based dialogue. The analyses showed explicit differences between using the tools and learning through them in the zone of proximal development. In their improvement processes the teachers depended on critical friends in order to be challenged as knowledge developers. Difficulties in giving a balanced response were evident from the net-based forum in which the teachers reported different attempts at change. The study has drawn on sociocultural perspectives on learning in which dialogue competence have been central to learning in the classroom and in the teachers’ occasional communities of practice. The results indicate that teachers, for their professional improvement, require critical friends in alternative forms of learning processes and that pupils as actors require alternative listening environments.
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| 6. |
- Frishammar, Johan
(författare)
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Towards a theory of managing information in new product development
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis deals with various information aspects of new product development (NPD). In total, the thesis consists of 6 research articles appended in full, and an introductory text that integrates and theorizes with and from these papers.The first paper is a review article examining the literature on and role of information in NPD. The main argument put forward here is that information processing can be understood in terms of three steps: acquiring, sharing, and using information. The second paper is a largescale survey that examines the relationship between market and entrepreneurial orien-tation and performance in NPD. A market orientation is to a large extent about acquiring, disseminating and using market information, while an entrepreneurial orientation partly is about ignoring such information, and instead trying to be innovative, proactive, and take risks. The results show that a market orientation and innovativeness are positively related to NPD performance, and that neither product nor environmental characteristics moderate these relationships. The third paper is also a survey, and investigates the extent to which management of external information is associated with innovation performance. The main findings are that scanning the technological sector of the environment was positively associated with innovation performance, while scanning customers, suppliers, and competitors proved to be negatively correlated with innovation performance. Crossfunctional integration in the form of collaboration as well as using information from the industry environment also proved to be positively related to innovation performance.The last three papers have a centre of gravity in “management of information & environ-ment”, and not so much in new product development per se. Paper four describes and com-pares different information processing approaches (e.g. environmental scanning, marketing research) in order to identify their similarities and differences, but also their underlying con-cepts and the course of events they represent. The main conclusion is that differences exist primarily in terms of focus and scope. Paper five is a review and tentative integration of different perspectives in organization – environment research: the adaptive, the resource-dependence, the cognitive and the population-ecology perspective. The review identifies differences and similarities among these perspectives, suggests tentative conclusions on why the adaptive perspective is so frequently utilized at the expense of the other three, and suggests constructivism as a feasible avenue for combining and integrating these perspectives. Finally, the sixth and final paper deals with information use in the context of strategic decisionmaking. With a case study approach, the questions of why information is used, what kind of information is used, where it is obtained, and how it is obtained were addressed, and the results from this paper are mainly descriptive.The purpose of the introductory text is two-fold. In addition to providing integration of the appended papers, the main purpose is theory construction (i.e. elicitation of constructs and propositions). In the introduction, all six appended papers together with a new literature search and a new pilot case study are used to generate propositions about management of information, information sources, and the need for cross-functional integration in three different phases of the NPD process. In addition, suggestions regarding theoretical connections are made. The introduction text concludes with reflections, managerial implications, limitations, and future research.
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| 9. |
- Fors, Vaike, 1969-
(författare)
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The Missing Link in Learning in Science Centres
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Science centres have been identified as an important resource in encouraging teenagers to choose higher education in science and technology. This is of interest to society, since there seems to be a problem in getting sufficient numbers to do so. And accomplishing this is sometimes described as a fatal question for a nation’s future prosperity and development. Still, there is an international trend where teenagers fail to visit science centres. Through research, little is known about what is interesting or useful to the public, as well as how to reach those who are ‘unengaged’. Considering teenagers as exponents for what distinguishes today’s society makes their apparent unwillingness to participate in science centres interesting to study with regards to what culture, history and ideology these centres were initially produced. Hence, from this point of view, what is missing in science centres that would make them interesting for the young people of today? Many studies of learning in science centres have come to focus on visitors who visit voluntarily and how well the embedded messages in the exhibits have been acknowledged by these visitors. This study focuses instead on teenagers who are reluctant to participate in science centres, with their perspective of science centres as the point of departure, specifically what kind of social activities are formed in their encounters with science centre exhibits. This encounter is regarded as an encounter between the two different practices of the science centre and the teenagers. The applied theoretical perspective is mainly assembled from socio-cultural theories of learning. This research is a microanalytic study of five teenagers who were equipped with video cameras and asked to film a visit to the local science centre, Teknikens Hus. The films were later discussed in a focus-group interview consisting of the teenagers and the researcher. Visual ethnography provided the theoretical framework for this research design. The results showed that the teenagers want to use exhibits to have the authority of interpretations and the possibilities to contribute to the meaning of the activity. At the same time, they want to use the exhibits in a way that the activities become places for developing social identity. To negotiate the meaning of the exhibits there is a need for an openness that may be constrained by too inflexible and limiting exhibit designs. This pattern is described as two different forms of participation in the exhibits; ignoring or extending the intended meaning of the exhibits. Meaningfulness also demands a closeness created by connections between the exhibit and the user’s personal experiences. This pattern is described as two different ways in which the teenagers identified the exhibits; exhibits which they dissociated from or to which they had an ongoing relationship. Providing a space for negotiation seems crucial to inviting teenagers into opportunities of meaningful experiences, even more significant than any specific physical feature in the exhibit. The teenagers’ agenda, in which forming practices where they can express themselves and contribute to the meaning seem to be very important, appears not to be greatly enabled by science centre exhibits. In this situation they learn to not participate. Science and technology represented in this matter show a ‘ready-made’ world that they cannot change. The missing link in learning in science centres is here described as the part of the meaning making process where the teenagers get to re-negotiate the meaning of the activities in the centre and use the exhibits as tools to accomplish this.
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| 10. |
- Vidman, Åsa, 1960-
(författare)
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Det är så mycket som kan spela in : en studie av vägar till, genom och från sjukskrivning baserad på intervjuer med långtidssjukskrivna
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Syftet med studien har varit att belysa erfarenheter och processer som är relaterade till långtidssjukskrivning, såväl till att bli sjukskriven, till att förbli sjukskriven under lång tid och till insatserna och arbetet för att återgå i arbete. Utgångspunkten har varit erfarenheter, upplevelser och uppfattningar hos personer som på grund av sjukdom eller annan funktionsnedsättning under lång tid varit utestängda från arbetsmarknaden. Studien har genomförts i Arvidsjaurs kommun där 17 långtidssjukskrivna personer intervjuats. Det var 13 kvinnor och fyra män i åldrarna 26 till 60 år varav de flesta var sjukskrivna på grund av problem med rörelseapparaten eller utmattningsdepression och liknande. Intervjuerna var öppna med karaktär av dialog, och analysen siktade till att förstå de konstruktioner de långtidssjuka skapat för att bringa mening i sin livssituation. Vid analysen framgick att intervjuerna förutom det som var direkt relaterat till studiens syfte – orsaker till sjukskrivning, om att vara sjuk under lång tid samt om stöd och hjälp för att kunna återgå i arbete – också handlade om hur sjukdom kan förstås, om könsskillnader samt om långvarig sjukdom och moral. Det övervägande intrycket är att informanterna ser sjukskrivningen som en konsekvens av många olika samspelande faktorer. Några har också varit med om olyckshändelser som endera bidragit till eller direkt orsakat sjukskrivningen. Bland annat beskriver de flera olika arbetsmiljöproblem som bakomliggande orsak. Dessa problem kan kopplas till den benägenhet att ta på sig stort ansvar som kvinnorna i studien ger uttryck för. Men tillvaron har varit kravfylld även utanför yrkesarbetet. Annat de tänker kan ha lett till den långvariga sjukskrivningen är hinder de upplevt i de olika hjälpsystemen. De flesta har också upplevt frustration och besvikelse över stödet och rehabiliteringen. Rehabiliteringsaktörerna upplevs inte beakta önskemål och initiativ från de långtidssjuka. De aktörer som beskrivs mest är hälso- och sjukvård samt Försäkringskassa. Informanterna är ambivalenta till de vanligaste insatserna – läkemedel och sjukgymnastik – från hälso- och sjukvården, och Försäkringskassan har upplevts som alltför regelstyrd och passiv. Det de efterfrågar är samtal och socialt stöd. Att vara långvarigt sjuk och därför utestängd från arbetsmarknaden ter sig olika beroende på tidigare erfarenheter, den totala livssituationen och vilka symtom man har. Med tiden har de fått kunskap som medfört att de kan undvika sådant som utlöser symtom, men kunskapen har då också fått en disciplinerande effekt. Informanterna har haft svårt att acceptera att de inte längre kan utföra sådant de tidigare gjort eller att de ska ha livslång värk. Relationerna till andra har förändrats och de sociala kontakterna har minskat. Informanterna i denna studie har problem som inte är uppenbara för omgivningen, vilket medfört att de upplever sig ifrågasatta. Överhuvudtaget har normen att man ska arbeta och försörja sig själv haft inflytande på informanternas situation – dels genom att de arbetat trots symtom av skilda slag och dels genom negativa attityder hos allmänheten. Allmänheten anser att sjuka oftast själva har förorsakat sjukdomen, och den som blivit sjuk ska också göra allt den kan för att återfå hälsa och arbetsförmåga. Många upplever misstro mot att de är sjuka och att andra tror de istället försöker hålla sig från arbete. Informanterna upplever därför misslyckande och skam. Moralen har stort inflytande på hur dessa människor beskriver sina liv – såväl hur de genom att uppfylla normerna till sist blivit sjukskrivna som de attityder de möts av genom att de är sjukskrivna. För att sjukdomen ska få legitimitet måste den också sanktioneras av läkare, så att de upplevda symtomen omvandlas till en diagnos. Diagnoser är socialt konstruerade och förändras över tid, men ger intryck av att vara konstanta. Medicinen uppfattas som en objektiv vetenskap och har också fått stort inflytande på våra vardagsliv, inte minst över sjukskrivning och rehabilitering. Detta trots att problemen många gånger i grunden är sociala. Även de rehabiliteringsaktörer som inte ingår i hälso- och sjukvården tycks ha influerats av medicinen. Rehabiliteringsaktörerna tenderar att förenkla den komplexa verkligheten för att det ska passa in i den uppsättning terapier eller åtgärder den egna myndigheten erbjuder. Arbetslivet och samhället har förändrats så det har skapats en konflikt mellan de normer som präglar arbetslivet och de traditionella förväntningarna. För kvinnorna i studien framstår situationen som extra sammansatt. De upplever att deras behov inte tillgodoses av myndigheterna. Regleringen utgår från att kvinnor och män lever jämställt, men så är inte fallet. Kvinnorna har i långt större utsträckning ansvar för hem och familj än vad män har och uppfostras till att ta hänsyn till andra. Deras egna behov prioriteras inte. Kvinnorna i studien upplever det som en extra påfrestning att inte längre kunna ta hand om barn och familj på det sätt de brukat.
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